London: Don't take their word for it

After traveling around Germany for about two weeks, it was time for Faeth and me to “hop the pond” and visit England. Just getting there was an adventure, since Berlin subways are deceptively slow and we almost missed our plane. If you’ve ever seen the Home Alone movies, you’ll know the scene where the McCallister family frantically runs down the airport terminals trying to catch their flight. That was us. We really did run to our terminal and board the plane just as they prepared to take off.

Despite the hectic start, we made it to London and even found our hostel without too much trouble. Our hostel, the Globe Trott Inn, was built up above an English tavern and dripped with English hospitality. You couldn’t really get any more English, with double decker buses passing by and red telephone booths on the street corners, despite the line of Indian shops surrounding it and the Bollywood movie theater down the street.

Faeth and I had a long, grand list of things to see in London: Westminster Abbey, Parliament and Big Ben, the Eye in the Sky (a Ferris Wheel), Baker Street, Madam Toussud’s, the Thames, London Bridge… the list goes on. Pretty much, everything I’d heard about London or seen in movies, I wanted to see for myself. I managed to find a free walking tour that covered most of the big-name places in London such as Buckingham Palace and the Globe Theater, so Faeth and I decided to tag along.

The tour started at Wellington’s Arch (Wellington’s the guy who eventually defeated Napoleon, and the British loved him until he became prime minster) and moved on to Buckingham Palace. The palace was a lot smaller and more subdued than I’d thought, which actually makes sense since it’s only been a royal palace for a couple hundred years, ever since King George III saw it at a housewarming party and decided it’d be a good place for his kids to grow up. After that, we caught a bit of the Changing of the Guard (not really so exciting) and our tour guide, Josh, took us to see the guard house. And that’s when things went wrong. There were about 200 people trying to get pictures of these famous British guards, the ones in red with the furry black hats. Faeth and I are far too Minnesota nice; so we politely waited for other people to push forward and get their shots. When our turn finally came, we snapped our pictures only to turn around and discover our tour guide—and the rest of the tour group—was gone. They’d left us, and now we were lost in downtown London.

Needless to say, we weren’t exactly thrilled at losing our tour (which until that point had been very interesting), but we managed to wander around and see most of the sites anyway. And it was during our impromptu sightseeing walk that I started to realize something: it’s more important to see what I wanted to see, not what everyone raved about. There’s more to London than the stories and tourist spots, and more to this city’s history and culture than checking famous sites off your list.

For example: Everyone’s heard of London Bridge. We have a nursery rhyme about and everything (which is actually pretty morbid when you consider the lyrics, but then most nursery rhymes are). Yet when Faeth and I finally found our way over to this famous London Bridge, we were greatly underwhelmed. It was a modern bridge, rebuilt after the old one had broken down years ago. It was nothing like we imagined. The same went for the Globe Theater and Parliament. Big Ben looked really cool, but you had to pay to see Parliament, and we weren’t willing to do that. Ditto for the Eye in the Sky: pricey tickets and a long line. So we skipped that, too.

We wanted to see Big Ben because of the Great Mouse Detective... look it up!

Was London a total bust? Goodness, no! We had a blast discovering it. We explored the Tower of London and saw the gorgeous Crown Jewels. We wandered the huge British Library. We went to Greenwich to see the Prime Meridian (which is pretty arbitrary, especially when you consider that it wasn’t even the first “prime meridian” in England), where we got to stand on two hemispheres...

So close... yet so far!

 

From there, we visited the University of Greenwich, which had a “painted hall” where, you guessed it, everything was painted: walls, ceiling, doors… The mural on the ceiling was breathtaking. Once you walked out of the university, you could climb down onto the bank of the Thames to walk the river. It was very pretty, far prettier than the Thames under the London Bridge, and it was quiet and relaxing in Greenwich. In fact, I think Greenwich was one of my favorite places in London.

It was like this throughout the entire building.

London was a ton of fun… once we stopped trying to see everything everyone told us to see. Jumping for site to site just to snap a picture is no way to travel. Travel is about expanding your horizons, seeing new viewpoints and meeting different people. You can’t chase after some “perfect visit” to London, or any place. If all you’re worried about is seeing the famous places so you can brag about seeing them, you’re really missing out. There is so much more out there! Why let yourself be dictated by other people’s arbitrary standards? Why do other people get to decide what’s cultured and what’s not? If you want to see something, go see it! If you don’t, don’t waste your time. Life is too short to waste part of it molding yourself to other people’s expectations. If you let go of trying to fit into a cookie-cutter mold, your trip will be a hundred times better. I guarantee it.