My Adventures Before School Starts

Hi Everyone!

            I know it has been a while since I first posted about my blog, so I am sorry that it has taken me this long to post anything again. It has been a fantastic past few days, and I am very excited to share my experiences with all of you. We just arrived in Prague yesterday, but we spent the past few days in London sight-seeing and taking in all that it has to offer.

            We arrived at the airport in London Tuesday morning, and after a little bit of confusion and misdirection, we were able to get to our hostel. It wasn’t a five star hotel or anything, but it gave us somewhere to sleep and that is all we needed. On that first afternoon, my friends that I traveled with, Miranda and Jessica, and myself took ourselves on our own tour of London. Miranda and Jessica had already been there before, but it was a new experience trying to navigate the town without the help of a tour group or other adult figure. However, we did just fine and went and saw places like Soho, the Piccadilly Circus, and Trafalgar Square and saw things like Big Ben and the London Eye. We even had fish and chips for lunch, just to partake in the London experience. We finally finished off the night by exploring some of London before supper, so we could see everything all of the buildings lite up for the night.

            Our second day there was the most tourist packed day of them all. We had bought a London Pass for twenty-four hours, we just means that you can see so many attractions all throughout one day, as long as the discounted total for the places equal how much the pass is worth. So we went to five different places with our pass in less than eight hours! We started out the day by going to Kensington Palace, which is where William and Kate Middleton live, and did the tour there. It was a very beautiful place with a lot of history, and well worth our time. We then went to Westminster Abbey, which just took my breath away with how beautiful it is. Unfortunately, pictures are not allowed inside of the abbey, but it was still amazing to go see. We then ate some lunch at a market and got right back into touring. We went to the Tower of London to see the Crown Jewels and just admire the medivel design of the building. We also went to the Tower Bridge Exhibition, which allowed us to go up into the Tower Bridge and get a bird’s eye view of the city, which was a lot of fun. And for our last tour with our pass, we went to London Bridge for the London Bridge Experience. It was a scary yet educational tour of what went on at the London Bridge in the early days of its existence. After that, we went and found the Globe Theatre, because I thought it would be cool to see it, even if we did not go inside. We then found a pub to eat at for supper, and went back out to see Big Ben and the London Eye at night.

            The next day was probably one of the most fun days. We started out the morning by taking a bus, then a train, and then another bus to the Harry Potter Studio Tour. Although I’ve only ever read the books and not seen the movies, it was so much fun to go see all of the hard work that went into making the movies. We spend around two hours there, and then came back to the main part of London and ate at the same market as the day before. After lunch, we went to Buckingham Palace, but we weren’t sure when the changing of the guards was happening, so we just went to see the Palace. And for our final tourist place in London, we went to Hyde Park and just sat and observed how pretty it was (also because we were exhausted from walking, so we didn’t want to walk around the park). We stopped by the Sherlock Holmes Museum before supper, and returned to the same pub as the night before for some more great food. We headed back to the hostel, where we repacked and went to bed early.

            Yesterday morning, we left our hostel at three in the morning to get to catch the 3:30 A.M. bus to the airport, because the airport was around an hour away, and our flight was at 7 this morning to Prague. We hit a few snafus at the airport, but eventually made it to Prague. Although it was not difficult to find our hostel here, we had to pull our suitcases up a super long steep hill to get to it. We found a café to eat at for lunch, and then we went to the grocery market to get some snacks to eat for supper. It was not the busiest day, but it was nice to relax and recuperate from the previous three days.

            Today is probably not going to be a very busy day either, but we are planning on going on a walking tour around the city and just seeing where we go from there. Sunday is when we finally go to Olomouc, and I am super excited to start our classes and get to know the rest of the students going on this program.

Until next time,

Rachel