A Week in London

Hello from across the pond! Over the next six weeks, I am studying abroad in England and will try to write about it as much as possible. We begin our journey in London…

Tuesday

It’s 6:30 a.m., and my plane from Raleigh has just landed in Heathrow Airport. The flight was smooth, and outside the window, the English morning sky is a different shade of blue than the American sky (I’m sure I like this shade of blue better). Highlights of the flight:

the friendliest and most adorable couple sitting in my row: a woman reading a romance novel and a man with a comically curly moustache
30 seconds from take-off realizing that I had packed contact solution but no contacts
reading a good chunk of my book for upcoming Oxford classes
watching an even bigger chunk of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (raise your hand if you are HYPED for the new book/movie!!! 🙋‍♀️)
sleeping maybe 20 minutes in total

I walk through the airport slightly loopy from jet-lag and go to the bathroom–sorry, the loo–outside customs, where the janitor says “‘Scuse me, luv” before reaching under the counter with a broom. She’s the first person I hear with a British accent, and I can’t help but grin. On the other side of customs, my group of fellow English students has staked out a spot by the information desk while we wait for all 33 of us to arrive from our separate states. We’re delirious, yawning, and working on loading any form of caffeine we can find into our bodies. Because of delayed flights, we’re stuck at the airport for just under five hours, but at last we board the coach and are on our way.

After lunch, dropping luggage at our hostel, and the first of many tube rides, we arrive in Hyde Park, just near Buckingham Palace. Our tour guide is a colorful Irishwoman who is intent on stalking King Charles so that we can get a look at him. “Come, come, my luvies,” she keeps saying and dashes us from Buckingham Palace to Clarence House in hopes of seeing the white motorbikes that mean the king is “on the move.” No, we do not see the king. But we do see Big Ben, the outside of Westminster Abbey, a changing of the guard, and all the must-see tourist locations. By the end of the day, we are thoroughly exhausted and prone to falling asleep on the tube at 8 p.m. That night’s sleep is 11/10.

Wednesday

We arise fully refreshed the next morning and set out for a tour of the Globe Theatre, a replicate of the theatre where Shakespeare put on his plays. We will be seeing The Taming of the Shrew at the theatre the next night, and the cast is rehearsing as we take our tour. The new Globe specializes in modernizing their plays from the original Shakespeare, and the two scenes of rehearsal that we catch leave us confused, to say the least. But more on that later.

For lunch, a friend and I make our way to Borough Market nearby, a bustling square packed with food stands. The smell alone is enough to make me more desperately impatient for food than I already am. Our lunch of choice is falafel and veggies (after eating practically nothing but bread since the airport). Behind me in the line are two other American girls who strike up conversation with a Frenchman behind them. The Americans have just come from Paris and ask the Frenchman what he’s doing in London–I only pick up snippets of the conversation. But I wish I was brave enough to talk to strangers from faraway places. For now, lunch is the priority.

We spend the afternoon at the British Museum. And OK, I may have thought that the British Museum was an art museum until like three days before the trip. So when we obtain a list of the many treasures that the British Museum holds (first of all… why does the British Museum have all this stuff??), I don’t even know where to begin. The Rosetta Stone seems like I good idea, so a friend and I squeeze our way into the crowd and snap our pictures. And after that, we’re lost. I’m not a history buff, so wandering through glass cases with old rocks and jewelry leaves me feeling even more lost. Maybe if I look lost enough, a cute British boy will take pity on me. But alas, I’m left to stay lost. We wander through the Ancient Mesopotamia exhibit (which was actually pretty darn cool) and call it an afternoon. And even though our feet are just about dead from the walking, we make a stop at an antique bookshop on the way back to the hostel. I flip through an old collection of Charles Dickens books that are wildly out of my budget, and the smell of old paper is like warming myself by a fire. The books may not be as old as the Babylonian tablets in the museum, but the shop is my kind of history museum.

Thursday

Good news: now we’re going to an art museum! The Tate Britain is a collection of mostly Impressionist and 19th/20th-century paintings in a building almost as gorgeous as the paintings themselves. This is the kind of museum I love getting lost in, and I wander from painting to painting, marveling at everything. The highlight of the collection is a section of galleries dedicated to J.M.W. Turner, an English painter who specialized in painting massive landscapes that take your breath away. I imagine what it must be like just having the talent to whip out paintings like that, and as someone whose artistic ability is limited to doodles of flowers on class notes, I’m a little jealous.

The afternoon consists of a meander around the Tower of London, which finishes off my feet. The ravens yell at us as we walk, and we learn an impressive amount of information about torture and execution for one afternoon. There is a dungeon-like room which was the luxury prison of Sir Walter Raleigh (the patron saint of North Carolina history classes) and torture devices that make my limbs hurt just looking at them. We sit in the beautiful chapel to rest our feet before heading to our next destination: dinner and the Shakespeare play.

There is a pub neighboring the Globe Theatre, and our professors have highly recommended their sticky toffee pudding, a traditional English dessert. A cake-like mound sitting in a caramel sauce and topped with clotted cream. The only way I can describe it is that it tastes burnt but in the best way. 10/10 recommend. Anyway, we jaunt next door to the theatre, and The Taming of the Shrew begins. For an extremely modernized version of Shakespeare, I enjoy it three times more than I thought I would. And when you gather thirty English majors together to watch a Shakespeare play, at least one of them is going to have a genius insight, and at intermission, the girl in front of me basically decodes the whole thing and leaves me thrilled for the second half. It’s kind of hard to explain the new twist the director put on the play in brief words, but basically the play became very meta. They also added in a murder, which was a plot twist I didn’t see coming. Needless to say, the thirty of us still have very divisive opinions about the whole thing. “Yes, it was very interesting,” my Renaissance-literature-expert professor says on the tube the next morning, clearly not wanting to crush my enthusiasm.

Friday

Friday begins with an extensive tour of Westminster Abbey, led by a very, very British guide who points out memorials of Martin Luther King, Jr. and FDR for us Americans. The church is packed with quirky history stories of dead kings and poets, and some of the most famous people who have ever lived in England are buried there, including Charles Darwin, T.S. Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Not to mention the whole place looks like something out of Harry Potter.

We spend the afternoon in two more museums: the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. We only have an hour in the National Gallery, which is like the Tate Britain but huge. Gorgeous and absolutely overwhelming for a group of exhausted college students. Still, I flit from painting to painting until my feet beg me to stop (I spend most afternoons with my feet being very sore), and then the National Portrait Gallery awaits. The gallery houses both Renaissance paintings of old kings and modern photographs of famous bands. And on one wall is a floor-to-ceiling painting of a young Queen Elizabeth II, regally watching over the halls.

My friends and I have tickets for Les Misérables that night, so we decide to head to Chinatown for dinner, which is close to the West End (London’s theatre district). Best decision we ever made, because our bao bun dinner is the best thing I ate in London. I will be dreaming about those bao buns for weeks. One over-stimulating walk through Piccadilly Circus later (including an encounter with a male stripper that I wish I could erase from my brain), we arrive at the theatre and watch the best production of any musical I have ever seen ever. I was the only one in the group completely and totally ignorant of anything Les Miz, and oh. my. word. Anyone who has seen this show… please, I am still not OK.

*A very naïve girl eating bao buns 3 hours before being shattered to pieces by* Les Miz

Saturday

It’s the king’s annual birthday parade, which is apparently a big deal (his real birthday is in November, but they always have the birthday parades in June… don’t ask me, I don’t get it). But instead of waking up at 6 a.m. to line up for the parade, my friends and I sleep in and head to a café to drink coffee and work on homework; we’re all now realizing that “study abroad” unfortunately does have to include some amount of studying. It’s a chilly and rainy morning–very London weather–and we sit by a window and drink our hot drinks and are relieved that we decided not to go to the parade. When two hours of reading poetry has fried my brain, we eat lunch and meet up with the rest of our group outside of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where a small wedding is taking place. We catch a glimpse of the bride and groom at the altar before following our professors downstairs to the crypts, and tragically, we’re left to hear the organ blare “Canon in D” only through the vent above our heads as the wedding ends. After we’re free to roam, I climb the 600-something stairs to the top of the dome and look over the London skyline. On the way back downstairs, I hear cheering from the wedding party outside, but even when I squat and peer through a window, I can’t catch a glimpse.

*St. Paul’s Cathedral 10 minutes before it started bucketing down with rain*

Sunday

Our professors turn us loose for the day, and after a chill morning in the hostel, we set out once again to galavant through the streets of London. I have my first ride on one of the iconic double-decker buses, and my friend and I hit a cute little bakery for some fire avocado toast. Our original plan was a bookshop crawl through the city, but by the time brunch is over and we navigate around the underground stations that are closed for maintenance, we only have time for Daunt Books, a beautiful bookshop on High Street. I could spend all day in a bookstore, but I show some serious self-control and only buy two books. (technically… I buy three. But the third is a little £5 Jane Austen book that I can fit in my pocket. Doesn’t count.)

Now the plan is to go to Westminster Abbey for an evensong service. But after finding the tube line to Westminster closed, we hurry to yet another station that takes us back to St. Paul’s Cathedral. We slip in after the first song and sit for a gorgeous, gorgeous service. Then it’s back to the hostel for a cheap dinner, homework, and packing for tomorrow. Or ignoring homework and blogging instead while trying not to stress over my laundry downstairs. That is Bailey’s current state.

Tomorrow morning, we leave for Canterbury, and we hop around England quite a bit this week before settling in Oxford for a while. It’s been a very fast-paced week, and I’m definitely ready to slow down for a bit. So long for now, London, you’ve been good to me. ❤️