My procrastination tactic of the day is to update my blog. I have so much to tell! So much that I had planned on telling over the Christmas break but it was so good to just be home that I didn't really feel like updating. Plus, most people that read this blog will have already heard most of my stories, but this is more for purposes of writing down what happened so I can reflect on it later I guess...

The last weekend in December I had plans to go to Dusseldorf, Germany with three other McMaster students. We left on Dec.1 and came back Dec.5. However, this isn't what happened really. It's kind of funny cuz when I talk about this trip I still say, "When I was in 'Germany'", but when I say "Germany" I do the quote fingers, but that is where we were supposed to be. Don't get me wrong though...it still ended up being an awesome weekend!

So it all started on the Thursday (Dec.1) morning. Our cheap plane tickets were out of London, so we had to take a bus down to London at 9am. Lucky for us, since we booked early enough, the tickets were free!! Unfortunately, not everyone made the bus on time...so we missed it. So we were like, okay...what do we do now? Luckily National Express runs busses to London every hour, however these ones weren't free. So we got tickets to go on the 10am bus. While we were on the bus, just about ready to go, the guy I was with said, "Do I need my passport guys, cuz I think I forgot it.".....yeah....he needed his passport. So, we got off the bus, he went back to the flat to get his passport, and we got on the 11am bus to London. Now, it's about a 5 hr. drive to Victoria Station, and our flight was supposed to leave at 7:20pm from Stansted Airport. If everything else had worked out the way it was supposed to we still would have made our flight. However, the shuttle bus from Victoria to Stansted (which is definitely NOT in London!), which was supposed to take 1 3/4 hrs. was caught in traffic (apparently there was flooding in London somewhere, not to mention it was also rush hour), so the trip actually took 3 hours. We missed our plane. It was seriously like being in a movie...we got off the bus and ran to the check-in only to find out that the plane had just taken off. So then that was crappy. We were in Stansted Airport, going nowhere. We'd booked a hostel and paid for our flights and we were still in England. Luckily, the guy at the service counter said that we could claim the taxes back so really we only lost 14p (30 cents) each for our plane tickets (yes, they were that cheap), and we explained the situation to the hostel and they let us cancel without having to pay for any of the nights. So moneywise, it could have been worse.

We decided that since we came all the way there, we might as well just stay in London, because it's not like there was a shortage of things to do there. We got this awesome hostel called the Globetrotter. Even though it was the same company as the one we stayed at in Edinburgh it was SO much better! It was only a minute's walk from an underground station, it had nice rooms, a cafeteria, a bar, a movie room, a big kitchen, a gym...I mean this place was really great! If you book on Hostelworld you get really good prices too! (ie. It was 8 pounds a night from booking online but if we hadn't it would've been 17 pounds a night!) And we got free breakfast!! It was great.

So, what did we do when we were there? Well, we didn't do a lot of really typical touristy stuff like Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London and stuff like that because Erin and Elle had been there the weekend before (obviously they weren't intending on going two weeks in a row!) and I had seen that stuff before when I visited as a kid. So, we walked by a lot of the touristy stuff and took lots of pictures. At night it was nice to see the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge and stuff all lit up:




The first day we were there we took the underground to the Parliament Buildings and when we came out of the station, this is what we saw:

It was great! We sat in on some parliamentary proceedings...although it must not have been an important matter because only about 10 people were discussing it. It was something to do with the crime bill.

Right beside the Parliament Buildings is Westminster Abbey. We just walked around it though cuz we didn't feel like paying to go in. It was really crazy though, because when we stood beside the abbey and looked up (so you see the view in the picture below), it made this kind of optical illusion where the building was falling down backwards because the clouds were moving forwards...it was really crazy.


One of the days we were there we went to the Museum of Natural History. It was free to get in! And we spent the whole afternoon there. There were lots of dinosaur skeletons!! Please excuse the "Ross" but I love dinosaurs...they are so cool! And they had this animatronic T-Rex who roared at you.

And then they had all these "alternative" reasons for why the dinosaurs went extinct which were kind of funny.

So there was a life sciences section with all the skeletons and stuff and then there was an earth sciences section that had this simulation of an earthquake that happened in Viet Nam or something where the floor shook and stuff, which was kind of cool. And it was so cool in the life section because we signed up for this "Behind the scenes" tour, which took us into the museum's labs! Did you know that they actually ship specimens in the mail? Like, they have thousands of those jars with dead species and formaldehyde. So, if I was at home in Canada and I couldn't make the trip to study a specimen in London, they they vacuum seal it and bubble wrap it and mail it to me!! And...when someone brings in a specimen where they only want the bones, instead of scraping the bones clean themselves they have buckets of bugs that eat everything but the bones...so they go into every tiny whole and suck it out. So after a couple of days the skeleton is all clean! It's crazy! And the best part was the "Tank Room". This was were they kept the really big jars of animals... they had jars that held small sharks or anything else that size. Most of the jars were about 1m-1.5m high. They even had what they thought was the link between fish and on-land animals because it still had the fins but it had appendages as well. It looked like an oversized tadpole that was still morphing. And they had original specimens that Darwin took on his journeys!! And I know that it's a really dorky thing to get excited about, but that's a pretty significant part of history right there...and also in the Tank Room were...the Tanks. Obviously, you're not going to fit something like a bear in one of those jars, because they just don't make them big enough. So, they have huge vats of solution that bigger animals just float around in. Some tanks have 4 or 5 specimens in them and they're just tagged for identification. So if someone wants to study one, they have to fish them out. Unfortunately we didn't get to look inside the tanks, cuz it would've been sweet to see all the dead things floating around...haha. We had to wear labcoats on the tour, so this is us:

We also did some shopping while we were there...or rather, more looking at stuff in the shops. We went to Harrods, and obviously when they're selling clocks in there for 10000 pounds I'm not really gonna be in the mood too buy much. But it's a huge store. It was insane because it was right before Christmas. They had multiple Santas there. It was like a corridor with 10 rooms and there was a Santa in each room, but the kids wouldn't see people going into the other rooms, so it wasn't like they could tell there were multiple Santas. But the line was 2 hours long!! I couldn't imagine keeping my kid occupied that long! And then in the toy section they had this almost life-size Lego triceratops!

We went to Portobello Road market too. If you've seen Bedknobs and Broomsticks you'll know what I'm talking about. Basically, it's just a bunch antiques, but it's such a huge market...I don't know how long it went down the street but we stopped after about an hour cuz it just kept going.

Covent Garden was another shopping place, which in My Fair Lady is where Eliza Doolittle sells her flowers. We weren't there for long though...but I'd heard of a "Canadian Store" near Covent Garden, so we went there and they sold Moosehead and Sleemans and they had Oreos and maple syrup and Mr.Noodles and other stuff like that...and I really wanted to buy a bag of Oreos, but it cost 4.25 pounds ($8.50)! So I figured I'd wait til I got home...
And then right near this store was The Maple Leaf Pub. It served normal English pub food but then had poutine and tortiere and stuff...and pancakes with maple syrup...and Canadian beer! So we ate there. And apparently they show Hockey Night in Canada there on Sundays but unfortunately we were there on the Monday, so we missed it.

And in more news relating to movies, when we were on the Tower Bridge, Tom discovered the James Bond door. In the latest film, Die Another Day, there's a part when James Bond goes to meet M in a deserted underground station, and he has to go through this door on the Tower Bridge to get to it.

And...we went to King's Cross Station! It was so funny cuz we kept telling Tom we had to go there but he's not into Harry Potter...so he was kind of out of the loop about the whole thing. But it was exciting in a really dorky way. They even had a photo-op Platform 9 3/4 there...so we took pictures:


We were kind of stuck for things to do at night. We tried to get rush tickets for a West End show...but there weren't really any shows available that we wanted to see. One night we went to see Flightplan at a cinema in the West End. And so we were in the cinema, and then I left to go to the washroom before previews started and there's a girl outside the door giving out free samples of Disaronno amaretto! It was great! They'd never do that in Canada!! So we watched Flightplan, sipping our amaretto. One of the other cinemas in the area had a huge Triwizard Cup on top of it from the 4th Harry Potter movie, so of course I was a dork and took a picture of it. It was so big though!
One night we went to this stand-up comedy night...but it was just really bad so we left part-way through and went back to the hostel to play euchre.

I think that pretty much sums up the trip though. It ended up being a really fun weekend despite the beginning of it...