Ciao!
Last weekend was the opening weekend for Harry Potter. It has been my life dream to see a Harry Potter movie in London, its native land. What perfect time to go than for the final movie. Well part 1 for the final movie. So weeks before I spent planning out to meet my friend Emily and two of her friends in London. They were coming up from the Lusanne program. The weekend of the 18th came and knowing that Emily already had my movie ticket I began my solo journey to London.
After taking my Humanities reading test, I rushed to the train station to catch a train to milan, where I would be flying out of. It was a pleasant train ride. Once I got to Milan, however, I couldn't quite figure out how to get to the airport which was an hour away. I knew there was a bus that shuttled people there but the Milan train station was huge! I had to ask around a couple of times to finally figure out where to go. After I bought my ticket, I successfully boarded the bus that would take me to Milan Malpensa airport. I was going to London!
I arrived to the airport in plenty of time. I swooshed through security and realized that I had two hours to kill. Those two hours were spent browsing the duty free shop that took up most of the floor where I was waiting. I saw many interesting things like kinder eggs that had seven surprise toys inside instead of one. It was 15 euro. I also saw all the Harry Potter books, in Italian. I really wanted to buy them but I had no way of getting them home.
Finally my gate was listed, I boarded my plane, and we set off for London! Once I got there it was around 10:30 pm. I had to take another shuttle to the center of London inorder to get to my hostel. This shuttle also took an hour. When I arrived to central London it was around 11:45. The bus dropped me off at the Marble arch stop which I knew was in the vicinity of my hostel. I just didn't know exactly where. I figured I would just take a night bus over towards the areas where my hostel was. I went up to the machine to buy my ticket and that is when I realized I had no way of buying anything because I didn't have any pound currency. I was just thinking, "great, what ATM will be open at midnight?"
I traveled around the corner to a hotel and went inside to ask where an ATM was. She walked me around the corner and showed me where the closest ATM was, across the street. After getting money, I walked by to the bus station and for the life of me couldn't figure out which bus to take. I finally decided to suck it up and get a taxi because I wanted to make sure I got to my hostel sometime during that night. It was about 12:30 when I waved down a taxi and 12:50 when I pulled up to the Hostel.
I walk in the hostel just wanting to go to sleep and the women at the front desk tells me that I am not on my friends reservation list. What?? She tells me which room Emily is in so I could go talk to her. I find her and through some miss communication I was not put on her reservation list. I went downstairs to see if they still had any free beds. The hostel was completely booked. But they didn't have an emergency bed that I could stay in just for that night. So I immediately booked that bed and went straight to the computer room to try and book another hostel for the next two nights.
After an hour, I still had no luck. It was now 2 in the morning and for the next two nights, I was homeless. Every hostel was booked so I gave up on hostels in pursuit of a cheap hotel. The cheapest hotel I found was a Holiday Inn. I booked it. I wasn't quite sure where it was but I was hoping it was close.
I finally went to bed at 3:30 am and the next morning, or the same morning, I woke up at 7 to meet Emily and her two friends. I was a bit thrown off by everything and was just hoping that the weekend would get better. I was thinking it would since I was going to see Harry Potter. As it turns out, the weekend got loads better. When I went downstairs to meet Emily, Casey and Kristina, we were all in good spirits. It was really nice seeing a familiar face outside of the Florence program.
We set off to Starbucks, which was wonderful, bought our oyster cards for the tube and headed for the Marble Arch station, a place that I knew well. ; ) We had three hours before our movie started so we spent the time roaming around that area and shopping. I ended up finding a really cool throw of the British Flag. For luch we had subway which was so homey feeling. Finally we headed to the theater. We were all giddy and could not wait for the show.
The show was amazing. All four of us were crying through the whole movie. We were so pleased with it, and we couldn't believe that there was going to be only one more premier of Harry Potter. It is weird seeing this franchise end because my generation grew up with these characters.
After the movie, Emily, Casey and Kristina all took me to find my hotel. It was coincidentally only a fifteen minute walk from their hostel. God thing?? After finding my hotel, we decided to exlore the city. We took the tube to Leicester Station. There we decided to go see a theater show. We went and saw Chicago. It was really awesome to see. I just love theater shows, and I had never seen Chicago before.
The next day Emily and the rest of the group met me at my hotel and we took the tube to Westminister, where Parliament and Westminister Abbey is. We roamed around that area for a bit. We saw Big Ben and Westminister Abbey which the front courtyard was decoration with crosses and poppies for veterans month. We then walked across the bridge to find the Globe theater because Kristina is a litirature major and wanted to see it. I was not opposed in the least bit and so we headed off to the Globe. We ended up coming to a really neat part of town. The Globe was really cool to see and after we saw the Globe we had lunch at a pub. You have to have at least one pub experience while you are in London. It was really cool just being in the pub atmosphere eating fish and chips.
After that we kept walking and came acrosse that bridge which was in the sixth Harry Potter film. We all started geeking out when we recognized the bridge. We may like Harry Potter a little too much haha : ). We then took the tube to Picadilly and looked around there and browsed through a huge souvenier shop. Walking around Picadilly, we branched off and found ourselves in Leicester again. We decided to go to a cupcake shop we saw the night before when we went to see Chicago. On the way to the cupcake shop we stop at a movie store that had almost every memorabilia from every movie you could think of. I got a Gryffindor scarf while I was there.
While we were eating cupcakes, we were all wondering what we were going to do that night. We sat and looked at each other knowing we were all thinking of the same thing. Go see Harry Potter, again. So we rushed over to the nearest theater we could find and they had a couple seats still available for that last showing of the night. We bought the tickets and we also got a student discound which knocked off 8 pounds. That was nice. We then had dinner across the street at Byron's: Proper Burgers. Then at 9:30 we walked back over to see the show. It was so awesome seeing it again. This weekend had turned out to be almost perfect.
It was 11:40 when we left the theater and we decided to walk back because the tube closed in twenty minutes. The walk took us about 30 minutes so I didn't get back to my hotel until quarter past midnight. It was a very pleasant walk though. We walked through a quaint part of town. When Emily, Casey and Kristina dropped me off at my hotel, I had to say my goodbyes there because I had to leave at 4 in the morning to catch my bus back to the airport. The whole night I was so nervous that I was going to miss my bus back to the airport that I literally got not even one hour of sleep. I was really nervous about having to walk around London at 4 in the morning. But God got me to the bus stop safely. I almost had no trouble finding it. I was able to make my flight and my train back to Firenze. All in all it was a great weekend and I learned a lot about traveling.
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