Okay, okay, I know I’ve been very slack and have let the blog fall way behind. Sorry! I’m going to try really hard to get it back up to date and keep it that way. Alrighty, here we go…

So after the three most exciting, crazy, adventurous, amazing months of my life, I boarded a plane from Rio de Janeiro to London in order to start the next instalment of my overseas experience.

The plan: get a job, find somewhere to live and enjoy all that England has to offer.

First off though I checked into a hostel in Piccadilly Circus so I could get to know the city that I’ll be calling home for the foreseeable future. After three months of staying in pretty damn good hostels all around South America I had such high hopes for Piccadilly Backpackers. Surely London hostels would be of the highest quality considering it is the home of some of the grandest buildings in the world.

Boy, was I bitterly disappointed! Piccadilly Backpackers was the worst hostel I had ever stayed in!

Horrible dorms, horrible beds, horrible staff and the most hideously horrible bathrooms I’ve encountered. They gave the hole in the ground toilets on the Inca Trail a run for their money in terms of disgustingness! I’m not even sure if disgustingness is a word, but it should be!

Anyway, let’s just say I didn’t stick around for too long, after a couple of days I decided to try another hostel out near Notting Hill called Hyde Park Hostel. Sounds nice doesn’t it? Wrong again! It was even worse! The rickety old stairs I had to cart my backpack up for three floors felt like my foot would go through them at any step.

Anyway, enough of the bitching and moaning. Apart from the below standard hostels, London is absolutely amazing!

And you won’t believe it but it was actually sunny when I arrived. I jumped on the tube which is so easy to navigate (although I’ve been told I will learn to hate the tube and everyone on it once I start the peak hour commute to work!) and when I jumped out a Piccadilly Circus it was such a relief to finally be able to ask someone for directions in English!

After checking in to the previously mentioned hell-hole, I got out and explored this amazing city. I did a walking tour that visited some of the most famous sites including Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey. It wasn’t long before I experienced the dreaded London drizzle but it certainly wasn’t enough to dampen my enthusiasm for seeing some of these amazing buildings and sites that I have heard so much about and have always wanted to see with my own eyes. It’s just incredible hearing the history of the different places and the beauty of the architecture is just stunning. I just can’t believe how old some of the places are here, it’s so different to back home in Australia.

Wellington Arch – Hyde Park Corner

Serpentine Lake – Hyde Park

Buckingham Palace Gates

Buckingham Palace

Changing of the Guard – Buckingham Palace

Changing of the Guard – Buckingham Palace

Guard outside St James’s Palace

National Gallery – Trafalgar Square

Nelson’s Column – Trafalgar Square

Big Ben – Houses of Parliament

Big Ben

Houses of Parliament 

London Eye across The Thames

Westminster Abbey

St Paul’s Cathedral

I also wandered around Kensington Gardens and saw Kensington Palace, explored the Museum of Natural History (really cool), visited Notting Hill and checked out the city nightlife.

Kensington Gardens on a gorgeous autumn day

Kensington Gardens

Kensington Palace Gardens

Royal Albert Hall

Central Hall at the Natural History Museum

Portobello Road – Notting Hill

After about a week of being in London I realised I had been procrastinating on my original plan of finding a job and a house so I decided perhaps I hadn’t quite finished with travelling. It was about that time that I got two amazing offers from some friends. First, my friend Matika who I met in Argentina said that her and a friend were going to France for the day because they had signed up for some amazing deal to get the ferry from Dover over to Calais. “Would you like to come, we’re going on Thursday?” Mitika says to me on Tuesday, “Um, yeah I would!” (We actually ended up going to Bruges in Belgium in the end, but more on that later).

The next day I meet up with my friend Rebecca who I’ve known since uni, “I’m flying back to Budapest on Friday and travelling south through Eastern Europe, would you like to come?” says Rebecca, “Um, yeah I would!

So that was that, a week and a half after arriving in London I was off again, but I’d be back again soon, well eventually…