During our five-month-long trip planning, I was nervous about London. Kathleen had requested that we separate it from the rest of England, and as the rest of the itinerary fell into place, she ended up asking if we could save London for last. (Until she realized our return flight was through JFK, then it turned into a whole “Why don’t we do 36 hours in New York City?” hypothetical which sent me into a tailspin of stress, but that’s for the next post.)

She asked for “four or five days or whatever” (pretty sure that’s verbatim) and we landed on four whole days in the city (with a late afternoon arrival flight and a very early morning departing flight).

It stormed on our way out of Ireland, and overall it was chaotic and confusing at London Stansted. That’s one of the various downsides to the cheap airfare with Ryanair: you don’t get to fly into Heathrow, which is a pretty well-oiled machine compared to Stansted. (Also the terrifying landings. If you have a phobia of flying, don’t fly Ryanair, I don’t think we had a single smooth landing on that airline. You get what you pay for, and we arrived in one piece, so if you’re a relatively relaxed flier like me, it’s totally worth it.)

It took us a while to clear customs (what’s up with that, England, we used to be one of you!) and then an obscenely long time to figure out how to get from the airport to the hotel, and we might’ve overpaid by taking a shuttle bus to Walthamstow Station, but it was direct, so again, worth it in the stress it saved. After waiting nearly an hour for the bus, then spending two hours on said bus due to normal rush hour traffic and such, we got to the train station already pretty tired.

That’s where we got our Oyster Cards, which were very confusing at first until it finally clicked. The poor teller explained it three times but the gist is that you’re never charged over a certain amount in a single day, between buses and the Underground. At the time the amount was £7.50 based on the zones we’d be traveling in, and there were exceptions, but all around, it was definitely the most economical mode of transportation of our entire trip.

We got to our hotel in Leyton, it was another Ibis and definitely the weirdest one we’d experienced. As soon as we checked in, they informed us that we’d be staying… across the street. I worked hard not to freak out and I’m glad I didn’t, because it ended up being just fine. You needed a key card to enter the other building, and we were in no more danger than if we’d stayed in a normal hotel, it was just quirky. And we had to cross a pretty busy street every morning for breakfast. As you do.

The room itself was pretty cool.

The wallpaper is books, and that’s an owl cage hanging in the corner above my bed.

YEAH. IT WAS A HARRY POTTER-THEMED ROOM. And judging by the doors of the other rooms, it was the only room like this in the building! (The one next door looked like it was Underground themed.) We just happened to luck out and land the HP room completely by chance!

So we were tired, hungry, cranky, exhausted, etc, and Kathleen reminded me that for almost a month, I had promised her that we would eat Indian food in London. She’d hopped onto the wifi and discovered that a very highly-rated Indian place was literally around the corner from us, and she insisted we needed to eat there for dinner.

I know I have hammered this home all through these posts, to the point that I probably sound bratty, but I’m a shamefully picky eater. And I was cranky that night. So I agreed to accompany them to the restaurant, but warned them that I probably wouldn’t like the food and that I would definitely be stopping by KFC on the way back. It was undeniably my ugliest American moment.

Well I’m here to eat crow… Or to be literal, I’m here to eat all the Indian food. First of all, the staff was so nice. I mean, they knew we were tourists, they knew we were new to Indian food, and they knew we were a little bit gunshy about all of it. (Kathleen isn’t picky but she’s not a fan of spicy so we were both peppering the waiter with questions.) In the end, I went the safe route and ordered the Tandoori chicken wings, while the other two ordered tikka masala and butter chicken. (I think the tikka masala had lamb instead of chicken.) We also got naan and fried rice because we are genetically incapable of resisting bread and rice.

I fully deserve the half-blinky dumb photo for being such a PITA about dinner that night. The chicken wings were amazing but I’d been subsisting on wings for weeks and I was falling over myself after sampling their dishes. Needless to say, we never got KFC in London. (We did, however, get a Dominoes pizza, you can’t beat those prices.)

The restaurant was called Shish Mahal, by the way, and that won’t be the last you hear about it in this post.

So the next day, we embarked on our most unapologetically touristy outing of the entire trip: the Hop On/Hop Off bus tour of London. They were running a special where you could pay for 24 hours but get 48, and since we were buying in the afternoon on a Friday, we could technically use the tickets for most of Sunday as well.

I highly recommend this for London. For me, I was aware of tons of London landmarks but I was completely unaware of where these landmarks were in relation to each other. Who knew Big Ben was a straight shot from Trafalgar Square? How come I never knew that Greenwich was so far away from other landmarks? Was I really not aware that the City of London was actually only one square mile?

We started at Trafalgar Square, which has featured prominently enough in some of my favorite TV shows that I was nerding out pretty early in the day.

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Since the Hop On/Hop Off tourist center is right by Trafalgar Square, it kinda became our central point for the next few days.

We jumped onto the first bus we saw and happened to land an amazingly informative, funny, and concise tour guide, so we rode most of the circuit. It really helped me get my bearings of the city and it helped us note the areas we would want to explore on the following days, whether we could ride the bus or not.

This is along Pall Mall. You’re gonna see a lot of pictures of building facades because I love London.

I just love the weathered stone and the quoined corner on this building. Also I want to buy a replica of one of these signs to hang up in my house (maybe Pall Mall or Baker Street, I don’t know).

Another shot of Pall Mall. Just let me live on this street.

Or let me live here, in my crooked picture of St. James’s Palace. Look at that brick. Just look at it.

We look so happy and relaxed. That’s the big advantage to doing these bus tours — sitting back and soaking it in.

I want to cry at how pretty this corner is. This used to be a bank building but now it’s the Beretta Gallery, as in the gun makers. The intersection is St. James Street and Jermyn Street, which is almost exclusively made up of shops geared to “gentlemen,” as in where Archer would buy shirts, shoes, and any other luxury items except for bespoke suits because he’d get those on Savile Row, you heathen.

Albemarle House on the corner of Piccadilly and Albemarle Street. Look at that roof line. Look at those windows.

The War Memorial at the Wellington Arch (the latter of which I couldn’t get a good picture).

A close-up of Victoria Station, which was one we passed through frequently during our short stay.

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Our first glimpse of Westminster Abbey!

A view down the Lambeth Bridge, just before we turned north toward…

Westminster Palace (which looks… strange… I assumed it was just constantly exploding, judging by blockbuster movies…) which contains the House of Commons and the Houses of Parliament.

And of course, the Clock Tower! (Because Big Ben is the bell, duh.) Just one of the 30 or so unnecessary pictures I got of this landmark. Can you sense how excited I was? It’s nothing compared to how excited I was for this:

Such an iconic view from Westminster Bridge. So pretty.

And our first close-up view of the London Eye!

I hadn’t known about the dragons at the boundaries of the City of London. This is the Temple Bar Memorial, which stands at the boundary between the City of London and the City of Westminster.

The Shipwrights Arms, an 1800’s pub on Tooley St that is just beautiful, isn’t it?

We hopped off the bus (reluctantly) at the Tower of London because we were starving, and we quickly decided on Pizza Express. We’d seen it all over England and these were our final days, we were more open to chains and non-local fare. It was tasty and inexpensive (and now I want pizza).

After lunch, we wandered to the docks (okay, we got lost and took the scenic route but we found it eventually) to take advantage of the boat tour of the Thames that was included in our tour package.

Sure, it felt a little bit like getting herded, and I had plenty of pictures of strangers taking pictures, but it was still amazing. It allllmost made up for missing the canal tours of Bruges. Almost.

The Tower of London, as viewed from the river. (It reads: Entry to the Traitors Gate.)

And the Tower Bridge.

Our first view of the Shard from the river! The tour guides talked at length about Londoners’ split opinions on these skyscrapers (the other divisive one is known as “the Gherkin”) popping up among the historic buildings. I liked the aesthetic, personally, because it portrays London as exactly what it is: a constantly evolving and innovative city.

You just started singing the song, right?

And the Millennium Bridge, which we would walk across in a couple of days.

Nearing the end of our tour.

But not before snapping an amazing photo of the London Eye.

We disembarked at the Westminster Pier, which gave us the opportunity to explore around the area on foot. Time for some hilarious Friends references!

In front of Westminster Abbey: “Man, you are Westminster Crabby!”

After we had our fill of wandering the area, we got back on a bus headed for Trafalgar Square once more.

It was a slightly different route so we ended up retracing a bit of our previous tour, which meant more opportunities for pictures!

Fleet Street!

The Tipperary, an Irish Pub on Fleet Street, which originated in the 1600’s.

This is along Parliament Street. We passed Downing Street, but obviously, we couldn’t go down it to get a picture.

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Then we were back at Trafalgar Square, where we did a little bit of touristy shopping.

I was pretty delighted at the Captain America swag in England. I almost bought this for my husband but £3.50 for a rubber band? What am I, made of money?

Before we returned to the hotel, I asked Kathleen to take a picture of me in Trafalgar Square, going into my map Joey-style.

She reacted in two very predictable ways; one, with a selfie:

And then with the hilaaaaarious joke where she runs in a zig-zag while holding down the shutter button, which I’m pretty sure she picked up from her friend Sam when she did the same thing to us at Kathleen’s graduation.

The result was this pretty cool gif:

It’s basically “pose pose pose pose Kathleen what’s taking so long pose pose what are you — OH OF COURSE.”

This picture was 100% for my other sister, Kara, whom I love so much that I was willing to stand on a map in the middle of Trafalgar Square while our sister took a series of embarrassing pictures of me.

Worth it. Right?

A couple more pictures of Trafalgar:

That’s a seriously cool but creepy shot of the horse skeleton which displays a live ticker of the London Stock Exchange. It adds a really festive, terrifying touch to the square, but then again, I’ve never understood art.

We got back on the Underground and walked the mile from Walthamstow to the hotel, and along the way, I sent this picture to Kara, along with the text, “I found your dentist.”

She thought it was so funny that she screencapped it and sent it to her friends.

I’m pretty sure we went to the Tesco around the corner from our hotel and picked up sandwiches and chips (oops, crisps) for dinner that night, but I’m not entirely sure.

The next day was what I’d dubbed the “fandom day,” also known as the day we would hit all the sites we’d seen on TV. It started out promising:

St. Barts is the hospital where Sherlock Holmes goes to run his experiments on… Well, it features prominently on BBC’s “Sherlock,” and I snapped that picture to send to Kara.

My first stop was in Bethnal Green, and the bus was the fastest and most direct way to get there.

It’s called Labour and Wait, and it acted as 221B Baker Street on CBS’s “Elementary.” Kara and I are huge fans and aside from my own excitement to scout out shooting locations, I felt like I owed it to Kara to seek them out as much as possible. (Mum and Kathleen were… not as excited as I was, which is fair.)

There’s a screenshot of Sherlock and Joan getting ready to enter his old apartment; obviously the address was altered to reflect the one on the show. I can’t get enough of this tile with black detail, it’s so striking. It’s like a Slytherin headquarters in London.

And there’s me, selfie-ing across the street like a creeper!

From there, we took a bus and then a train to our next stop in Euston Square, unwittingly following a theme, but that’s just how the locations landed when I was planning the stops the previous night.

This is the building that acted as 221B Baker Street on BBC’s “Sherlock.” It’s much more iconic, as “Sherlock” is a more popular show, and I was not the only person doing selfies while people were trying to brunch.

Sherlock and John standing outside Speedy’s Cafe on “Sherlock.” Cool, huh?

With my nerdy Holmesian stops out of the way (mostly) we continued to a stop we were all very excited about:

King’s Cross St. Pancras! You know — where Harry Potter and his friends catch the train to Hogwarts!

Yes, there is an attraction where a trolley is stuck in a wall between fictional platforms 9 and 10, but it’s actually out in the main section of the station to cut down on people crowding the real platform. There was also a long line, which we stood in for about ten minutes before deciding that we wanted to spend our time doing other things. There was also a line into the Harry Potter gift shop, which we stood in because we were determined to get Shane some souvenirs.

We also did the thing where we got tickets just to get onto the platform, and we rode the train from platform 9 for exactly one stop; I was terrified that we’d get stuck on a train that went out to Oxford or something, and we’d lose the rest of the day. Kathleen loved it, though, and it all worked out.

We took the tube from King’s Cross to the Tower of London, and this is where I should talk about how nerdy I was about the Underground. I was pretty much like a kid in a candy store. After living in a decidedly not-metro area my entire life, and then getting really overwhelmed by the metro in Paris, I was surprised and delighted by how easy it was to navigate the Underground. Really early on — I’m talking that first night in London — my mum and sister just relented and trusted that I knew where I was going.

I looked like a total tourist 100% of the time, because I had my crumpled-up tube map in my hands or sticking out of my pocket at all times. In the age of technology and Google Mapping your route, we were still hampered by international data restrictions, so I was old school as I checked lines, read signs, and ran us all around London’s Underground stations. It. Was. Bliss. If I lived in London, I would sell my car and never regret it.

It also helped us immensely when we got to New York and were thrown headfirst into the subway system (with an assist from a friend, but that’s for the next post).

We debated at length — at leeeeength — about whether we should tour the Tower of London. The one big drawback is that Mum had toured it before. I was also pretty much on the fence about it, and the other two were less keen to do another tour without me, so it might’ve been my fault that we ultimately decided against it, but even now, I don’t feel like I missed anything.

That means we had some time to kill outside the Tower, because we were waiting for a tour that the other two really wanted to do: a walking tour of the Jack the Ripper murders.

The tour meets at the bus stop outside of the Tower of London. I was nervous. I can get into crime capers, and there are more than a couple of crime procedurals on my TV binge list, but there’s something about true crime that terrifies me. (“Making a Murderer” is something I can’t bring myself to watch.) Retracing the steps of Jack the Ripper didn’t sound like my idea of a good time, but on the other hand, how could it not be fascinating?

This is “Prostitutes Church” as it was colloquially known at the time. It’s actually called St. Botolph’s Aldgate, but it got its name because it used to be where prostitutes would stand under a streetlamp to be seen by marks.

The church also stands right on the border between the City of London and Whitechapel. At the time of the murders, in the 1880’s, police from each municipality would walk their beats with no overlap. Moreover, it seems Jack the Ripper knew that if he committed a murder in Whitechapel, he could walk quickly into London and avoid pursuit by Whitechapel police, as they weren’t allowed to enter the city on police business.

When I first met my husband’s brother, Matt, he had a large collection of books on Jack the Ripper. He was always interested in the various ways that those murders reshaped how the police treated crime scenes, conducted their investigations, and used critical thinking. I sent the picture to my husband who responded in the most appropriate manner: a picture of Gus from Psych. {Context and more context.}

In all, we walked to five spots where various murders occurred. As many as eleven murders are attributed to Jack the Ripper, but those five were the biggest and most likely to be committed by the same person. The tour guide also ran through the various theories of who the murderer was, and why he might have stopped killing. It was about an hour and a half of walking, and there were kids as young as 8 years old there.

That was the site of the last and most confounding murder, but I also just really liked the look of the building.

After the tour, we got a late lunch at EAT and then got back on the bus to cross the city back to Buckingham Palace. We opted for this because we had the time, and we didn’t want to get on the Underground if we could take in the sights on an open-air bus.

We passed through Piccadilly Circus this time, and it was crowded! It’s always crowded, I’m sure.

And a backwards view down Coventry Street.

It was getting late and cloudy as we got to Buckingham Palace. It’s impressive and beautiful, and we watched the guards marching and changing posts for a little while. I also posed for more fandom pictures:

“Whoeee, I can’t believe we’re at Hogwarts!”

Maybe my favorite part of London was just how many pop culture references I was able to make. Maybe.

We did some souvenir shopping before we got back on the train to the hotel. Mum picked up a hard-cover rolling suitcase that she stuffed a bunch of souvenirs into since we would be able to check a bag for our remaining flights. I was on the hunt for anything and everything Underground-themed but didn’t pull the trigger on a mug with a map on it. I regret that.

That night, for dinner, we went back to Shish Mahal. This time I ordered Butter Chicken and fried rice. The waiter was the same guy from our first night and he greeted us like we were old friends.

I can’t remember what the middle dish was (I believe it had yogurt in it?) and the far left one was lamb tikka masala. The sauce was delicious.

The next day, our third in London, was our first day without the advantage of the Hop On/Hop Off bus tour. We decided to go out to Greenwich to explore the park, observatory, and surrounding area.

We messed up big time on our way there. We went from Walthamstow to King’s Cross to Bank, which all went smoothly, but then at Bank, we completely missed the machines to swipe our Oyster cards to get onto the DLR line. We didn’t even realize our mistake until we saw a man coming down the train to check tickets! I panicked and whispered to the other two that we needed to get off at the next stop and we played it cool, trying to look like we totally paid to be on the train, except I had to make Mum put her back to the man because her attempt at playing it cool read more like she was fleeing after committing a triple homicide. At least we can always tell when she’s lying.

We dashed off the train just as he was heading to check our cards. I felt bad, a little, but not too badly because we only made it two stops before we realized our mistake. We walked around that stop very purposefully, then scanned our Oyster cards and got back on the train. We weren’t trying to juke the system (we had no reason to — as I said before, we were very happy with the low price of traveling through London) and we didn’t realize until we swiped back in that we had to look out for the machines, as they don’t send you through a turnstile like the rest of the Underground does.

We made it to Greenwich without further incident.

I loved the Market, but it was so crowded that I didn’t get any good pictures of it. There were so many stalls to explore and shops to look into.

We spent a significant amount of time inside the National Maritime Museum, as it was free and chock full of information. Then we explored the grounds of the University of Greenwich.

Can you guess why I was excited about this?

They cleaned it up nicely after Thor nearly destroyed it!

And since we were right there, I had to walk over and get a picture of yet another place I’d seen on TV.

Trafalgar Tavern, as seen on “Elementary.”

Then we did the long, slow, arduous, all-uphill walk to the Royal Observatory, also known as where the prime meridian is located.

You have to pay to get in and do the thing where you stand on either side of the prime meridian, which was disappointing. Maybe on a shorter trip where we hadn’t just spent thousands of dollars, we would’ve spent the money to go in, but we didn’t this time.

That view though. Definitely worth the climb.

We ate a late lunch at the cafe attached to the museum. We wandered some more around Greenwich, then got back on the train headed for Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square.

We hadn’t gotten off the bus to walk around on the previous day, and I was determined to go to the M&M store and to get some cool souvenirs. The M&M store was awesome, I’d never been in one, and I came away with a couple of gifts for Shane.

After we were done souvenir shopping, we headed to Hyde Park and spent the rest of the afternoon there.

The Statue of Achilles, where Kathleen mocked the guys who were posing just like him as we walked up.

Notice my new M&Ms bag?

Boats on the Serpentine, it was such a warm day but so pretty and breezy.

We debated eating around the park but decided against it. We did a lot of walking and, at least on my end, almost no picture-taking after this, but a good chunk of the rest of the afternoon went to exploring the park. We were tired and a little bit sunbaked.

They were both asleep, Mum nodded off as she was attempting to read. I will never understand how they (or anyone else) can sleep on public transport.

That night, we returned to our American roots — we got Dominoes and drank wine. And it was amazing.

And I showed off my new, too-small laptop bag to Justin.

The next day, our last full day in London, started out rough. It actually started rough on our first day in London, when I went online to buy tickets for the Harry Potter studio tour, only to realize that we were supposed to buy those months in advance. Kathleen was crushed, she had been so looking forward to that tour. We had intended for our fourth day to be spent doing that tour, so suddenly, we had an extra day to spend in the city.

Mum was quiet all through our morning routines and breakfast, then when we returned to the room to get our purses and jackets, she announced that she was staying at the hotel for the day.

We argued, a lot. Neither of us were okay with leaving her behind all day, with no real way to call us if she changed her mind, but she was determined. Her feet were hurting, she was exhausted, and she felt she wasn’t getting as much out of London as we were. At this point, it was day 54 of our trip. With much reluctance and unease, Kathleen and I headed out into London on our own.

We were directionless at first. We hadn’t had a plan for the last day, just a general idea of where we might want to go. I had a couple more things on my list, but I ended up deferring to Kathleen for the morning, and she wanted to go look at St. Paul’s Cathedral up close, so to the Underground we went.

It’s much more imposing when you’re not on a double-decker bus!

After that, we decided to go to a museum. One of the great things about London is all of the museums they have to offer, and as the morning was pretty rainy, Kathleen had the idea to spend the next couple of hours doing something indoors. I don’t remember how we landed on the Museum of London, possibly she’d seen it in a brochure, but it was a short walk and free admission.

It was amazing. We learned a lot, and it was so informational and reasonably interactive (comparing it to Dublinia in Ireland, the theme was the same: the history of the city from its origination until now, but Dublinia was decidedly more kid-themed than the Museum of London) without any dull spots. I even snapped a couple of pictures to remember some of the more interesting facts that I’d never known (and I hate taking pictures of museum exhibits).

A map of Europe with all of the ancient names.

A map of the spread and destruction from the Great Fire of London in 1666. I’d never heard of the fire, which ruined much of central London, and I was definitely surprised at the spread over the course of four days. It started in a bakery, and it spread due to building material and a change in the winds. There’s a monument to the fire in the city, which the bus tour guides always pointed out as they casually mentioned that some people have died falling or jumping off of it, so I never wanted a picture of it.

I scored some very cool Sherlock Holmes-themed postcards for Kara at the gift store. Those still might be my favorite souvenirs I found, they were original illustrations of some of the most popular stories.

After the museum, we ate lunch at Pret A Manger, then proceeded to something on my list: walking across the Millennium Bridge.

We were both really excited about this.

And the view is to die for, that’s the Shard in the background.

Big smiles for the coolest bridge ever.

As soon as we got off the bridge, we decided to walk along the south bank toward the London Eye. That was when I accidentally happened across yet another shooting location from a TV show:

It’s the Southbank Skatepark, and it’s yet another location from BBC’s “Sherlock.” I can’t believe I found this one on accident!

It was a nice long walk to the London Eye, and we had every intention of conquering our fears for the last time and getting on it. It was our one plan for the day. Well when we got there, the line was crazy long; I’m talking, it was at least a two-hour wait. The express tickets had a line themselves, and then the line there was still at least an hour. We took one look at the pandemonium and pure chaos in the area and decided to nix the plan.

When I go back to London, I’m doing two things differently: pre-booking Harry Potter studio tickets, and pre-booking express tickets to the London Eye.

So we decided to get back on the train, which meant we finally got to see Waterloo Station! It’s beautiful.

And the escalators are long and steep.

I enjoyed seeing this Jack Daniels advertisement next to the Waterloo Underground sign, I felt like it was a surreal experience to see an iconic American ad on our last day in London.

There were many things we wanted to do in London that never even made our final list, and we had to make compromises along the way as well. In a perfect world, we would’ve gone to Wembley to check out the Jaguars promotions that have been going on in the last few years. They have a pretty big fanbase there because of all of the heavy marketing they’ve been doing, and going to a Jaguars game at Wembley is on my bucket list. This was July, though, and I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of NFL setup there was, if any, around the stadium.

More important to me was getting to the Olympic village. I watched those 2012 summer Olympics like an obsessed lunatic — I’m talking waking up early, opening my laptop, running whatever proxy I was using, and watching the BBC iPlayer all day. By evening, when NBC would air the highlights of the day’s events, I’d already seen most of what I’d wanted to see. The opening and closing ceremonies were beautiful, and for those two weeks, I wished I could’ve been in London to experience it.

This may have been my favorite experience of the whole trip. It was so great to stand there and think back to those two weeks wishing I’d been there.

We sat at these fountains for at least an hour, just talking. This trip was partially an opportunity for Kathleen and I to try to rebuild our relationship, and we were both honest about those five years of rift, fights, and non-communication, and our hopes that we could move forward. We cleared up a few remaining misunderstandings, and agreed that despite some of the difficult moments and days (and the unspoken fact that Mum was sitting back at the hotel as we talked) the trip was amazing and totally worth it.

I am happy to say that Kathleen and I are still doing great.

I was deeply sad to get back on the train to go back to the hotel. I hated leaving London, it was hard. Everywhere else, I’d been excited for the next adventure, but London was so wonderful that I was finally sad to leave one of our stops.

That night, we ate at — you guessed it — Shish Mahal.

When he joked that he would see us again in two days, we ended up telling the waiter that it was our last night in London, and he surprised us with a complimentary sample platter of foods we hadn’t been able to try yet! I can’t recommend that place enough, if you’re ever in London, go there.

(Also, I’ve made Butter Chicken three times since I got home, and Justin is a fan. We are working on expanding our Indian cuisine now. Thanks, London and Shish Mahal!)

Our flight the next day was out of Heathrow, thankfully, and back on Icelandair with an hour and a half layover in Reykjavik before landing at JFK in New York City, just as the sun was setting.