London on Saturday

Let me begin by saying that today I received a lovely care package from home! Treats and French dressing! Yay for being able to eat salad! Thanks Mom! Anyhow, The Story Continues... Saturday morning we woke up (pretty early, I might add) and got ready to head out for the day. It was nice to be able to leave our stuff locked away at the hostel.  We also got a complimentary breakfast each morning at the hostel. We were out of the hostel by 8:30 or 9, ready to discover what we could around London.

Street where the hostel was located

We honestly couldn't have asked for better weather on Saturday, at least in this part of the year.  It didn't rain on us! And it was nice and sunny to be able to get some good pictures.  We headed to Piccadilly circus again on the subway.  This early in the morning there were absolutely no people out and about yet.

National Gallery

We wanted to find Trafalgar Square so we headed in that direction, not planning on bumping into it as soon as we did.
But we found it! It was so pretty. Trafalgar Square is home to the National Gallery building as well as a large open square with statues and fountains and a monument.  We then continued walking,

                                               attempting to find Buckingham Palace.

Trafalgar Square

We walked under a large arch and it seemed like the road stretched out in front of us forever, but it didn't look like it was in the middle of a city.  We came across a large open area covered in gravel that was situated behind a large building (we had no idea what it was...we'll discuss this later) so we turned and crossed the road and headed through St. James's Park towards Buckingham Palace. The park was beautiful even in the gloomy state that winter causes. There were so many birds, some that even looked really strange and had big feet. They also had pelicans (that were absolutely huge).

Pelican! with Kristin and Emilie

 At the far end of the park stood Buckingham Palace.  The flag was flying! (which I believe means the Queen is there).  At this point, more and more people were joining in on the act of Tourism with us and they were crowded around the front gates as well as the whole open area in front of the Palace.

Buckingham Palace

While we were there, we checked the schedule for Changing of the Guards (because so many people have told me to see it and we were there right around the right time).  It usually occurs at 1100am everyday, but it depends on the time of year and such.  Anyhow, we found out that it would occur that day, but back at the mystery building, not the palace. We had time to spare when we got back to that building, which...I'm still not sure what the name of it is, but it's essentially a Calvary Headquarters/Admiralty Buildings--government buildings essentially.  It also houses a museum.

Guard

 There were guards on the opposite side of it, both on foot and on horses (I laughed soo hard when someone tried to stand next to the guard and get their picture taken and he turned and walked away...but that's because he had to pace back and forth every few minutes).  It was here that we saw a bit of a changing of the guards ceremony.  Across the road, there was also a movie filming, which was pretty cool--think it had Tom Cruise in it.

Changing of the Guard

Next, we headed down the road that the calvary building was on.  This road had a lot of government buildings on it.  It was here that we saw Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben.  It was funny because we got to an intersection and here were all these things.  We then crossed the Westminster Bridge while passing the London Eye, and ate lunch at a small restaurant we found.

Big Ben

Next, we decided we wanted to head towards London Bridge, the Bank of England, and St. Paul's Cathedral.  We took the subway to London Bridge, and walked towards where the bank would be. It was quite an adventure trying to find the bank, when in reality it was right across the road from where we started.  We walked way past it and then turned around and walked all the way around the bank once we found it, just trying to find steps (because we thought it was the place in Mary Poppins with the feeding of the birds song...but we later found out it's not.  You should've seen us asking 'natives' where the steps from Mary Poppins were...hahah).  So we never found the steps and had walked a really long way trying to find them.

St. Paul's Cathedral

So we ventured towards St. Paul's Cathedral. (For both our sakes, I'm going to not talk about St. Paul's in this blog post--we actually did the tour and I started typing it, and it's really long. So that will be a whole other post--tomorrow.) But it was amazing!!

Harrods

From St. Paul's, we took the subway to a fancy part of town, home of the huge department store 'Harrods'.  Our motto as we walked through was basically 'looking, no touching or buying'.  Everything in that store is extremely expensive. We saw a big stuffed bear for a kid that was £7,000 (which is ..more than $10,000?). It was a little insane, but pretty awesome to see. So that was a pretty fancy neighborhood.  We saw a woman who had her daughter there trying on clothes, and the nanny was right there as well. Sigh. So we left because we got sick of not being able to even think about buying anything.

Tower Bridge from London Bridge

We headed to dinner.  We decided to get out of that area and head back to Piccadilly Circus where we had seen a restaurant the day before that looked really good.  We got there and they told us the wait for a table would be about 30 minutes, so we waited..didn't seem that long, right? Wrong, 30 minutes turned into an hour. But once we finally got seated and had food in our bellies, it was definitely worth it.
We headed back to the hostel after dinner, it was about 10 or 10:30. Quite a full day, if I may say so myself.  But such a good day! =)