Day 9: London, England

Today is our last full day in London and Joel's enthusuatic to see as much as we can. We first stopped back at Westminster to see 10 Downing street, but you can only see from a distance- no Theresa May spotting this time. We walk over to the imperial war museum's Churchill War Rooms and toured the underground bunkers where he led the majority of World War 2 and learned a lot about his life I never knew. I was unsure if we were going to do this since it's pretty expensive, but Joel was really interested and it ended up being pretty good. It was bigger than I expected and it put an interesting perspective on the war. We crossed Westminster bridge dodging through the hoards of people to grab lunch at Pret a Manger under the London Eye. Love Pret. Cheap, healthy, quick, and delicious. We need these to have an option in between Starbucks and Panera. We walked with our coffee along the south bank with it's street performers, runners, tourists, and business people. We turned right to walk through the old Borough Market which is a bustling food market with lots of great produce, meats, cheeses, lunches, coffees, etc. After quickly perusing we walked to The Shard which is the tallest building in London and for modern architecture quite nice. You can go to the top for £30- no thanks. We then continue our walk through a maze of streets to the Bermondsey Market with antiques mainly consisting of silver and peruse, but most are closing up by 3. We turn to go back to the shard where the London Bridge underground is and take it all around the city to Camden Town Market on the NW part of London. This is an interesting place and I'm having a hard time deciding what word to use for this neighborhood- perhaps eclectic or maybe international. It's the strangest mixture of trendy, goth, punk, and artsy. There are perhaps hundreds of vendors of everything you can imagine. Most of it's kitchy and trash, with a few nice artsy vendors, but it's the food you want to go here for. Every kind of food from every kind of cuisine seems to represented from jamaican, ethiopian, british, gluten free, vegetarian, israeli, indian, american, cuban, venezuelan, chinese, italian, french, it's all here for very reasonable prices. I sample what's offered, but decide to wait for an actual dinner later. We return to our flat to rest and plan the night. We decide to return to knightsbridge to complete the circle around London by visiting Harrods. Ah, Harrods. What an extraordinary place. Harrods is the sort of place that will make your jaw drop in awe at it's opulence and also make you gag with the absolute ridiculousness of it all. I'm glad I saw it, but it was my least favorite place in all of London that we visited. It's such an attraction to tourists that it feels anything, but British. In fact much of London feels unbritish, but this section especially. We did get some traditional British grub at a restaurant called The Bunch of Grapes down the road then grabbed some chocolate tarts on the way back before jumping on the tube for the last time (exactly £0 left on my oyster card!). As Joel said leaving the tube: "Goodnight tube. Goodnight knightsbridge. Goodnight smelly people. Goodnight escalator." Joel and I are always discussing what it would be like to live in the place we're visiting- and it's really hard to say whether I could put up with the tourists and foreigners and smokers for long. It's a wonderfully varied city with so much to see and do and I feel we've accomplished what we set out to do. Next up... Paris.Read more