Look, it's Picadilly Circus...

As Jordan and I awoke on this fine English morning, we set out to explore the sights and sounds of the tourist London. Little did we know the distance that those sights had between them, which you would think that after our run from Victoria's Stations to Russell's Square, we would learn our lesson and just take the bus, but to no avail, we set our first steps on the brinks of London's streets.

First on the agenda, was a south-westernly walk to Buckingham Palace. This took us through Piccadilly Circus, where Jordan insisted on a picture akeen to one in Wayne's World II, some of you fans out there know what he is talking about, which I am not one of, but getting the exact picture was proving difficult as any trusting picture taker we came across seemed to not speak English. So after a few shots that were askew and completely missing the point, we just sat the camera on the ground and did the best we could.

After this we kept walking and came across St. James Park, just to the north of the Queen's House. St. James Park is very lush and beautiful. I recommend it to any of you needing a place for a picnic tomorrow. We then passed through the busy streets surrounding the palace and approached the gates of our destination.

Buckingham Palace is no doubt a palace. The British Flag flew full staff in a perfect breeze and Jordan and I pushed our faces through the tall black iron fence like third graders to get a look at the Changing of the Guard...this is where the metaphorical tires come to a screeching halt...the Guards were not wearing the tall fury hats or even the red coats!

We watched anxiously as the guards stood there, hoping at any moment they would throw off there dark uniforms and expose the uniform we had come to see! But to no avail it did not happen...we dillydallied on Queen Victoria's Memorial for a while, ever aware of the movement and costuming of the guards of Buckingham Palace...and unlike the American Revolution, the Red Coats did not come...

The rest of the day was a walk in the park...and by the river. We walked east through the Mall, took a few pictures of Westminster Abbey and stop for a nice picnic along the Thames in the shadow of Parliament Square in Queen Victoria's Garden. Which I need to look up why there is so much Queen Victoria stuff every where in London, one of you might have to fill me in when I get back.

After lunch, headed to The Globe, then to London Bridge (which is no more than a regular bridge), a quick stop in a market to buy some fresh strawberries and bananas, then we headed to and across The Tower Bridge.

Just past Tower Bridge is, the Tower of London which we are going to explore fully tomorrow, so more on that later!

After a long walk of 6 hours from our flat to the Tower of London it was time to make the 3 mile trek back to the flat to complete the April 4th circle.

Our legs hate us right now by the way. We actually stopped a few 100 yards short of our flat to rest our weary feet (and even took off our shoes) and frolic in the glades of Brunswick Square.

Just as a note, if you are wondering how we are eating here, Jordan and I have been shopping at local markets buying items and then making/cooking them in the flat...not only is that a good way to kind of see how it is to live in the city it SAVES A LOT OF MONEY!!

NEWSFLASH: THE DOLLAR SUCKS COMPARED TO THE POUND AND EURO

Well, we are off to the pub for just ONE pint. Happy Friday!

London Fundon (except for the phones)

So London is Fun, which I will get to in a paragraph or so...but first let me take you on the journey of man who is in a different Continent, who has to call his fiance because it is their 3 year anniversary.

After Jordan and I's Kings Cross experience we head back to the flat and weren't tired so we stayed up squaring things up with money and memories and such...I knowing that at 4am my time, Amanda would be getting out of rehearsal, Jordan and I set out to use the public phones.

Hear is the thing about public phone booths here in London...although they look like Clark Kent could change into Superman to relief the world of evils, it turns out that it is just a place where homeless people relief themselves of bladder evils...and probably some other activities as the booths are littered with naked lady fliers...but i don't want to think about that...anyway, sorry moms, Jordan and I tried and tried to dial extra country code numbers, to swipe a calling card, but nothing worked except the evilness that we knew was now on our hands...

After a bit longer, we gave up. And went to bed hoping the afternoon of April 3rd would bring us better luck than than the morning.

...Rise and Shine...it was 1pm before we woke up...ahhhhhhh!! But don't worry we still got a lot out of the day.

As we ate Corn Flakes and packet our lunch of ham and cheese, we set out to conquer the West End, but first a stop at the British Museum.

Now I don't mean this next comment to be a disrespect to the museum community, but what is it with the constant display of pottery! It is every where you turn! Anyway...we did see some cool stuff, Cleopatra's mummy...a sculpture of Zeus...we have pictures if you want to see. Ask us when we get back.

After the Museum, we had a picnic in Russel Square Gardens. Very nice place. And we saw a dog climb a tree. After the picnic, we headed to the West End, which was buzzing from end to end with people and theatres. Very cool and hopefully we will be blogging about a show we see on Saturday, more on that later, I hope.

We had not planned on going to the River Thames, but as we climbed around the Trafalgar Square and rode on the lions (they were statues moms and girlfriends), we just decided to do it.

The lights lit up on Parliament Square just as we crossed the River and we just took it all in for a while.

London is beautiful.

We walked along the River, took pictures, and then crossed the bridge to be a dozen feet or so from Big Ben. As we started to head home there were alot of cops out and they told us to say off this one street. Jordan acutely asked one of them, "Why, is the Queen driving by?" The cop said, "Ha, she is probably in bed already!" We laughed together at the Queen's expense, no offense of course.

As we contined our walk home amoung the history and skyline, it really hit me...

We are in London!

Harry and Ron Fly Into London

In a weird reality of fictional writing, it seems that the nerdy, glasses wearing human is never the main hero...that is until my good friend J.K. Rowlings wrote the little known Harry Potter series...more on that later but let us begin were we left off...

April 2nd, 2008: After going to bed a mere 5 hours earlier, Jordan and I rose from the comfort of our bunk beds to the stomach churning of moving around...well, maybe that was just me, but I will say that Guinness does not sound as good as it did on April 1st. With a quick shower that Jordan took and I did not, we then went and ate breakfast. With the previous nights spending haunting every corner of our money belts, Jordan and I selected Toast to eat. After putting that in the tummy, we walked to the bus stop to make our way to the Airport, but as Bus 16A approach and we hugged Anu a final time, the 16A wheezed right by us...which got me thinking about the peeing on the streets of Dublin the night before which of course I had forgotten...any way back to the whizzing bus...as it passed by, Jordan and I both thought we were going to miss our flight...you know what this is way too detailed and I am sure you don't care that much...so I will skip the drama and tell you we made it on the next bus and got to the airport with time to spare...

The flight was short and within an hour were in London. We took the train to the city and had an hour to make it to our destination...and eyeing the map we thought "Yeah, we can walk that, it is only about the length of my index finger." And hour later we had practically jogged 4 miles with our backpack and just about died while getting a speed through of the city. As we where let into the Jordan's family connections flat, we were very thankful to be given this place free of charge, it is Russell Square if you care to look on a map.

Jordan and I then made our way to the Market (that is the grocery store for you Americans :) and bought ourselves some supplies and let me tell you that their food is package a lot different, for example bags of chips (or crisps as my English brothers call them) come in several small bags placed in a bigger bag... anywho, after a brilliant ham and cheese sandwich, we decided to rest our weary heads and took a nap intended to be an hour long one...of course it was longer than that and we woke up just before 10pm...oops

Got to speed this up: We got up and then just started walking around London (mothers and girlfriends don't worry it was safe, I promise!) heading north of our flat and then we saw it...a place we had only read about...in seven different children's books...Kings Cross! (That is a train station for you Volemorts out there who hate Harry Potter!) And of course Jordan and I started doing our English accents...alright fine, we started as soon as we landed...as we wondered around Kings Cross looking for the boarding area we found it...the portal to another world: Platform 9 and 3/4!

As we took our many pictures, I being Harry Potter...aka the Hero...and Jordan being Ron...aka the side kick...Jordan and I walked away thinking this was clearly the best night we had had so far. And it was. Something we hadn't planned on happening did and that is what this trip is all about.

Peein' in the Streets of Dublin

Well it's been awhile since this happened, but we're going to try to go over what we have done the last couple of days. We just got to London yesterday at around 5, but we had one last day in Dublin that was pretty fun...I think it was Dublin.
We got up around 9:30 after a long nights rest. This was the day we got on European time and then subsequently got back on American time. Anu talked us in to finding a "traditional Irish breakfast"....so naturally we ended up going to a Jamaican cafe called Cafe Irie. our traditional Irish breakfast consisted of French Toast with too little syrup. Funny how that works.
To complete our alcoholic tour of Dublin, we trotted across River Liffey and found the Jameson Distillery. Scott was smart enough to bring his ISU card, so he presented it to the cashier and amazingly he knew that Des Moines was the capital of Iowa and it was known as the Hawkeye state. Well, Scott got the discount rate and I "forgot" my card, but I got the discount too.
The tour began with an informational video about the distillery followed by a call for volunteers to be guest whiskey tasters at the end. Anu was one of 2 girls to be picked and Scott and I, despite CLEARLY having our hands up first, were overlooked...don't think they wanted to give whiskey to people that eager.
The tour was good....we now have a lot of useless knowledge about a product that neither Scott nor I drink, but hey, we had a good time. We got a free sample of Jameson and cranberry at the end, where we watched Anu sample the whiskeys. Nobody chose Jameson as their favorite, much to the chagrin of our tour guide. After that was done, we were allowed to sample Anu's leftover whiskey, which was a nice compensation for not getting chosen in the first place.
We let the Jameson Distillery and quickly passed a man urinating in front of the free world with Scott yelling, "Jordan...Jordan, get a picture!" We found a really cool cathedral to go in, but they charged 6 euro to go in, so I just snuck in and took a picture.
From there we found an internet cafe in an attempt to meet up with Nath, who had just flown in from the US to live in Dublin for 3 years. We made plans to meet him at a bar called McSorley's at 7:30 that night. So I took a picture of the computer screen with his terribly non-descriptive directions and we went back to the hostile and took a 3 hour nap.
Woke up around 5:30 and set off to McSorley's. We walked through Trinity College and St. Stephen's Greens on our way and had a good time wandering. VERY beautiful area! We ended up having to kill time before Nath arrived so we checked out a few neighborhoods too.
Nath arrived with his friends Jason, Aidan, and Peter. We drank a few Guinnesses and watched ManU beat Roma....though Scott and I really had no idea what we were watching. Fun times though.
We had plans to meet up with Anu at a bar, so we quickly headed back to Temple Bar to meet up with her. We did stop off at another bar and we passed a pub called Whelan's, so that was cool to see. We were a little late in getting back, so I ran up to the hostel (which was our fail-safe meeting place with her), but couldn't find her. I ran back out and was surprised to see that Scott and everyone were gone. Thinking, "hey, it's April Fool's day", I waited around, but it turns out they just went to the pub because they had to pee.
I met up with them at Oliver St. John Gogarty's pub, a pub that had nightly Irish music and dancing. We ended up seeing 2 other people, Brian and Laura (from New Zealand), that we had met the other day, so everyone we had met in Dublin was all there. We drank and listened to music and did some Irish "dancing". Scott hurt his calves from this exercise, while I fooled Anu into thinking that I could actually dance. Scott was pretty darn drunk by the time we did this, but we managed to close down the pub and we were ready to find some food and head back to the hostel....but not without an interesting run-in with some Oompa Loompas.
On our way, Scott and I both REALLY had to pee, and we ended up just peeing on the side of a building. We were Peein' in the Streets of Dublin, which we both agreed would be an awesome name for a song. There was a burger joint near our hostel that we got The World's WORST Burger from. Nevertheless, we ate it and went to bed around 4 in the morning, which actually put us BACK on US time. Still struggling to get back on to it, but we'll manage.
Scott should be covering the next couple of days, so they will be posted right after this one.

Overall, we're having a blast and it's very fun being out of our comfort zone.

We're in London, baby!

Well we're here in London now. We pretty much walked across the entire city with our 30 lbs. backpacks, but we made it. Got some groceries to offset the massive amount of money we spent here so far......everything is SOOO expensive. After a quick nap, we found an internet cafe....but sadly it's closing in a minute.

But all is well and we'll put something up in the morning. Hope all is well with everyone!!!!

jordan

Good first day

Well we had a really good first day here in Dublin and we're excited to start our second day a little wiser about the area. We got into our hostel and met a nice Finnish girl named Anu who has been great at showing us the ropes of the hosteling world.
The first thing we did after we got settled into our hostel was to make our way to the Guinness Storehouse. We stopped and ate at a nice little place that served chick and stuffing sandwiches, which was a first for Scott and I but we really liked them.
On our way to Guinness, we saw this very "Irish" looking old man standing next to a horse and Anu thought, "Hey, that looks like a great picture. I think I'll take one." She proceeded then to take out her camera and snap a shot. Well apparently the old man didn't like that and help up a 2 euro coin to indicate that she should've paid him for this picture....no idea WHY we should've paid him, but apparently he thought he was worth it. So we though we'd move on our way and as we walked by him the man started to mumble to Anu, after she had already apologized for the unpaid for picture, that "It did him a lot of good for the apology now and that he will have her killed."
Masking our smiles and laughter, we proceeded to the Guinness Storehouse where we had a good laugh with the guy who gave us our tickets. Later on, it turns out that he told his manager and she sought us out and encouraged Anu to fill out a police report so she could get the guy to move on from his post on the street.
Crazy first day.
Scott and I actually made it until 10:00 before we went to bed, exhausted from the jetlag. We slept a good 12 hours and are now ready for Day 2.
Hope all is well with everybody back in the US, where things actually make sense to us.
Later!

We made it!!!

Just flew into Dublin this morning at 9:30 am and are hurting pretty bad because it's 3:30 am our time....oh well, we're surviving. The flight went well and we got our bags fine and everything. We did run into some hard times as we traded in $100 and got 56 euro:( We're probably going to be broke before we get to France.

Had an interesting time finding our hostel as it was mis-marked on the map in my Europe book (which I am no longer trusting). We're going to celebrate our landing by going to the Guiness Brewery here in a bit and enjoying a pint.

Hope all is well back home!