Zhen Tang: January 28th, 2012

After the first time being London with the school, I went to there with Mike, Andrea (two came from CapU as well), Elizabeth, Tyler and Grayson (three came from U.S.) for the second adventure. We got up early and took the bus to Hatfield train station which took 10 minutes. Then, we bought a round-trip ticket from Hatfield to London that includes transportation ticket the whole day in London for £8.6 which is 3-people group price.  This was my first time to take train in United Kingdom and the terminal station is the famous “Harry Potter Platform 9 ¾” which made me so excited.

It took less than half hour to get into London. We took pictures at the platform 9¾ as a souvenir. Then, we crossed the street to take the tube which went to Camden Town market. This market was quite big which includes outdoor and indoor areas. We visit the outdoor parts first. Almost everything was included in this market and you have the chance to bargain the price with sellers. Elizabeth bought a dress for £13 which the original price is £18. Also Andrea got a pretty red sweater with reasonable price after bargaining. There are bunch of stores been set up on the streets. We didn’t go through a lot of them because we were so hungry. Therefore, we went to the food area to get the things we want respectively. I got one Spanish doughnut which called “churro” with caramel or chocolate sauce as my dessert was really good. Due to the cold weather, we decided to get into indoors. Various jewellery, scarves and paintings sort of things were sold at the indoors part. We didn’t stay there that long and we got back to tube to the Natural History Museum which is one of three large museums on London.

This Museum for free because it’s an exempt charity & a non-departmental public body and lots of people lined up at the entrance. Five main collections are covered: Botany, Entomology, Mineralogy, Palaeontology and Zoology.  For me, the most impressive part is the simulative earthquake room which recreates an earthquake that happened in Japan.  I felt the floor shake and heard the earthquake sounds in that room.

The next destination we headed was Westminster Abbey which was the place for Prince William and Kate. We wanted to see the inside, but it closes early on Saturdays unfortunately. We just took pictures outside for that reason.

It was getting dark by that time, so we walked over to Covert Garden to look for a place for dinner. I thought it was weekend so we saw people everywhere even it was hard to find a restaurant for sic of us. We waited was like 30 minutes and had a table at Pizza Hut finally. After dinner, there was a Canadian pub which sells “Poutine” and “Caesar according to Andrea”. Americans wanted to give it a shot and we missed  it a lot, so we just went to there.  We ordered drinks a shared poutine. Tyler and Grayson kept talking to an older Irish couple which sat near us. We left the pub around 11:30pm.

The last train back to Hatfield was at 1:11 at King’s Cross Station (Platform 9 ¾). We really wanted to see how the London Bridge looks like at night, so we made a run to there and take pictures. The surprised thing happened during this period. We asked a passing couple to take a picture of all of us, and then the woman randomly handed each of us a rose from bouquet. You’ll see how natural happy we were at the below pictures. It was so sweet. Then, we managed to catch the last train back to Hatfield at around 1am.

A long and tried day, but it was my best trip of mine till now!