Thursday was our first full day in London and we were pretty excited to continue our walks. Breakfast is from 7:30 to 8:30 so I was up around 8:30 eating and then took a quick shower. I left with a couple girls to begin our second walk soon after that. The second walk focused around The London Wall. We followed the route along the wall—one of the highlights was Spitalfield Market, which looks like it will be a fun outdoor market to go back to and do some shopping. Christ’s Church was very beautiful. Last, at the Guild and Ward Church of St. Botolph-without-Aldersgate had a courtyard on the side with a memorial containing plaques that tell of heroic deaths. It was really cool to read those. For example, one of them said, “Soloman Galaman, Aged 11, Died of injuries Sept 6, 1901 after saving his little brother from being run over in Commercial Street. ‘Mother, I saved him but I could not save myself.’”
We continued onto the third walk after that which focused on the city. We saw a few churches and mostly went by a few of the major buildings in the city, like The Royal Exchange. It started raining sometime during our walks, and although that made it cold, it was mainly because it was really windy. It’s hard to talk a lot about the things we’ve seen because the walks are really whirlwind tours of a lot of things that we’ll get to go back to see later. Although some of the walks are so long, they are really useful for getting oriented in the city and getting a feel for where I am and where I’ll be going over the next few months.
Walk two was really long, so we only got those two done on Thursday. We ate lunch while we were out at a deli—we get breakfast and dinner at the London Centre Monday through Friday. Saturday we get breakfast and Sunday, dinner. There are usually leftovers and toast that we can have during the day, however. After we had dinner on Thursday I went with a group of people to Harrods. Harrods is a gigantic department store. It’s funny, some of the rooms even have names and themes, e.g. The Egyptian Room. They had tons of designers and a huge area with tons of different types of chocolate. A lot of people got a chocolate—or rather, two, since that’s the minimum amount you can buy.
We got back and hung out for a little while before going to bed, realizing the long day we had ahead of us, with five more walks to finish by Saturday.
On Friday we knew it would rain all day and so opted to leave right after eating—none of the girls did their hair or anything. We also wanted to get started early so we could get three walks done.
During the fourth walk we got to see some of the Thames River, and cross a few of the bridges: the London Bridge, Millennial Bridge and the Tower Bridge. We walked by Hay’s Galeria, the Globe Theatre and the Tate Modern. It’s really exciting going by these galleries and museums, knowing that soon we’ll be able to go back and actually visit them. By this time we were pretty wet and cold, but it wasn’t too bad. It was okay since I had a waterproof jacket on and layers and stuff, and we knew we had a few more to finish.
The fifth and sixth walk we pretty much powered through since by this time we figured out that we needed to quickly go through the walks, and we’d be able to go back to all the places later. However, we did get to see some cool touristy sights. The London Eye is pretty huge and I really want to ride on it to see the great view of London. Big Ben is really cool and pretty—we saw it during the day but later at night too, which was beautiful. A few others were Westminster Abbey and the London Aquarium. Although it was so cool and really helped me get oriented in London, it was a lot to do and since it was raining and such, it was really nice to be finished with our first six walks.
Friday night we were pretty worn out, and we knew we still had a couple more walks, so after dinner I played some card games with a bunch of kids. It was cool because some of the people playing weren’t people I had gotten to know well yet. Dinner was really good last night, the best so far. We had soft tacos, which we made into taco salad for lunch Saturday. Oh and we had a meeting sometime after dinner where we got ward assignments and went over some other logistical things. The meetings was like two hours long and it got so boring that I wanted to poke my eyes out. Instead of doing that though, I played with some of the kids that were sitting near me, spinning Professor Ostraff’s daughter Hannah on a chair. We haven’t quite figured out how long it will take us to get to church, but it’s pretty far, and we have to take the tube, then a tram.
Saturday we took a little more time in the morning since we just had two walks to finish, and didn’t have to be back for group dinner—we’re on our own for Saturday lunch and dinner. Today was also a really nice day, kind of cold, but it wasn’t raining during the day so we were a lot less inclined to rush. The seventh walk was a tour of Theatreland. It was really exciting! We saw so many signs and posters for so many plays that I’m really excited to see while I’m here. I can’t wait! There isn’t anything particularly notable besides that, except we also saw the London Chinatown.
Our last walk was pretty short and we went after coming back to the London Centre for lunch so it was getting dark. The city is really pretty at night, especially some of the administrative and royal buildings, which is what most of our walk consisted of. We saw Buckingham Palace—I can’t wait to go back to see the changing of the guards.
It was really nice to be finished with our first eight walks since we had to cram them in the first week. It was a lot to do, and sometimes I wanted to slow down and stuff, but it was designed to get us oriented, which it did. I feel much more confident in the city and I already feel okay navigating on the tube.
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