Tough Travels in London

After traveling all over Europe to places like Prague, Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris, going to an English speaking country for my last weekend trip seemed like a blessing. I thought there was a much better chance of something going wrong in the other cities I traveled to rather than London because of the language barriers, but I was painstakingly wrong.

Traveling with my good friend Dave, we arrived into London Wednesday afternoon just in time for the start of the England vs. Slovenia world cup match. There seemed to be a pub every two buildings on the streets, every single one filled to capacity with people watching the match from outside the pubs, drinking beer of course. England ended up winning the match one to “nil” as it is said in London. After the game, Dave and I met up with our fraternity brother Will to crash at his place for the next two days (he was studying at the Literacy in London program through Miami).

Thursday was our day to sightsee. Dave and I took the “tube” (the British word for metro) to the obvious first destination in London: Big Ben and Parliament. These magnificent sculptures were everything I thought they would be and more. Overlooking the Thames River, the giant building of Parliament seemingly had never ending spires on its top. Big Ben was built in 1858 and is the biggest bell clock in the world located at the north end of England’s Parliament. The United Kingdom’s Parliament building was rebuilt almost to its exact original form in 1834 after it was destroyed. The original Palace of Westminster (also known to many as the House of Parliament) was built in the 11^th century.

http://www.visitlondon.com/attractions/culture/big-ben

http://www.aviewoncities.com/london/housesofparliament.htm

After seeing Big Ben and Parliament, we ventured around the city to see Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace. After this our sightseeing was done; it was time to prepare ourselves for our all-day adventure on Friday: Hard Rock Calling Music Festival in Hyde Park. Hyde Park is the largest park in London, and was almost completely shut off by twelve foot fences for this huge music festival. With 80,000 screaming fans, Pearl Jam came on the stage around 8:00 and finished around 10. Dave and I were so tired we could do nothing afterwards but sleep to get ready for our next adventure: a day trip to Edinburgh, Scotland.

This is the part where our story goes sour. Dave and I spent two hours in line trying to check into our flight to Scotland. Once we finally checked in, we had an hour to kill. A half an hour later we checked to see which gate our flight was at and found out our flight had been pushed back an hour. An hour later we checked the departure monitor again with the same result: it had been pushed back another hour. Finally, an hour later we discovered the nightmare of our trip: our flight had been cancelled. We quickly grabbed our bags from the baggage claim, only to again wait in another two hour line to get our flight rerouted.

When we were finally able to talk to an employee from Easy Jet Airlines, we told them we HAD to be back in Luxembourg by Sunday. The only possibility for us to get back to Luxembourg Sunday was for us to take a flight from London to Munich at 7:30 Sunday morning. Thankfully we had our Eurrail passes, and we agreed to this deal. By this time it was 12 at night, only giving us 4 hours of sleep before we had to wait in line another two hours to check into our new flight Sunday morning. We finally arrived in Munich around 10:30 in the morning on Sunday, and had to sit around until our 1:30 train to Luxembourg. We were originally supposed to arrive in Luxembourg around 5 PM Sunday if we had flown in from Edinburgh, but the train took 8 hours, not letting us arrive until 10:30 Sunday night.

Overall, my time spent in London was great. I saw Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham Palace. I was blessed to enjoy the biggest music festival I have ever seen with 80,000 other people. The biggest drawback was the mode of transportation to and from London. They do not use Eurrail passes in London because it is not on the actual European continent. The only reasonable way for two college students to travel to London is through an airline. Since we are college students we decided to take the cheapest airline possible. This in turn ruined our trip to Scotland. It was great to be around people who spoke English, but in the end, our London weekend turned out to be the most troubling weekend traveling of all.