London!

So, what can I say about London? I guess there are two main points.

1. London is beautiful.

2. London is expensive.

Both are facts, and the first fact makes the second fact a lot easier to live with. For example, Jeff and I walked for two hours yesterday to get to the city center. Of course, we stopped along the way to look at things, and saw Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the Parlament Buildings, and various parts of inner London such as Trafalger Square, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. So the £10 we saved by shunning public transportation was not saved in vain, for we saw a lot more than we would have if we had traveled on the Underground. (My opinion, anyway.)

Our hostel here is better than the one in Ireland. The kitchen here is smaller, but that's no big deal since here, everything works. (Only two out of the total of 15 stovetops could boil water in the Ireland hostel kitchen.) We're staying at the Queen Astor Hostel in Bayswater, a place my guidebook describes as a 'virtual tourist ghetto'. But it's right next to Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, which is a nice consolation. And within a minute's walk, we can reach McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks!! (Sad that this is exciting to me...)

Tonight we will go back to a pub that we discovered yesterday in Soho called the Red Lion. Hopefully we'll do a little more discovering of London. Tomorrow will be the day for seeing the inside of Westminster Abbey, London Tower, and visiting the Tower Bridge. Wednesday will hopefully include a swing over to Camden Town before we have to leave to catch our flight back to Germany.

Time to go and spend some more quid...