Brit Break: London

It's been a while, but I've finally gotten around to writing about my quick trip to London. First of all, apologies for the lame and unvaried pictures. I'm a big gavone and forgot to charge my camera, so everything I saw after Big Ben went woefully undocumented. My bad.

We're just going to start this right off with the necessary touristy picture of an Underground sign. Iøm a big fan of the Underground signage, particularly on a stylistic level.

Behold, The Gherkin. I know this building has gotten mixed reviews, but from a purely structural standpoint, it's pretty amazing.

The Tower of London. Not as impressive as I expected.

I have to say, London is not my favorite place that I've been. Even after having been raised on Britcoms and assorted English movies, it was surprisingly hard to understand people. And apparently I was difficult to understand as well. Though it probably didn't help much that I had lost my voice a bit after the festivities of the Czech Trek... But anyway, communicating was surprisingly hard at times.

Tower Bridge.

And a skyline. Complete with a funky new building going up.

Bacon Street, a.k.a. the street I should live on.

The illustrious Liz Levenson, casually photobombing a shot of a picturesque London street.

For some reason I didn't believe that all the buses in London would be red doubledeckers. They are.

Big Ben, 3 minutes before my camera died.

In conclusion, two days was not nearly long enough to spend in London. It's a dauntingly large city, and I feel like I barely got to see anything. However, I did get off the beaten, touristy path a bit, which was nice. My hostel in the East End was right next door to the West Ham stadium, and on top of a delightful pub, which was featured in the movie Green Street Hooligans. So you know it was good.
Things I can reccommend highly include meat pies, Brick Lane, Picadilly Circus, booking a flight that doesn't leave at 8:00am, and not eating the fast food that's all over Barking Road. As good and as cheap as the shawarma there was, by the time I got home I couldn't even look at another chip without feeling a bit queasy.