Back to the beginning: London

It seems the trains from Barcelona to Madrid are pretty popular, and I couldn’t get a seat until 3:30 this afternoon… I have to wait 4 hours! Not enough time to go touristing, but long enough for it to be, well, a long time. I thought I would take this opportunity to recap the trip so far.

But first:

After two days in Madrid I am heading to Saville. I’m pretty excited about it. Where should I go next? My train pass is valid for unlimited countries… so I could easily take a night train to Lisbon (in Portugal) and spend a few days there. Or, if you’d prefer, I could take a night train to San Sebastion and make my way to Italy from there. Or I could just start making my way over to Italy via Barcelona, stopping in Nice on the way.

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Anyway. Back to the recap.

The flight to London really wasn’t that bad. My mom bought me this inflatable pillow thing, and I felt like a tool pulling it out and inflating it… but it seriously made a big difference in my sleep. Now, I wouldn’t use the words “Beauty Sleep” since I was pretty haggard in the morning. But I don’t want to imagine what I would have looked like sans pool-pillow.

I sat beside this super cool girl on the plane (who I have since lost the contact information of… grrrr) and I could tell she was just dying to talk to someone. I was happy to oblige. I flew into Gatwick and then had to take a 9 pound ($20ish) train to Victoria Station. I was feeling cheap so I decided to walk to the hostel, and got horribly lost. The thought process I used bewilders me: I have no idea why I thought I could walk somewhere without a map or an address. I ended up walking for 3 hours, then taking the underground anyway: a one-way trip was 4 pounds ($9ish)! Ouch!

The next day I was too cheap to spend the 5 pounds on an underground day pass, so I bought a 3.5 pound bus pas. Big mistake. Busses suck. Undergrounds are cool. There’s also this thing called an Oyster card that cuts your fare down to about one pound per direction. Super cheep. I’m super stupid for not buying one. Oh well. The second day sort of sucked. I was feeling pretty sick and jet lagged, and spent most of the day on busses and walking around. I did get to see Notting Hill, and in the evening I met some cool backpackers and started to sap as much information as I could from them. They told me about Free Walking Tours, and I was excited to try them out.

Lessons learned so far:
1) Buy a small book and write addresses in it. A lot of people seem to use FaceBook… so sign up and add people galore.
2) Don’t cheap out on a metro pass. It’s worth it, and if you cheap out, you will end up buying one anyway and spend more than you would had you not cheaped out. Ha ha. In Paris and Barcelona you can buy packs of 10 tickets. They are pretty reasonable, and worked out better than buying day passes.

I already talked about the free walking tour I did the next day, but they have them in major cities all over Europe and I heart them.

I made a video of my museum hopping, and finally uploaded it. Here we go!

And unfortunately, since all good things must come to an end… I had to leave London and make my way down to the Tomato festival you sent me to. So I took a night bus. It sucked. It seriously sucked. There were 3 busses and no order. It was some sort of national Holiday (so I had to pay the 3 pound holiday fee) in addition to my 34 pound fare. When I got there, there were people at the table bartering for tickers. Pandaemonium. I had to stand outside in a crowd waiting for the busses, and when they arrived it was a free-for-all to get seats. How hard would it be to install a line?

The bus headed to Dover, we got off, went through customs, boarded a giant ferry, traveled on said ferry then got back on the bus and drove to Paris. I thought it was weird that there were no places to sleep on board, but there were people sprawled everywhere so I joined in. I think I got 3 or 4 hours of sleep on the entire journey so it wasn’t too bad. And I got to use that inflatable pillow again, ha ha, kudos to me. I’m not excited about taking another bus from Amsterdam back to London. But that’s what happens when you are cheap but hate taking cheap flights.

I don’t want to inundate you with to much text, so I’ll end it here and set up my blog to automatically post the Paris recap in twelve hours.