I was letting my mind wander to all the glorious places I still want to visit and then I saw some pictures of London. It got me thinking; what would be a better place to spend Christmas? Now, I have some family obligations so actually celebrating the holidays abroad would be a no-go, but I’d love to spend a few days in december there, to get in the holiday spirit! All I have got to do now is convince the Boyfriend to go!

I’ve been to London once before, it was actually the first trip Boyfriend and I took together. We only spent one night there in a crappy hostel, but we did have a lovely time in the city where we saw all the highlights, went to a play and stood in line for over an hour to take a picture with a wall…

iT was four years ago, when we went on this trip and had a marvelous time in the city. It’s funny to see how far we’ve come, because we were really on a budget on this trip and it showed. We took a bus and a boat to get there overnight (which was horrible because we had to get out of the bus, onto the boat in the middle of the night and we were already sleeping) and we had the smallest hotel room I have ever seen. The hostel itself, Restup London, was fine, we just booked a tinytiny room with accidental bunkbeds…

Anyway, our short first day here was lovely. We kept the highlights for our second day and decided to just explore the city a bit. We walked through Hyde Park, did some window shopping and went to the store of the Sherlock Holmes museum. We didn’t go in because we hadn’t read the books yet, plus we were on a budget. But I’m planning on going in the next time we visit!

After walking around and windowshopping a bit, we had lunch at Pret a Manger and then took the underground to King’s Cross station. This was actually the one thing I really wanted to do: To visit Hogwarts! Unfortunately, my camera didn’t work there so I only have a picture of me passing through. But I’ll tell you, Hogwarts was amazing 😉

After King’s Cross we went back to the hotel to rest a bit, and it was getting dark when we went out for an amazing evening. We had fish and chips for dinner and then set out to The Globe.

It was on this trip that we started our little tradition of going to see a play on vacations. We had booked a show in Shakespeare’s theatre the Globe called The Changeling. Not one of Shakespeare’s plays, but it was really amazing to actually see a tragedy in his theatre. The show was in Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and the theatre itself was absolutely gorgeous. We had booked tickets in the Yard, which meant we didn’t have seats. That was okay, though my feet hurt a bit. But luckily, after the intermission, the people that had seats in front of us didn’t come back so we could take theirs. It was a lovely play and a start of a great tradition.