My Vacation in London: Part 2

Posted on by alvin

I will start by saying this upfront: Day 2 was my absolute favorite for the obvious reason of the Spice Girls show. BUT – that can wait until the next post.

The four of us got up late – no surprise there, really. Even if I had gotten the correct amount of hours of sleep, traveling is exhausting – and the three cousins I traveled with also love to sleep. The early risers weren’t on this vacation, that’s for sure.

Prior to arriving in London, Chrizia had been in Ireland with her husband Dave, and having done the whole tourist thing already, she was only going to stay with us for three nights before flying back to the States. So we decided to do the one thing she hadn’t really done first and that was go visit The Shard.

So we all got ready and didn’t really get started until the early afternoon. We hopped on the tube and walked to the Shard. The Shard is a relatively new tourist destination in London, and it’s hard to miss – it’s a huge, narrow, triangular building that you can go to and enjoy a view of all of London, comfortably inside. The shard quickly became a running gag on this trip because it would show up in the background of so many of our photos no matter where we were. It’s not cheap – tickets ranged from £30-55 – all for a quick glance. Is it worth the price tag? To me, not so much – but if you have the London Pass, absolutely worth it. We went in the afternoon, but at the time I wish we had went at night (more on that in another post).

Left to Right: My cousins, Kriselle, Chrizia, Jackie and Me in front of the Shard!
You can view London in its entirety from the top of the Shard.
Alternate View from the Shard
Walking along the River Thame, you have the best views of a large majority of London’s major landmarks, including the London Bridge, Millennium Bridge, the Tower Bridge, Parliament, Big Ben and more.

While walking around, we passed by a really long, tall monument, and I asked Chrizia what it was, and to my surprise she had no idea – so I walked up to it and started reading the details quickly since I knew we were on a time crunch. It turns out it was a monument to recognize the Great Fire of London, which evidently wiped out the vast majority of the city. It was a fact that was mentioned to us several times as we’d go through more tourist excursions – so yeah, pretty important.

The Great Fire of London was a significant part of London history – the fire essentially destroyed the vast majority of the city!

We walked over the London Bridge, as well as the Millennium Bridge – both important for different reasons, and both in close proximity to each other. We also were able to see Big Ben (which unfortunately was under construction) as well as Parliament, which was right next to it.

World famous London Bridge – a bit underwhelming, but its history is rich and as such is extremely significant. I’ll post more about the London Bridge soon.
London Bridge, with Parliament and Big Ben right behind.
Yet another bridge! The Millennium Bridge – as featured in Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows.
The famous London Eye – basically a terrifying Ferris Wheel.

After a crap ton of walking – we needed to eat something soon, we were hungry and we had a Spice Girls show to get to. The show was so awesome that it will get its own post. 🙂

Till the next entry… peace!