June 29

The day started late as we didn’t wake up until noon. I guess we had too much fun last night; despite our best interests for today. At noon, it was already scorching hot outside. We had to get into a cramped bus that was like an oven and ride for about an hour. It got to the point where we actually got off the bus halfway through our trip to wait for the next bus just to get some fresh. We were drenched in sweat already before we even arrived in downtown London. We read in the newspaper later that day that London was experiencing an extreme heat wave and the Mayor actually called a state of emergency and had a lot of things shut down. Great timing on our part. At least we had a shower at our disposal when we got back.

While we were downtown, we had to check out all the main tourist attractions. These seem to be the least enjoyable parts of our experiences in London and Paris, but it’s something that we must do of course. It’s not that we weren’t impressed by Big Ben, Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, and the London Eye, but it seems like we are impressed only for about five seconds for each attraction and then it’s on to the next. Two hours of steaming hot bus travel doesn’t really make it seem worth it at the moment, although now I can definitely say it was worth it.

There are a few cultural things that we have been able to pick up on in our four days here. One is that they love their McDonald’s and Pizza Hut restaurants. Our bus actually passed eight Mickey D’s on the way into town. They also have an extreme amount of fast food chicken restaurants and grocery stores in the area of our hostel. I’m not sure if the rest of the outskirt neighborhoods are the same way, but there are literally seven or eight restaurants similar to KFC within walking distance of our hostel. The funny thing is that they are all extremely cheap and they all have their “unbeatable deals” posted all over their storefronts. They also all have a chicken as their symbol/mascot which seem to all be drawn by the same artist. It is a wonder how they all can stay in business. We have eaten eight “two chicken strip sandwich w/fries” in two days together. They are good and cheap; right up our alley.

Another thing we now realize about London (and probably the UK in general) is that they love Michael Jackson. I’m sure it is only this evident because of his death, but we hear his music and see his fans wearing his t-shirts everywhere. Yesterday, some random guy walked up to us and shouted “Don’t stop ‘til you get enough!” This of course is a line from a MJ song. It was kind of funny now in hindsight (with respect to the King of Pop of course) when we learned about his death. Since we were in Paris when it happened, we saw his photos littered all over the newspapers. However, since we can’t read French, we had no idea why he was receiving so much attention until we got to London. It was just kind of a weird way to learn about something that is such a big news story.

I finally got the computer to charge, but the internet here is pretty shotty. I uploaded all our latest pictures, but there is quite a few videos that I would like to post that just aren’t working right now. Hopefully there will be a place in Manchester tomorrow or Dublin the following day that will work better. Right now I am just catching up on all the updates for the past couple days. Ben is hanging out in his room with all his roommates. They are pretty interesting people as I may have mentioned previously. Ben has definitely taken a liking to them and they are able to put up with him so it’s a match made in heaven. Well I need to go to bed now so I can make sure to be up in time to make that miserable bus trip one more time.