London! Part 1

We visited London from May 9th to the 14th and had the best time!  We took the train from Osnabrück to Amsterdam Thursday afternoon and then flew from Amsterdam to London. Once we got checked into our hotel (the Tune Hotel – Kings Cross), we hunted for a Barclay’s ATM (since we can get money out of our Deutsche Bank account without any fees), and then went back towards our hotel to The Lucas Arms for dinner. It was a typical English pub – I had some pretty yummy mac and cheese with bacon pieces in it.

Side note about our hotel – I tried to find the cheapest place I could – without being a hostel or looking creepy/unclean/in a bad part of town- so we thought we try out a Tune hotel (most of their hotels are in the Asia Pacific but they do have 5 hotels in the UK). You get a very basic, tiny but clean room and pay extra for things they consider amenities (towels, hairdryer, in room safe, TV usage, WiFi, etc). AND from you picture, you can tell we decided to try out a basement room – meaning no windows, but this took off about £100 from the cost of our stay. Kings cross has a major underground station (6 lines run through there) so it is really easy to get just about anywhere from here (our hotel was only a 5 min walk from the station) – so it was a great location- and we only paid €322 for 5 nights.  I’m not going to lie, I was a little worried what we would find when we checked in given it was so cheap, but we were pleasantly surprised. The staff were all nice and helpful, we couldn’t hear trains going past our heads (since we were underground), the room was clean, Morgan even enjoyed not having a window since it allowed him to sleep in later! We would definitely stay in one again!

Friday:

We headed to the Victoria & Albert Museum Friday morning and ate breakfast near the South Kensington Station first at Muriel’s Kitchen (it was delicious and really cute inside!). Across the street from Muriel’s was the Lamborghini dealership, so Morgan got to stare at the pretty manly cars during breakfast.

-The Victoria and Albert is the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design and is divided up into 5 themes: Asia, Materials & Techniques, Europe, Modern, and Exhibitions (there was a huge one for David Bowie – that we weren’t interested in at all – and one called “Treasures of the Royal Courts: Tudors, Stuarts and the Russian Tsars” that looked really cool, but we had hardly enough time to see the regular museum so we decided to pass on the exhibitions). The V&A has 4.5 million objects, covers 12.5 acres, and its collection spans 5,000 years of art. Also, the building itself is beautiful. We enjoyed this museum just as much as the British Museum and may have liked it even more. Below we’ll include some pictures of some of the favorite things we saw (well at least things we were allowed to take pictures of, most of the Asian galleries didn’t allow pictures)!

-Next grabbed lunch and then picked up our London Pass tickets. Next we walked up towards the British Museum, but stopped first by Museum Street to look in the shops.

-I had been to the British Museum before, but Morgan hadn’t soooo I think we saw every single room in there (though some we walked through pretty quickly towards the end because our feet were killing us). The Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece and Rome rooms were amazing and Morgan also really enjoyed the Clock and Watches room. Oh, and the jewelry room was pretty amazing (too bad they don’t let you take pictures in there! Some of tiaras were just as beautiful as those you see in the crown jewel display at the Tower of London.

– By the time we left the British Museum we were completely exhausted from being on our feet all day so we ate a quick dinner at a fast food Mexican place (think Moe’s) and then got to bed early.