Although I haven’t traveled out of London, I have had two quite productive and exciting weekends the past two weeks. Two weeks ago, after Alison left, my friend and I ventured out to Richmond on Sunday. We were looking for a cute English countryside town that we could reach easily. However, no place like that exists so we settled for something pretty close, Richmond. Richmond is on the water, has some cute streets, some nice café’s and is home to the largest royal park, Richmond Park. We walked down by the water, stopped in a market, drank some tea. The first place we went for tea was not really a tea spot, but it had windows overlooking the water so it made for a great afternoon sit. However, later on in our exploration of Richmond, as we were walking towards the park, we saw some lights strung over an awning in the distance. We could tell it was a nice little hut but were not sure what it was beyond that. To much excitement, we saw it was a tiny café. Even though we had pretty much just finished drinking tea at another place, we could not pass up the opportunity to drink tea at this hidden gem of a café. We also thought it would be appropriate to have a scone and cream. We sat on the little patio, the café provided blankets and hot water packs since it was fairly chilly out.
In the end, there was not much to do in Richmond, but I am really glad to have gotten out of central London for a day and explored some new parts.
This past weekend I did stay in Central London. On Saturday my friends Amanda, Ben, Brennan, and Sam came in on CMU’s spring break. On Saturday we went on the London eye and hung out for a while. The goal was to keep everyone awake for as long as possible to try and get over the inevitable jet lag. Saturday night Rebecca Shapiro was in town so we had a Fernwood Cove Reunion. Jess, Rosie, Rebecca and some other counselors who I did not know all met up and we went to dinner and to a few pubs to hang out and talk about camp. I of course got sad that I would not be going back again this summer, but it was great to see some familiar faces that I had not seen in a while. On Sunday, another FCer joined the group. The world famous Gez took Rebecca, her boyfriend, Jess, my CMU friends and me on a tour through London. We started at Buckingham Palace for changing of the guard and got to hear about the ceremony from someone who had been in it quite a few times. We then moved on to see some other smaller guard changing ceremonies which turned into a full walking tour of London, including the obligatory stop for Cadbury (and Krispy Kreme). It was quite interesting to hear about London from a London resident (although Gez does not currently live in London) who is simply interested in his City as opposed to a tour guide or professor who is trying to cram a lot of information into a sprint through the city. Gez showed us and explained about the Royal Mail and the boxes, he talked about why certain guards were assigned certain jobs, and he pointed out some interesting historical locations. We ended the day with a big late lunch at Nando’s and then we all went our separate ways. It was quite a full, exciting, and fun day and I think my friends really enjoyed their authentic tour.
Tomorrow I leave for Stockholm for the weekend. I will write about that when I return. Stay tuned for my experience in the world’s largest IKEA.
-Drew
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