London Day 2!

So I'm sucking at Europe posts! These posts will just come as quickly as I can get them. Last week I had a crazy busy week at work and then spent the weekend in NY. I can't believe my best and very first friend is heading off to Mongolia for 2 years! She is joining the Peace Corps and I am beyond proud of her. I'm also pretty jealous! These are the types of emotions that make me want to quit my job and move to Tanzania. I'm currently re-looking into Birthright. I wish the trips were a little shorter so I didn't have to take off so many days from work. Ughh!

Okay, so Europe! We started our second day in London a little later because I had a weirdly ill night (this unfortunately was not my only illness of the trip, but more on that later). We left our hotel and planned to follow our "day 2 walking tour" that Maja made for us. We started at Westminster, crossed over the bridge and walked along the South Bank, then crossed the river for more exploring.

The first stop was seeing Big Ben and Westminster up close!

The perfect London photo with the red double decker and Big Ben!

Crossing Westminster Bridge

The view from Westminster Bridge

The walk along South Bank was great. It was pretty touristy near the London Eye but it was great just to walk along the river. Here's just some of what we passed while walking along the bank:

South bank skate park

A cute little alley filled with shops and restaurants

Shakespeare's Globe Theater!

We stumbled upon Borough Market (aka foodie heaven), which I'll go into more in my next post!

Of course we had to stop for a few oysters on the way

Lunch!

The writing on the bathroom door of the bar! Loved it. 

The coolest sparkley toilet ever...hah!

And stopped for a photo with the famous Tower Bridge!

The gorgeous Westminster Abbey from the other side of the Thames

The first thing we did once we crossed over the river was go to "The Monument".

The Monument was built to commemorate the Great Fire which devastated the city in 1666. It is 202 feet high and is the tallest isolated stone column in the world! Of course it offered some great views of the city, our pictures don't do it justice!

At the top of the Monument!

And of course, there was not an elevator in the Monument so you have to walk up 311 steps to get to the top.

Clinging on for life in the tiny spiral staircase!

After the Monument we spent some time walking through "the city" aka the financial district of London. It was around 6:30 at this point so it was fairly deserted. It reminded me a lot of Boston's financial district at that time.

And for the most random event of the trip, while walking through the city we ran into Tom's family friend standing outside of a bar! He lives in London and just so happened to be drinking his pint outside of the bar we walked by. SO weird. We stopped inside to have a drink and get some tips from him and his friend. 

After the run in we continued our walk in search of the beautiful St. Paul's Cathedral. From the outside the cathedral is just stunning and I wish we got to go inside!

Maja recommended going over to Madison Rooftop bar for cocktails and more stunning views. Unfortunately it was raining pretty hard (the most rain we had on our trip) by the time we got there so we checked out the view then split.

We then headed over to Fleet Street for dinner. We stopped in at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. The pub had an interesting gloomy charm to it (we ate in a dungeon-feeling basement) and had some pretty neat history. Apparently a pub has sat in that location since 1538 and a lot of famous literary figures were frequents of the bar -- like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens (who alluded to the pub in A Tale of Two Cities!).

I ordered a burger and Tom got a steak pie. Obviously he was eating more traditional London fare than I.

Here he is posing with the famous slideshow!

That's about it for our second day in London! Hopefully will have some more posts up soon :)