London Trip for Valentine's Day 2014

This past weekend, Greg and I visited London! No, it wasn't technically "for" Valentine's Day, per say, but this year Valentine's Day fell on the Friday before President's Day, meaning that it happened to be the first day of a 4 day weekend. Since we won't get much time to travel very far in the next few months, we decided to jump on this opportunity to take a trip we've been discussing since we landed in Germany: a trip to the UK!

I could probably write a post for each day we spent there, because we crammed so much stuff into 3 days. Instead, I'll try to limited it to the basics.

Getting There & Around

This was the first trip we took that we chose to fly. London is technically about a 7 hour drive from where we live. However, we never bothered to get our international driver's license because we're too lazy. Yes, it only costs $15 and an hour of our time to upgrade, but we still only have German licenses. We're planning on changing that soon, but for the time being, we can't legal drive outside of Germany. Not only that, but Greg refuses to drive on the "wrong" side of the road. I'm actually very glad we didn't drive because the traffic in London was insane.

Anyway, we bought a Ryanair flight direct to London. Ryanair is a discount airline in Europe. Depending on where you're going, you can get a very inexpensive flight through them, but it is cheap for a reason. Baggage limits are extremely restrictive, you can only fly into and out of smaller airports and just about everything has a fee associated with it. That's not even including the fact that they cram as many people as possible into a small and uncomfortable plane. For a flight that was just under 1 hour, it wasn't that bad, but I do not think we would take Ryanair for a flight that was much longer or a trip that required a lot of luggage. For a short getaway relatively close by, it was pretty reasonable. I absolutely hate flying with a passion, but I really can't complain too much about our experience.

When we landed at the airport outside of London, we had to take a coach to an Underground station in central London in order to get to our hotel. This is where the real adventure started. In Germany, the rail system where we live is relatively expensive and somewhat limited. Sure, you can take it to get from city to city rather reasonably, but it would probably cost you a good deal of money if you were using it to commute regularly. For Greg and I to get from where we live to Frankfurt (about a 20 minute drive) by train, it will cost around 25 euro and take almost an hour. We assumed it would be similar in London and prepared ourselves to do a lot of walking. Clearly, we didn't understand the size of London or maybe I would have looked into this more. Once we realized our hotel, which was only a few Tube stations away, would be a 40 minute walk, we relented and walked up to a ticket counter. If there is one thing we loved the most about London, it was how extremely friendly everyone was to tourists. Around all of the Tube stations and main attractions were employees dressed as famous British "characters" giving directions, answering questions and handing out free maps. The

Underground employee was equally helpful. Basically, we put a deposit down on an Oyster card, put enough money on it to last us for unlimited trips for 4 days (less than 7p per day) and sent us on our way. When we left London, we turned in our cards and got 20p back in return. It's really an awesome system that I wish was available to us in Germany. Long story short, we made it to our hotel in 5 minutes instead of 40 and got to ride the Tube for pretty cheap all weekend. If you ever take a trip to London, go immediately and get an Oyster card! It's definitely worth the money.

Day 1: Fish and Chips & Platform 9 3/4

Once we got to our hotel, we were dead tired. I forgot to mention previously that we woke up at 2 AM in order to get to the airport entirely too early and wait around for 2 hours. We both really underestimated how little time was needed to get through a small airport in Germany. By the time we landed in London and got oriented with our surroundings, we had already been awake for 10 hours. However, we didn't want to waste any time! After a short rest, we were back out wondering around. I didn't really plan anything for the day so we mostly just rode the train around and got out at stops near the major tourist attractions. Of course, no trip on the Tube would be complete without a stop at King Cross Station's most famous platform: 9 3/4.

According to PotterMore, I'm a Slytherine.

If you have no idea what Platform 9 3/4 is, you probably did not grow up in the 90's. Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross Station is the infamous location where young wizards from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series catch the Hogwarts Express to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Since the series came out, King's Cross became somewhat of a tourist attractions for fans of the books and movies. Eventually, someone had the brilliant idea to rake in loads of money by taking advantage of this impromptu attraction. They opened a gift shop called "Platform 9 3/4" filled with Harry Potter merchandise and affixed a trolley car to the wall of the station so that tourists could take a picture with it as if they were entering 9 3/4 on their way to Hogwarts. Yes, it's extremely gimmicky, but it didn't stop me from hopping in line with the other 12 year old children to get my picture on the way to the Hogwarts Express. I did resist purchasing anything from the gift shop, though. 

Right near King's Cross was a restaurant that was highly regarded

on both Trip Adviser and Urbanspoon for having the best fish and chips in London. It's called Fish Central and if you're ever visiting London, seriously consider eating there even if it is a little out of the way of most attractions. The atmosphere was not at all what you would probably expect from a London restaurant, but it was by far the best food we ate the whole time we were there. We were the youngest people in the restaurant by at least 30 years and there wasn't any other tourists in sight, but the fish and chips was amazing and completely worth it. Sadly, our food experiences every other night left much to be desired.

Day 2: See all the sights!

When I was researching what to do in London, I ended up buying tickets with a hop-on hop-off tour bus company. Because it was off season, we were able to get two days for the price of one. It also came with a little 30 minute river boat tour down the Thames (which we did on day 3) and a few walking tours which we skipped because they didn't seem very interesting to us. The tour bus company also sold us discounted tickets to the Tower of London which was one of the few sights we decided to pay to visit. London, by embracing it's tourist industry, also has a lot of pretty gimmicky and over expensive (in my opinion) sights. After looking at reviews and talking to some friends and family who had visited, Tower of London seemed worth the 19p a person.

Before heading to the Tower, we wandered around Westminster mostly to take pictures. The Westminster

Tube station was pretty close to our hotel. Obviously, it was packed with tourists, but that's to be expected. Once we were done with picture time, we hoped on the tour bus and rode over to Tower Hill. The bus company we had tickets with had two different routes. One was shorter (2ish hours) and had a live guide, while the other was much longer (closer to 5 hours) and required you to listen to recorded audio. After going to the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace, we did hop on the shorter loop to listen to the live guide. It was a great way to get acquainted with the city and see all the major sights, but it took forever to get from one location to another. We enjoyed it for the sake of picture taking, but probably wouldn't choose to do that again next time we visit. Using the Underground is a much more effective and cheap way to get from one location to another if you're in a hurry to see everything.

There are so many tourist attractions in London that it's almost hard to decide what's worth the trip. It seems that every location where some type of history took place is now a paid attraction, and some of them are quite ridiculous, in my opinion. When trying to plan a trip, everyone we came across seemed to agree that the Tower of London was worth the price to visit. We definitely were not disappointed. We probably spent half of the day at the Tower of London. Greg swears up and down that if he were the Queen of England, he would live in the Tower instead of Buckingham Palace. One of the difficult parts of traveling is deciding exactly what it is that you're interested in and enjoy. A lot of travel guides and friends will recommend visiting places that are probably pretty awesome, but just not within our scope of interest. When you only have a short time in a place, you don't want to waste it on a museum or tourist attraction that you realize just isn't interesting to you.

After a long day of exploring every tourist attraction possible, we were tired and starving so we stumbled into the nearest pub. Fair warning, don't do this. Or better yet, at least look at the reviews of a pub before just blindly picking one. Our pub experience was pretty horrible. When we walked in, there were signs everywhere reminding people of the high amount of pick-pocketing that happens there regularly. We shrugged it off figuring that maybe this is common practice in the tourist areas. After ordering food 5 minutes before the kitchen closed, I got served a frozen solid entree and Greg got some cold, yet burnt, fish and chips. This meal was also much more expensive than the one we had the night before. When we got back to the hotel, I looked up the pub and realized it was one of the worst rated in London. Also, despite how authentic looking it was, it was actually apart of a chain that owns quite a few in London. Whoops! I guess at least we didn't get pick-pocketed.

Day 3: Buckingham Bust & Jack the Ripper

By day 3, our feet were a sore and we were exhausted, but the weather was beautiful. Even on Saturday, we lucked out with only a passing rain shower or two, but Sunday was perfectly clear and warmer than it had been previously. We didn't really plan anything for the day in particular, but felt obligated to check out the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. In winter, they only do the ceremony every other day. This weekend, it fell on Sunday at 11:30. We showed up at 10 inadvertently (thinking it was 10:30) and the place was already pretty crowded. After grabbing a coffee and wondering back over, the whole area around Buckingham Palace was swarming with tourists. We tried to wait around, but once it started and we were left completely unable to see anything going on, we just gave up and left. It was kind of sad because I felt like we wasted a whole morning trying to do something that, in all honesty, we probably wouldn't have found that enjoyable. We're surrounded by the military 24/7 so seeing some soldiers in their dress uniform marching about isn't exactly new to us.

After that, we took a brief stop a few Tube stations up to see the flat were Greg's mom lived when she wasyounger. Lucky for us, a Tube station was built on her old street just a few years ago, so it was pretty simple to find and snap a good picture. I'm kind of hoping no one noticed me standing outside of their house taking pictures because I probably looked mildly creepy.

Most of the rest of the afternoon was spent wandering around and enjoying the nice weather. We took a riverboat cruise down the Thames which was also included in our bus tour ticket. We also mistakenly got on the wrong bus route and spent over an hour backtracking things we already saw. On the riverboat tour, the guide pointed out a few pubs by the river that seemed to be good options for dinner. We walked over to one that was a rumored hang out of Shakespeare, assuming it just had to be more authentic than the one we visited the night before. Instead, it was very similarly packed with tourists and a sign above the bar indicated that it was also owned by the same company that owned the

awful location that we visited the night before. We ended up leaving and eating at a burger place right next door. I can't lie, the more European foods we try, the more convinced I am that American food is the best tasting (albeit, the least healthy).

That evening, we went over to White Chapel for a tour about Jack the Ripper. There are probably 40 different companies that do Jack the Ripper tours. We pretty much just showed up at the Tower Hill station where most of them start and joined the first group to leave. It was actually a really enjoyable look into the history of the area and our guide, a Queen's Guard member living in the Tower of London, was wonderfully enthusiastic. By the end of our trip, we had heard all sorts of conspiracy theories about Jack the Ripper. It was chilling, but also a nice way to see a few different parts of London that probably aren't as common on the usual tours.

The next day, we woke up and headed directly to the Tube station to turn in our Oyster cards, then it was off to the airport again. We were very sad to leave the UK and hope to return soon. Greg mentioned he'd like to spend New Years in London one time and I know we'll definitely plan to stop through again on our planned "Greg is Turning 29 Birthday/St Patrick's Day Extravaganza" vacay through Ireland and Scotland next year. We don't have any set plans for traveling in the near future, but have talked about planning a day trip to the Netherlands in April or May for Keukenhof, the huge tulip festival they have every year. Also, I'd like to fit in a trip to Prague in sometime in the next few months. I'm crossing my fingers that we're able to take a cruise this fall, but we will see how everything goes moving forward with work.

To be honest, it took me over a week to write this post. I actually have a few others that I intend on adding soon, but considering how long it took me to finish this one, I'm not going to try to stick myself to any particular time line. Fasching/Carnival is happening over here as I type this, so I have a whole new update coming about fasching parties!