London has been great, it has been very relaxing staying in one place for so long. We've been here for 4 nights, and out of all that time here, we've only spent 1 full day in London town proper. We are staying in a town called Acton, which is a bit west of London, but still pretty easily accessible on the tube (what the subway is called). It's a suburb, and it has turned out to be a pretty interesting place unto itself.
Acton looks like the street Harry Potter's evil god parents, the Dursley's, live on. It's a bit more urbanesque than the city in Hot Fuzz. There's an interesting ethnic mix here, with a prominent Polish community and also a growing Armenian, Somali, and Iraqi population as well. The pub that we stayed at (they have a “hostel” in the upper floors) seemed to be a Polish meeting place for the citizens of Acton, so that made things a different than expected. I was anticipating speaking and hearing 100% English while we were here, but we've heard more Polish than English in our pub. It has made for a bit of a different stay, haha.
The pub itself has it's own history which I thought was pretty interesting. It was built in 1899 as an inn to shelter travelers coming to and from Oxford and London, and I do believe it has been family owned and run since. The place is very old and the rooms in the hostel show it, but the actual pub portion of it is very cool.
London was fun, we went on a free walking tour and got to see a lot of royal places. Buckingham Palace was infinitely more expansive than I pictured it being, and we got to see the changing of the guard. I took a short video of the intro to it, check it out. All in all, London was a great place to relax and recuperate, and I'm glad we came.
The side of Paris is underneath the London pics, fyi.
Concerning Paris: we were only there for a little under 13 hours, so it was more of a layover on the way to London than a stop on our journey. From what we saw of it, though, neither of us wanted to stay. With half an hour of taking to the streets, we had been hustled by 2 or 3 drunken vagabonds, and that was before 10am. They seemed especially attracted to travelers, which is understandable, but it was disgusting and annoying. The city seemed very dirty, and my pickpocket paranoia was much higher there and anywhere else. I was scared that I was going to look down at any given moment and my pants were going to be magically pickpocketed away. We did get to see the Eiffel Tower, though, so that was neat. We were happy to leave by the end of the day, as we were very exhausted from traveling and exploring Paris all day.
We're leaving to go to Amsterdam today, which is exciting. It's weird to think that the trip is winding down; it feels like we got here yesterday, though I do miss the comforts of home.
No comments:
Post a Comment