That Was Definitely Longer Than 7 Minutes

Friday was another day full of activities and boy did it tire me out.  Friday we had our last day of class while over here, which is so weird to me because it still feels like we just got here.  Everyone who didn't present the day before presented on Friday.  One of my roommates and I gave our presentation on our trip to Paris the weekend before.  It could only be 5 minutes and max of 10 slides so it wasn't bad at all.  It was nice to finally get it over with and turn in my portfolio that I had spent hours two nights before putting together.  We got out of class early again and since we didn't have a lot of time at the Borough Market the day before, we decided to head back there.  I thought my parents would really enjoy the market so we planned to met up there after they went to the Tower of London.  Communicating with them is a little difficult here since we don't have our regular phones and we only have a set amount of minutes on each phone.  They are using the sim card that I had to buy when my other phone peaced-out in its watery grave. They got a little bit of a late start so me and one of my friends had to kill some time so that they would have enough time to go through the whole thing.


So in order to kill time, we decided to head to Harrods to buy some gifts for relatives and friends at home.  I got some gifts and a bought a little something for myself as well haha.  We began to get hungry though so we headed to the market.  I got lunch there again and I got this really delicious salad with prosciutto.  Here's a nice little view of it...

We wandered around getting all kinds of samples again and I have never been so full in my life.  My parents finally found there way there and we ended up buying some really yummy cheese and chocolates of course.  I'm still in the process of eating both and both are super delicious.  We also got goat's milk ice cream that was also really good because it had a different texture and was lighter than regular ice cream.  After the Borough Market, we headed back to my flat to pick up their luggage, pack my bag for the weekend, and head to the hotel to check-in.  They had to switch hotels because I stayed with them all weekend and not all the hotels here allow for 3 people in a room.  We found the hotel just fine after dragging all our luggage through the Tube.  We had to get ready to go pretty soon after we checked-in because we had to make it to the other side of town by 7 for a 3-hour bike tour of the city.  We left a little later than we wanted so we were racing to make it there on time.  We were about 5 minutes late but thankfully they hadn't left us yet so we made it!

We headed to grab our bikes and get going after this because it was a 3-hour tour so we had to get going.  The bikes were really funny because they would like fold up and I had never seen one like them before.  They were not very comfortable however so that was not too fun especially when we rode over cobble-stone...that was no fun at all trust me.  I haven't ridden a bike in a long time so it took me a little bit to get used to it but I got the hang of it after a little pedaling around.  Here's a view of what our lovely bikes looked like and of course mine was pink.

Once we got going, we never really stopped.  We rode everywhere around central London and our tour guide was really good because we told us some things that I never knew.  We rode through a lot of the city that I had visited before but we also went to places that I never even knew existed.  There is actually a part in London that is all still lit by gas.  It was really cool to see all the street lamps and you could smell the gas but it was also really creepy because there wasn't a lot of lighting and it was dark.  Needless to say, I was happy to pedal my way out of that area of town.  We ended the tour riding along the River Thames and we got to see Parliament and Big Ben lit up at night.  It was beautiful and I really enjoyed the views that we saw.  The only down side was that it began to rain at the very end of our tour. Rain + cold + riding bikes = not fun.  Our tour guide told us that it was only about a 7 minute bike ride back to our starting point when we got off our nice warm boat ride that assisted us on the way back...it was definitely longer than 7 minutes.  Any minute longer when you're riding a bike in the cold rain is no fun let me tell you.  I was so happy when we finally got back to the "pub" that we started at.  We didn't get back there till about 10:45 though and we hadn't eaten yet.  We needed to get back toward my area of town as well because the Tube closes at midnight and I didn't trust the area that we were in so we decided to head back.  We ended up grabbing pizza at Pizza Express and it definitely hit the spot.  Eating at 11:30 was a little weird but we didn't really have another option so we just had to get over it.  We finally headed back to the hotel after "dinner" and literally crashed because we had to be up at 6:45 am the next morning.  We had booked a day trip to Lead's Castle, Dover, Canterbury, and Greenwich for Saturday but the bus was picking us up at 8:10 at a Tube station so we had to be up early.  Here are a couple shots from the bike tour just to give y'all a taste...

 Big Ben duh

 Westminster Abbey Entrance

Parliament at Night...So Pretty