London and Liverpool

On December 12th, I went to London. My trip got off to a rocky start but thankfully I had a friend from high school there who was able to help me sort out everything. I saw her for one day while in London since she was only there for the semester. We went to CamdenTown, an area of London, that has a bunch of largely open air markets. Part of it was once an area where horses were sold. So now, the stalls have been converted into markets. It's a really neat area of town and the prices aren't so ridiculous as you might come across in London.

On my 2nd day in London, I walked around the city, seeing many of the tourist destinations like the Tower of London, London Bridge, Shakespeare's Globe Theater and the Tate Modern. The Tate Modern was not as good as I had hoped it would be but they still had some interesting, if not disturbing, pieces. I went into a cathedral at one point and happened to catch the last bit of a Finnish Christmas concert which was pretty neat. Thankfully the weather was decent for most of my trip in London. Not too much rain and it was warmer than Leeds.


On my 3rd day I continued with the tourist destinations- going to Buckingham Palace, seeing some of Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, Ben Franklin House, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye, some of the Kensington Gardens, some of the Piccadilly and Oxford Circus, and a small bit of Soho. London was really nice and surprisingly, not as expensive as I had anticipated. The underground is comparable to BART in the Bay Area and it's very easy to navigate around the city. I never got lost because of the great underground system and signs all over the city.


I've spent the last week in Leeds, doing things around the town like going to the Royal Armouries and going to the Leeds version of a Christkindelmarkt. On Friday, the 19th, I went to Liverpool and went on the Magical Mystery Tour. The tour was set up really well and we saw a lot of sites including homes and birthplaces for the Beatles. The tour focused on their lives growing up and the formation of the band- stomping grounds, places they met, etc. We saw a lot of sites from popular songs like "Penny Lane", saw a cemetary that has a tombstone for Eleanor Rigby, and of course the Cavern Club.


I have a lot of pictures from the two trips and instead of the Flickr website I had been using- which has a limit as to how many pictures I can upload per month- I have started using a new website.

Here are London pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/slicedbreadbox/London?feat=directlink

Here are Liverpool pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/slicedbreadbox/Liverpool?feat=directlink

For now I'm having trouble find a direct link to the site so I will just continue to blog, giving links to the pictures everytime. For Christmas I'll be going to Ulverston, which is in the Lake District of England. I'll be spending the weekend with a retired English couple and all I know so far is that we'll be going to a Church of England service. I hope to see some nice English countryside- the town seems to be quaint and they have hens in the yard. Then, I'll be flying to Prague on the 28th to spend New Years Eve there. So, an early Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!

xx

Copenhagen

This past week I went to Copenhagen to visit a friend from high school who's studying abroad there for the semester. I went to see the Little Mermaid statue and Amalienborg, the Royal Palace, and to the Carlsberg Factory on the first day. The Carlsberg factory is nice but I actually though the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin had a better setup. Although at Carlsberg you get two drinks at the end versus the one in Dublin.

The next day I went to Christinia which is basically a hippy population that lives inside Copenhagen but they're exempt from law. They basically created their own society. So there's a lot of cannibis paraphernalia around. The buildings are graffittied but it's actually really pretty artwork. We didn't stay long though. I went to the National Museum in Copenhagen which was massive. They had a variety of exhibits so I spent a lot of time there. The displays were really well done and there's pictures on flickr.

On my last day we went to the canal and saw the Christmas market. I went to the Danish worker's museum to see some WWII/Nazi exhibits that I had been wanting to see. Unfortunately these exhibits were all in Danish and German so I didn't know exactly what I was looking at for most of it, although I was able to figure most things out.

Overall, Copenhagen is a really nice, but expensive city. They're also a bit more modern than I expected. Once you go outside Copenhagen though, it's all countryside and smaller towns. This coming weekend is London and then in a few more weeks, Prague.

xx