so many things to see

we slept for 13 hours straight last night. literally. feeling much better now 🙂

so, the hostel we’re staying at is called piccadilly backpacker hostel. it’s humongous, 7 stories tall, and it’s been pretty cool so far. the location of it is great: right in the center of town and only several blocks from buckingham palace and other important stuff. today, when we woke up, we got free breakfast which consisted of: a plate w/ 2 pieces of white toast, a cup with a tiny bit of instant coffee in it, orangeish liquid (orange juice??), and huge vats of butter and mystery jam for the toast. i dunno, for something reason, there was something i really liked about how ghetto the breakfast was. it was cool to be in this room surrounded by people from every different country and speaking all sorts of different languages and eating this cheezy meal. oh, the one annoying thing about the hostel though, is that it has only one *very* slow elevator. ugh. so most of the times we just give up and walk up/down all 7 flights of stairs. last night, caryn and i got our own room, so we were able to sleep no problem, but tonight we’ll have a dorm room, so we’ll see how that goes.

after breakfast, we went to buckingham palace again to see the changing of the guards. it was pretty cool, but to be honest, we got kinda bored after the fisrt 20 minutes. it was hot outside, and there was a total mob scene outside the palace. sheez, if we got bored standing out there in the hot sun for 30 minutes, how do the guards survive?? standing still outside for hours on end in those furry hats?? ouch!!

next we went to go see westminster abbey. we were way impressed by that place. the church itself is extremely beautiful from the outside w/ impressive architecture and completely amazing stained glass windows. the inside was extremely ornamental and beautiful as well. one thing i had never realized about westminster was that it is the place where a ton of famous people are buried. they had graves there for everyone ranging from queen elizabeth to Isaac Newton to Lewis Carrol. walking around inside the church was really cool. it’s funny, when i was younger i was very afraid of checking out churches… i felt like somehow just being inside a church was in some way going against my religion. heh, luckily i dont really feel that way anymore or i’d definitely be missing out on some cool stuff.

then we went to go check out big ben and took some obligatory photos there. we also went to the tate modern art museum. i kinda left that place w/ mixed feelings about it. there was some really good stuff in there, like Dali, Magrite, Picasso, and some others but at the same time, a lot of the stuff in there i didnt really care for. oh well.

by this point we started getting tired again. damn jet lag. even w/ all the sleep we got last night we still were sleepy by around 7ish. but also part of the reason we were tired was the sheer quantity of stuff we saw today. being here has such a different feel to it than my last trip. in thailand you spend most of they either just chilling or you do like one activity, while here in europe it’s all about checking out the sites and attractions.

hrm, what else is there to say about today? we went to our first british pub here. we tried malaysian food for the first time and that was pretty good. my shorts have a pickpocket-proof pocket and it’s damn annoying (read: the zipper is broken and comes apart every time it is pulled).

the computers here dont have usb ports so i can’t post photos unfortunately, but hopefully i’ll be able to next week in france!

*v