Adventures Abroad!: Easter Break Part 1!

Here in Norway they call spring break simply Easter break. (Guess they can't be as politically correct as America :) They get a whole week off plus the Monday after Easter..quite the break! Maggie, Gabby, Katlin, and I were able to travel to London for 3 days and Dublin for another 3. It was a great trip and I was really happy to change things up for a bit and see other countries!

We headed out early Monday morning. We got a ride from one of our cooperating teachers to the airport that was about 2.5 hours away from Rosendal. We flew with RyanAir, which is the "cheap" airline here. It's quite interesting how much they pride themselves on on-time arrivals. When you land on-time, a trumpet sound plays announcing that you just rode on another on-time flight from RyanAir..kinda goofy. They allow people to enter from both ends of the plane, all at once. There are no assigned seats so everyone is rushing to get a seat. I enjoyed how quick they are with everything though, waiting at airports can get really boring really fast!

We got into London and had to take a bus to the city center. We then took the London Underground to our hostel. By then it was dark and we were tired from our long day of travel so we got some food. We found a fish and chips restaurant near our hostel that we decided to gorge on. It was so nice to have some greasy food again! I didn't have any since I left America and it tasted wonderful, until about an hour after when I had a tummy ache :(

Where we had our fish and chips the first night.

Fish and Chips!

London Underground Station for our hostel.

Tuesday we woke up really early and started our exploring..or I should say wandering. haha. We visited Buckingham Palace first. It was SO cold out, but still very beautiful. We didn't realize we were near the palace until we saw huge fancy gates then it came to us we were near something royal! We saw tons of cute people all dressed up in fancy hats going into the palace, we thought about tagging along and heading in with them, but then we thought better not :)

Gates near the park next to the palace.

Maggie, Me, Katlin, & Gabby out front of the palace :)

Fountain out front of the palace.

The palace was huge!

After the palace we went to Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and the London Eye. We were freezing by the time we got by these so we snapped some pictures and headed to the underground to warm up. We actually ended up riding it to the London Bridge, took a couple pictures and then got on a bus and gave ourselves a little self-guided tour as we rode around and warmed up. It was fun to just ride around and see the city. As we kept riding I noticed how big and busy London is. People are everywhere and there are all different types of stores, shops, and buildings everywhere.

We found green grass! and flowers, and ducks!

I loved these. They apparently were only for emergency calls tho.

Westminster Abbey. (see that line behind me!)

London Eye- ice frozen by this time...

Double Decker Bus!

We then headed to St. Paul's Cathedral. It is such a huge, gorgeous church. We only got to peek inside and go in the basement where the gift shop and restaurant were. It was still very pretty! We learned that it burnt down in the Great Fire of London and took over 30 years to rebuild! We then headed inside the Museum of London to warm up and explore. It was free admission so we spent a good amount of time learning about London history.

Out front of St. Pauls. It was so beautiful inside!

Our next stop was the Tower of London. It was so expensive so we didn't get to go in and see the jewels but we did see the outside and took some good pictures. We visited the gift shop and a small museum that explained some of the details about the Tower. We were then running out of daylight and getting pretty tired so we got some dinner at Garfunkel's, which is apparently a chain restaurant in the UK. I had some salmon cakes that were delicious!

We were very tired so we decided to sleep in a bit the next day and take it pretty easy. We went to a shopping area where we visited some shops and Maggie and I got tickets to see Wicked! We were lucky to get tickets and I was happy we did. I really enjoyed seeing Wicked, I knew nothing about it and it was really good. The show was my favorite part about London. It was nice to enjoy for a couple hours instead of go go go. That took a few hours and then we had dinner and relaxed at the restaurant as we enjoyed a beer and dessert!