London Sight-seeing Day 1

Today I managed to get myself into the actual City of London. Like I said before I recruited one of my housemates, Nicole, to come along because she hasn't been into the big city centre yet. Mind you....we didn't venture right into the heart of it all. We headed to the Northern Line, which is Colliers Wood Station, and loaded up our Oyster Cards. Okay....for those who don't know, Oyster cards are the THING for London transport. If you are travelling by Bus, Tube, or Train you load them up with money and swpie them to pay fare going in and out of the stations. It's fast, conveinient and just makes life go on easier. Anyways, my Oyster card had £2.50 on it already (thanks Mum and Dad) but I loaded £20 on it just so it's good for now. And so, we travelled up the Northern Line to London Bridge and got off. Side note: if you want to pull up a pic of the London Underground you can follow along! So, we got off at London Bridge and went walking west towards the Tower Bridge. Stopped for coffee (more accurately a Cafe Americano...what else) along the way and continued on.

The Tower Bridge provided many photo ops along the walk and the Tower of London is on the North bank and also provided many more.



After we crossed the Bridge we sort of muddled about the Tower of London area and I managed to pick up an England Flag and a patch for my backpack for London. We then continued North . At this point we were waaaaaay east of the usual London tourists points but we also didn't want to pay for tours and stuff just yet so we were really just getting a piece of the area down and making note of things we want to see in the future. So, we travelled all through the east side of the City of London and saw many sites (of which can be seen on Facebook here)

I randomly saw on Nicole's map that there was the Guildhall School for Music and Drama just north of the Musuem of London. Seeing as how I love Drama I figured we should go check it out. So, we made the walk up to the area and passed by some really nice buildings along the way. Once we got to the school we saw people coming in and out so we went inside to check it out. Oddly enough they were having an Open House at the time (mind you...it was part of a thing called "Open House London" which only went on this week-end and we didn't know about). They were calling people for the 2:30 tour while we were standing there so we just jumped in impromptu and had a guided tour of their Theatre facilities! There were no photos allowed (sorry) but it was very similar to what Queen's had. The only difference was they didn't keep or make a lot of their own costumes, set, or props. Also, they have a lot of really experienced students but they specifically don't train designers...just people who work for designers. But, by allowing professional designers to come into their school to design shows it gives their students professional connections upon graduation. Very cool.

Before we left we sat in at a Jazz Band rehearsal which was quite lovely and continued on our journey. At this point it was getting to bbe 3:00pm and we had been walking for so long that we called it a day in London and headed back home to 76 Marlboough.

I gave Geoff a shout once we got back and he popped over for a visit and we ended up going to the Colliers Tup for dinner and some pints.

REVIEW:
The Colliers Tup is AWESOME. It's less than 5 minutes from our place and Nicole and I love it and we're hoping to recruit our other flatmates to come there enough to be fairly regular. Not enough to be alcoholics....but as a regular place to go out impromptu and for dinner sometimes. It's a great atmosphere...not too busy...and they serve a great selection of Real Ales. Dad, my new favourite is Spark's Doom Bar...it's awesome. I'll show you sometime. So, the three of us went there, I had the Pork Roast for dinner. They have roast every Sunday and it's "the best in London" so they say. It was absolutely delicious. We chilled with some pints and actually participated in Pub Quiz as well. We ended up coming in 5th of 8.....which is pretty good but as teachers I know we can do better. The science category really screwed us so we're going to recruit flatmates for next Sunday's quiz.

All in all...an awesome day. I'm going to hit the sack now...it's 1am. I'm going to hit more Central London tomorrow...Picadilly and such. I'll make sure to post pics ASAP.

Cheers, Love, and Rock the World!

Erik