You expect me to pay half?!?!

3-ish weeks ago my roommate Ally and Maggie and I made a trip to London. It was Maggie's idea that was inspired by our trip to Dublin to go and see the Walk the Moon concert. Her all time favorite band, The Avett Brothers, was playing in London on a Thursday night and she figured that if I could get people to go to Dublin for a concert, she could get people to go to London for a concert. Well, I wasn't a hard one to convince since she suggested we make a weekend of it and it was Ally's birthday weekend. I also figured that even though I have plans to go with da schwester during the summer, London is like New York City in the sense that you could spend a very very vey long time and butt loads of money and still not have seen everything it has to offer.

So we bought all our tickets and were all excited until someone realized...crap..our flights booked for home don't come in until 9 pm on March 17th...St Patrick's Day. Scrambling to fix our mistake since there was NO WAY we were missing all of St Paddy's in Ireland, we shelled out the extra cash to switch our flights earlier.

We decided to leave early Thursday morning since we all had class Wednesday (I had some on Thursday as well but I figured it was an acceptable excuse to skip class). And by early, I'm not being a whiney college student who thinks getting up at 8 is early (although it is). We were up at 4:30 in the morning to get a 5 o'clock cab to the airport for a 7AM flight. We knew we'd be miserable about it, but we wanted to squeeze as much into the weekend as possible.

Our first mission upon arriving in London was figuring out the Tube/bus system and getting to our hostel. It's actually quite an easy system once you get settled into it, but getting started is the problem. When trying to figure out how to buy tickets, we were looking at the machines like the moneys looked at the rock in 2001 A Space Odyssey. We finally gave up and went to a ticket booth in a train station and asked for and Oyster card, which is what we though we needed. It's a reusable, reload-able card that seemed pretty easy to use. The guy helping us got very upset at that "No no no! That is not what you want!"...um ok? After his long rant about how awful the Oyster card is and how badly it rips people off, he set us up with 3 day passes. They were not only infinitely cheaper and gave us unlimited travel each day, but also got us 2 for 1 ticket prices at big attractions. So for everyone who doesn't like to ask for help, you go ahead! I'll sit back and watch happily with my full wallet.

We decided to split the cost of the discounted tickets, but since there were 3 of us, it got kinda confusing at times. It reminded me of a hilarious story involving my parents and Uncle Steve splitting costs 3-ways while in Austria many eons ago when my dad was studying abroad in Graz. One particular night, it appeared as if Stevie boy, a notorious miser among a family of penny pinchers (myself included), was having a bad dream in which he exclaimed "You expect me to pay half?!?!" clearly not happy with whatever monetary arrangements were being made in his dream. Oh Uncle Steve. Your ridiculousness is bringing laughter clear across oceans.

We finally found our way to the hostel, which was in a very pretty area of London:

And it was right next to Kensington Gardens and super close to a Tube stop. The place had a "free bread" policy which was basically, they always had too much bread and so we were allowed to help ourselves to as much of it as we wanted at any time of day. Truly, the only downfall of the place was that our room was on the 5th floor and there were no elevators. At least it kept us in shape (somewhat).

We figured we had time to do some sightseeing before needing to head off to the concert so we set right off. Our first stop was the London Eye:

Yes it is just a big ferris wheel, but you get some AWESOME views of the city. We also had some really great weather this first day so that definitely made it worth it.

The Jubilee Bridge (creatively) in honor of da Queen's Jubilee.

Hmmm...I don't think rivers are really supposed to be that...brown...

Love me some panorama!

We actually got better picture of Parliament when we got off and walked across the bridge:

And the ever present selfie:

And of course I (and Maggie apparently) couldn't pass up the ridiculous photo opportunities either:

The next Mumble Happy Feet ladies and gents.

London EYE Geddit? Geddit? Oh, I'm so clever.

After one last gander:

We decided to head back to the hostel to get ready for the concert. Apprently they were hot tickets to get since Maggie could only get the upper level tickets where there were seats (more like benches) instead of in the standing area below. It actually worked out well since our feet were killing us from all the walking earlier. And ya know, the whole being up since 4:30 in the morning thing too. It was a great concert too! 

The Avett Brothers are a bit like the US equivalent of Mumford and Sons with a bit more country vibe if anyone's interested. 

Finally, after a long day and experiencing the truly terrifying joy of being thrown into a new city, we made it back to the hostel in one piece. More or less. I've also realized that my entire summer will be perpetually spent in that terrifyingly joyful state of mind as not only will I be in a new city every other week, but most of them won't even speak the same language as me! Looks like I'm going to be a charades MASTER when I finally get home.