First day in London and Cat & Martyn

Sarah and I decided to try and save a nights worth of accommodation expense so we spent the day in Belfast and took a night bus back directly to the Dublin Airport. Our flight wasn't until 8:15 and the bus arrived at the airport at 1:15... Long night. We finally boarded our plane to London and before we even took off both Sarah and I were asleep, and didn't wake up until after we had landed. We had to take a bus from Luton into the city. After grabbing lunch, we started walking and the first place that was on our route was Buckingham Palace. The Palace doesn't have a garden, it has around 10 city blocks! The size of the property, as well as the building itself is very overwhelming. We walked from one end of it to the other and it took around 20 minutes. The only bad thing about the day was that it was raining decently hard. Because of this, only one of the famous guards was out at one time and we didn't get to see "Changing the Guard." 

After trying to beat the rain and not ruin our phones, we kept walking along Buckingham Palace Way. The street has well placed trees, whose branches hang over the street so you can't see up at all. Looking at the map I knew that Big Ben was coming up but we couldn't see anything. We finally made it out of the forest and this is the first thing we saw!

What a picturesque moment! Just to the right of what you are looking at is Westminster Abbey. Westminster Abbey was one of the things that I had to do. I really wanted to see Sir Isaac  Newton's tomb. By the time we arrived at Westminster it was already 1:30 and the abbey closed at 3:30 on that day. We decided to move on to other things and come back the next day. 

We started walking and eventually made our way down to Trafalgar Square. The square itself holds two large fountains and one tall poll with a statue on top.

Directly touching the square is the National Gallery. We found out that it was free to go see so we had to kill and grew in awe of all of the paintings. The size and details of the paintings really made me appreciate art, which I guess I usually don't. 

By the time we wandered through the National Gallery, we decided that we should probably start making our way out to Chelmsford where we stayed. We weren't overly warned, but the Underground Tube System in London is a monster! So many people ride them and you can literally go anywhere you need to go with the amount of different lines you can transfer to. By the end of our second day, Sarah and I felt like pros, even starting to memorize the names of the different lines we usually took.

 

We arrived in Chelmsford and waited just outside of the train station for our host to come pick us up. I know this sounds weird, but we just finished our first Couchsurfing experience. The idea is that people host travelers for free and then when they travel they can do the same thing. Basically a pay-it-forward idea. We were lucky enough to be hosted by a Cat (27) and Martyn (22). Nobody really knows what to expect when you are going to stay in a complete strangers house, but we all four just clicked from the first night! This is mostly the reason why I haven't blogged much in the last two days because we have been hanging out and talking about traveling and just enjoying ourselves so much. We would all get carried away talking about traveling or the differences in our two cultures and before we knew it, 1:00 am would be here and it would be time to go to bed! We could not have had better hosts! And we felt that way only after the first day!