London Calling

This time I stayed a night. I signed up to go with PKP, and paid to tour the English Parliment. We weren't allowed to sit anywhere for the 75 min tour, and I was carrying my luggage with me the entire time too.



This is me and Kat inside the building. Pictures weren't allowed past this hall.



Afterwards, we were starving, so we went to Chinatown to look for boba.



Then, we wanted to go shopping, so we met up with 2 other PKP people who didn't go on the Parliment tour and headed to Covent Garden, where there are a lot of small shops. I didn't get anything though, I was looking for British brands, or stores I couldn't get in the US. I came across the United Nude store!



And look at these shoes I'm trying on!


Then, we met up with some more people and checked into the hotel we were staying at for the night. We had tickets to see Benny Benassi at the Ministry of Sound. So many PKP people went too.



Yes, it lasted until 7am! But we didn't stay that late.



I'm going back on August 20th to see Afrojack!

The next morning we went to the British Museum.



Scores of tourists everywhere we go, so there are always random people in these pictures. This is what it looked like inside, which is completely different from the outside.



There was the Rosetta stone! They have a vast Egypt collection--with mummies! I got really excited to see them.



It was already around 2pm when we finished at the museum, so we decided to go get a snack. We figured out how to use the buses and went on a double decker bus! There was a really cute coffee, tea, and pastry shop in Soho.



I love the Soho area, it reminds me of Downtown NYC--lots of independent restaurants, cafes, and shops.



More walking let us stumble upon the London Chinatown (once again for me), but this time, I actually saw the gates:



Even after eating some cakes, we bought some dim sum for takeaway here and decided to just relax and picnic at Hyde Park.



That is the gate to Hyde Park. It was an abnormally sunny day in London, everyone had the same idea as us. There were so many people here playing football, frisbee, drinking wine, and sleeping on the grass.





See what I mean? The people watching was great, and there was a street musician playing the entire time we were there.



This is Maddy and me sitting on the grass, eating our dim sum.

When it was starting to get cold around 7-8pm, we decided to go back to Chinatown and eat dinner. There is just too much British food in Cambridge. I didn't get any pictures during dinner, but we had Peking duck. But walking to Chinatown from Hyde Park took us to a very posh area of London.



I HAD to. The others did not understand why I needed to take a picture of a storefront.