London Calling

My trip to London, England was definitely filled to the brim of adventures. We had a really great time, despite some things that went wrong. I guess I'm just going to go day-by-day through the weekend to fill you all in on what happened.

Wednesday

As you've already read, we were stuck in the train station for about nine hours. We played cards, drank Coke, and watched That 70's Show on some TV in the train station. We ate lunch and dinner there as well. At around 6:30pm-ish we got on a bus that was to take us to the Gothenburg City Airport. There, we waited until we could check in, got our boarding passes, went through security, and waited for probably another hour and a half to board the plane. The plane ended up being late, so by this time it was about 9:45pm. We were supposed to leave at 9:20pm. The flight went well, except the seats didn't recline, so sleeping kinda sucked. We landed around 11:30pm in the London Stansted Airport and got a cab to take us to our hostel. When we booked our hostel reservations, we looked at pictures of the rooms online - they didn't look too bad. The place had decent ratings. We got to Hostel 639 at 2am and it could not have been sketchier. As soon as we walked in, there were two cops at the front desk because there had been a robbery. Great. We checked in and went up to our room. Thankfully, we had a four-bed female dorm and there were three of us. No roommates. We prayed for safety and made an attempt to go to sleep. We could hear EVERYTHING that was going on outside - cars driving by, conversations being held, dogs barking, etc. It was a restless night.

Thursday

We ended up waking up at 8:30am. Well, we were pretty much already awake, but it was then that we got out of bed. Thankfully, breakfast was included in the cost of the hostel. We got dressed and went down to eat some food, when all that there was there to eat was bread/toast, butter, and jam. Yum. We ate two pieces each, and then went to the grocery store to buy stuff for lunch and dinner for the next few days. We bought bread, peanut butter, and jam to make sandwiches, and some pasta things that you just add boiling water to to cook the noodles and stuff. After that, we went back to the hostel to shower and eat lunch. The shower was in our dorm room, so that was nice. The shower itself wasn't, but the fact that it was in our room and not down the hall was nice. We walked around London for a bit after lunch and saw Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Liescter Square, and some other things. Then we decided to go see a movie. We found a cinema called Empire which was next to a few other cinemas and went to see Burn After Reading. Very bizarre movie. After that, we walked out of the theater and there were a TON of people outside surrounding a red carpet with cameras, pens, and paper in hand. Some guy was standing on a chair holding a sign that said "EVERYTHING IS OK" and shouting, "Leonardo DiCaprio is just a human being like the rest of us. He still pees and poops like all of us..." Apparently, Leonardo DiCaprio's new movie Body of Lies was having its premier in London, and Leo was on his way there. So surreal. We decided to stick around and see if we could get a look. We managed to get our way to the front of the crowd, and five minutes later, four Mercedes pulled up and Leo got out of one. WHAAAAAATTT? So bizarre. We got some pictures and whatnot. After that, we went back to the hostel to eat dinner. Turns out, there was not pot to boil water in so we turned our shower water on super hot and put it in our pasta bowls. Makeshift. We also noticed when we walked in that someone else's stuff was in our room - we had a roommate. She was from France, and seemed like she wanted to keep her own, so we let her be. I think it was because I'm from the US and Colleen and Christy are from the English-speaking part of Canada.