I'm home tonight instead of at the carnival, so I figured I'd try to bang out the U.K. trip entries so it's not hanging over my head. Get ready for some mood swings--this trip started badly, got better, then ended in frustration. It's only amusing now that all the hassle is over.
With that warning in mind, let's look at day one.
So after traveling all day Friday and trying to catch some sleep that night, I had to get up early to shower and buy travel-sized contact solution. Yeah, a bit random, but hey, I ran out, okay?
There was a bit of a hassle meeting up with Alice and Courtney, not because we missed the time or anything but because Courtney forgot to print Alice's plane ticket (long story). Basically, we ended up carrying her stuff to bus station to get tickets to the airport while she literally ran to the library computer lab. She showed back up in time to get a ticket too, so we sat and waited for a while. You know, I'd have to say that the motto of this trip was "Hurry up and wait," 'cause we sure did a lot of rushing but even more waiting. However, in this case it was sooo worth it--we got the front seats on the upper level of the double decker bus! I can't even describe how cool it was to see everything from that view. Every time we turned a corner, it looked like the light pole was about to hit my face. Awesome.
Once we got to the airport, we made it through security in no time, then found a cafeteria for lunch and some more waiting. We got to the gate early, but in the two minutes that I was in the bathroom somehow a line formed and we ended up being in the last group to board. I have no idea what happened--must have been a stampede while I was washing my hands or something.
The flight itself was normal (no volcanoes yet at this point), and the next bus trip to Victoria Station was nothing special either. By the time we arrived in London, however, it was starting to get dark, and since we had no map of the city or any idea how to get to our hostel, we made a pit stop at Subway for my supper then tried to find the place. Luckily we headed into some random hotel when we were sufficiently creeped out, and the guy at reception printed out some maps for us and told us how to catch the Underground to get to our hostel. Totally saved our lives and didn't even know it.
Once we figured out the whole subway bit, we checked into the hostel and then bought some snacks at a convenience store for lunch the next day. And here's where it gets interesting: okay, so the beds in hostels are supposed to be stripped of sheets after people check out so the next person can move in, unless someone is staying there more than one night. Well, in our 16-bed, mixed gender room, all the beds still had sheets. After we asked again at reception, they said just guess which ones were empty and replace those sheets with our clean ones. We should have been clued in to the sketchiness then, but hey, we went along with it. After I came back from brushing my teeth, the woman whose bed I had taken was back and asked me to move. I said sure, okay, no problem, and picked another one. That time I had almost gotten to sleep when the crazy Italian man who had claimed it came back and shook me "awake" (yeah, I definitely faked sleep for a bit 'cause I didn't want to face him). He kept yelling about how he paid for four nights and he couldn't believe that we did this to him while we kept trying to explain the mistake. He started shouting in Italian, I think something about giving me five minutes to get out, then stormed out. Some nice guy the next bed over offered to help, so he went and got reception and made them come sort it out (about time they fixed things, honestly). We ended up just grabbing our stuff and running out to the office, where reception gave us a new room with three very un-talkative Russian guys. Ughhh...like I said, the beginning should have been a hint that the trip was destined to go bad.
We were still laughing at this point because of the ludicrous nature of the whole thing and because earlier in the night we had talked about how if we were creeped out by anyone, we'd all huddle in one bed and protect each other. Maybe we should have stuck to that plan...
On to the next day...
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