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Published: June 17th 2008
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June 3-8, 2008
We left for London on June 3rd as a group "field study". Basically it was just one big group field trip to London and we all stayed in the same hostel. We stayed around the London Bridge area and our hostel was connected to a bar so we all just hung out there at night when we were done with our travels. There are about 40 of us in our group, so clearly we filled the place up pretty well.
We arrived Tuesday evening around dinner and we all went to a pub for a group dinner. I had the classic steak and ale pie and it was a lot better than I had actually expected. We tried going to our hostel, but turns out the first one we went to wasn't ours, so we had to go figure out which one was ours in the pouring rain. Not a great first day since we were wandering around town all night and had to all be on the underground for a lot longer than would have been necessary. Luckily our hostel turned out to be pretty decent so it all worked out fine.
Wednesday was
our first day there. We started out bright and early and we had a walking tour of Westminster Abbey. During that we got to see Westminster Abbey (clearly) and Buckingham palace. At Buckingham palace we got to see some of the changing of the guards. It was cool because the Malaysian guards were there for the first time. In Britain, they have a policy where their colonies or w/e you want to call them can come in and guard the palace and other areas around the country in place of the typical Britain guards. After that we got a little time to lay around in the park and then went through Churchill's war cabinets. After that we had the rest of the day to ourselves and we decided to go to the Imperial War Museum. We then went to a curry house, b/c apparently they're supposed to be good in London, and they were definitely all over the place. It wasn't my favorite, but I don't typically like that kind of food either.
On Thursday, we went to John Sloane's house. He was a great architect in London and created the Bank of England. Since we went to London
for our roman history class, we went to his house because a lot of his house has Roman influence in it, and he even made his own "museum" in his house of Roman artifacts. We then had a break and a few of us went down to Abbey road and then just walked around London some more. Then as a group we went to the London Museum and Guildhall (?) gallery and we saw a Roman amphitheater there that they had discovered under the building as they were expanding it. Afterwards we went into Harrod's which was huge and had so much stuff in it.
Friday, we went as a group to Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, and Bath. Windsor castle was beautiful and very large. Stonehenge was definitely different, and its kind of crazy that its so old, and we still have very little idea of why it was built. It was really nice to go to Bath because it was out in the country and was absolutely gorgeous. We saw a roman bath that was there and a lot of it still exists considering how old it is. I wish we would have gotten to stay there longer, but
we were already about 3 hours away from London, so we couldn't stay there too long.
Saturday we went on a walking tour of the modern architecture in London. That was kind of nice because we got to see a lot more of the city. Afterwards, we went and explored the huge market that was around our hostel. You could literally go and eat lunch there off of all the samples that people gave out of their different foods. Later we went to Covent Gardens and just wandered around and watched a bunch of the street performers. We also grabbed some dinner there and then went back to our hostel where we did our own mini pub crawl around all the bars near our hostel.
Sunday we went home. This trip was a lot of fun, and a lot different than when I had gone with my family, especially considering I got to see and do a bunch of different things.
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