So I think I am still on Greek time... I tried so very very hard to sleep in but I found myself awake at 530. Oh well... I tried to get back to sleep to no avail. I sneaked a peak through the window... Dark, grey and rain. CRAP. London has really put on a show for our first day. We headed out anyway and picked up a couple of umbrellas from a side street.
We went on a hunt to find where to collect our London Pass tickets from. With a little help from the concierge and my expert map reading skills we were on our way. We were walking past Leicester Square Station and found a shop that was selling cheap theatre tickets - so we made a spontaneous decision and bought some tickets to see Mamma Mia. Yayyyyyyy - we were very veryyyyyy excited, who doesn't love a bit of Abba!!
It was about 10am by that stage and we were starving - so we found a corner diner and had a good English fry up brekkie. Just what the doctor ordered. Yum. We found the London pass kiosk and collected our tickets and massive booklets that said where we could go and what we could do. Man there was a lot - we needed two weeks here to do all this, not two days.
The London Underground... Slightly overwhelming and confusing the very first time. There are a lot of tunnels, corridors, stairs (always so many stairs - story of my life), escalators, arrows pointing everywhere, direction boards, maps, overwhelming to the max. But we made our way successfully to the London Eye, which was so incredible and massive, overlooking all of London.
We had fast track tickets which got us access to the 4D London eye experience, a short film about the London eye which was super fun, there were bubbles, a snow machine and scary seagulls that flew right at our faces. Our fast track tickets also got us in a super fast like and before we knew it we were in our little capsule beginning the 30 minute revolution of our London eye experience. It was really slow but the views were breathtaking - even if it was raining and gloomy. We both really enjoyed our views over London from the inside of the London Eye.
We got off and found ourselves in front of the London Dungeon, I had heard about it from one of our fellow topdeckers and I was super keen to see what all the fuss was about. Alysha sill needed convincing - so we decided to get a 3 attraction pass which saved us about £30 so we had tickets to the London Dungeon, The Sealife Aquarium and Madame Toussards. How exciting!! We had about two hours to kill before our session at the dungeon so we went in search of food.
It was still pouring rain... But we managed to find a little fish and chip diner where we got some good ole English fish n chips. Which were quite average... But we still ate them - Alysha was pretty hungry, she probably would have eaten anything! The wait staff at the diner were giving us some dirty looks for holding up one of their precious tables so we cruised on to kill some more time. There was a cute souvenir shop near the station so that was the rest of our time killed and a little extra money spent. Anything for some cute souvenirs!!
We headed into the London Dungeon... Very nervewracking, very dark, very creepy, very smelly, very damp - it was nothing like I ever imagined it to be. It was even more awesome!! We were a part of a 90 minute interactive role play type of performance where we had some audience participation and we learnt all about the dirty underbelly of London and Jack the Ripper. There were two rides throughout the tour, one was a scary dark water log ride and the second was a drop ride, where we all sat in a row and we were dropped 15m very quickly (simulating being hung). IT WAS SOOOOO MUCH FUN!
Our next stop was the Sealife Aquarium, Alysha was sooooo excited for the aquarium, like a kid in a candy store so I'm glad we got to do something she was really keen for. The aquarium was vastly underwhelming - mostly due to the amount of children running around shoving everyone and the amount of rude people who would barge into you. There was lots of very cool fishies (as expected) and there were penguins. We got through the entire aquarium relatively quickly.
We left the aquarium, the rain pelting down even harder than before... Oh dear. Today was not the best day to wear sandals, with every squelchy step I could feel them falling part - I could be in some trouble here. We needed to navigate our way back to the station and take the correct trains to get back - which we did - I am amazing at the underground - like a pro! We made it home safely and very very wet.
In desperate need of somewhere warm and dry we went for some dinner at an English pub which was amazing, the pubs here have such a great atmosphere, we need more places like this back home. After a good feed and a cold bevy we went to the local supermarket to get some food for our brekkies (we can't afford to get a fry up every morning), then back to our hotel to try to tackle our massive piles of laundry... They are quite massive, the Mt Vesuvius of dirty laundry. But hey, at least all of clothes were clean after that. A hot shower and a bit of TV and we were both zonked - what a great, wet first day in London!
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