london london london

Ahhhh London London London, how I love you so much and hate you so much. Times are tough living in the most expensive city in the world. Its starting to get me depressed but I am holding strong. I have started to accept the fact that no you will not find a meal for under 18 USD and no you will not find a beer for under 5 USD. Now im kinda writing this a week late so the chronology of this isn’t going to be exact but don’t worry ill get to everything. We took a cruise down the Thames river to the city of Greenwich, which is not pronounced like sandwich but without the W. We headed to Greenwich to see the national maritime museum and to see the royal observatory and prime meridian. For all you highschool drop outs out there the prime meridian is the imaginary line that splits the eastern and western hemisphere and is the basis for all time keeping and navigating in the world. The prime meridian was, well, lets just say it was the prime meridian and nothing more. But it was very cool to say I straddled the globe J. The national maritime museum was actually very interesting. Papa if your reading this, and I hope you are, it was actually very informative. They had an entire exhibit on the Battle of Trafalgar with some absolutely incredible displays of personal items of Admiral Nelson. They even had the actual clothes Admiral Nelson wore when he was shot and killed in the historic battle. They also had a great collection of scale models from ships dating centuries back to modern cruise ships, including a 1 billion dollar project that is set to create the worlds largest cruise ship. I also had a chance to operate a state of the art shipping simulator where I proceeded to crash my frigate into the coast of Australia. We stopped in a few pubs that were wonderful as always.

That week we also went to our fist night club which I wish we could do more because I love the night clubs here, people are there to dance and have fun, not creep on girls and get blacked out and puke everywhere. We went to England’s number one club known as fabric. This thing was so far underground it wasn’t even funny. Every time I came out of the bathroom I was in a different room, the music was earthshaking and the club held something like 2500 people. It was an awesome time we ended up staying out till around 4am. Oh yea we went to the National British Museum of history as well which was pretty sweet. As ive said before, I cant stand classical art so it was such a nice change of pace to visit a history museum instead of an art gallery. One of the museum’s claims to fame is that they have the Rosetta stone, yes THE Rosetta stone. Which isn’t as cool as it sounds, as its exactly what it sounds like, a big stone. What really interested me was the great exhibitions on Viking artifacts found as well as about 4 or 5 mummies on display which was sooooo cool. And to top it off was the Parthenon exhibit which is a giant room of marble that is al from the Parthenon, the Greek government is actually in the process of trying to retrieve these pieces as they are a SIGNIFICANT part of the Parthenon. And we saw another play, this time a musical. Im sure you’ve all heard of it, Les Miserables. Let me tell you that I was pretty fuckin Le Miserable. I thought they actually spoke a little bit in musicals, but not in this one, they sang the whole time, I thought my brain was going to explode. But the one thing I have to give them credit for was the production and singing. The production was incredible, I have to give mad props to the behind the scenes crew. The actors were also very good as well, all of their singing voices were superb. But like I said before, they sang the whole time and I thought I was going insane.

We had a overnight trip to Bath as well, including Stonehenge as well. Funny story, apparently I had already been to Stonehenge in 7^th grade but somehow I don’t even remember it one bit?? My mom said I was jetlagged but still, that is a pretty big item not to remember in the least bit. Now I had been to bath before as well but I didn’t realize we stayed there for 3 days in an apartment, I thought we just came for the baths as that was all that I remembered. According to the BBC that day we went to Stonehenge and bath was one of the rainiest days in England’s history, yay for us. We hit up the roman baths which was also really cool even for a second time. It is absolutely mind blowing what the romans did in such of a primitive time. Bath was actually a really cool city, its too bad it was raining all day because everything is done up in roman style architecture and for the first time in England it felt like I was in Europe again. A funny side story, we were at the oldest pub in the town and it was actually very nice, good menu, families eating all around us. I proceeded to enter the bathroom and on the wall I saw a vending machine. Now I figured oh it must be your typical bathroom vending machine, condoms and whatever. No, not this one. This vending machine had: A dildo, an inflatable sheep (use your imagination), and Viagra. Now this seemed very out of place for me in such a small conservative town especially in a pub like this so I had to snap some pics. I came out and told my friends and they both ran in there to see it as well. We decided at that very moment that we had to have a sheep, so we each pooled together 2 pounds for the grand total of 6 pounds and marched into the bathroom for our new toy. Now get your heads out of the gutter, we only wanted this for photo purposes and joking around, the prank ideas were endless. We marched into the mens room and put our money in but to our dismay the machine ate our money. This was not acceptable, so I went to the bar and explained to the bartender that I had put my money in the machine for an inflatable sheep and that it had ate my money. The dude was really creeped out and explained that he is not in control of the machine that the company runs it, teary eyed I retreated back to my table. Later that night we actually came back to the same pub for dinner and the bartender from early was our waiter. When he brought our food out I asked him in a very serious tone, if he had happened to fix the sheep machine. He got really awkward and hastily gave us our food and our waiter switched for the remainder of the night, he was genuinely creeped out that we were trying to have sex with an inflatable animal. After that we had a guys night out with just the boys and it was a good time. We posted up at a pub below a hostel and I met this magician street performer from Texas. This guy blew my mind with tricks. And no it wasn’t because I was drinking, as I met him before I even started. Not only was this guy an incredible magician but he was also extremely educated as well. He could chat about a wide variety of subjects, from quantum physics to early 15^th century Victorian history. We woke up early that next morning to go to a fashion/costume museum in bath which was a huge waste of time as we stayed overnight in Bath for a 25 minute walkthrough of a bunch of clothes, I did get to try on a corset though.

That is all I can think of for now, but this weekend I am doing my first solo trip of the summer, I am going to be touring Belgium. The plan is Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp. I am very anxious to be doing this traveling by myself because it really shows what you are made of when you get dropped into a foreign country all on your lonesome. Lets hope I don’t die or anything nasty like that.