Winning London

I had a lot of great intentions of writing detailed information about my visa process, orientation and homestay for future CIEE participants but alas, technology has not been on my side. The CIEE Blog has been switched and that is why my first post was published 4 months late. It was on the old blog site, and I have not had any way of posting until now. The past 2 months have been a real blur but I am going to do a few blog posts with as much information as I can remember. Over the next month I will probably post a lot more than I will once I get into a routine. This post I am going to do a real quick recap of my adventures leading up to Madird. I have already written this post once but the site deleted the original post that I spent 2 hours on, so this post will be less detailed and quite possibly a little jumpy so I apologize in advance!

I left Florida on the 8th of August and drove up to Massachusetts over the course of a few days. My friend Katie and I stopped in Georgia, South Carolina, DC, and New Jersey. Some just for lunch, some for a few nights. Once I made it back up to Massachusetts it was a Danny Farewell Tour. I saw as many friends and family as I could before I left the country for a year, and also did some last minute prep for the big trip. I flew out to London for the 17th of August.

Reasons I went to London before heading to Madrid:
1) Flights were cheaper
2) I wanted to get used to the time change in a place that spoke my language
3) British accents
4) I wanted to stop somewhere and travel a little before heading to Spain
5) I wanted to see all the sights Mary-Kate and Ashley saw in their movie Winning London



After deciding I was going to go to London and booking my flights, I posted in the CIEE Facebook group to see if anyone else had the same idea. I was contacted by Kate, someone in my program who had already planned her trip to London. We happened to have the same flight from London to Madrid, so we decided to split an Airbnb and explore London together.  Over the course of the next few days Kate and I went to the Tour of London, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, the Peter Pan Statue, and Abbey Road. We also went on a high tea afternoon boat tour down the River Thames with B Bakery. I would HIGHLY reccommend doing a tour with them if you are in London. It was the absolute best! They usually have double decker bus tours but we got lucky and happened to be traveling on a special day where they did a boat tour. I was informed about this from Naiya, an 8 year old I know in Florida and it did not disappoint! We had a wonderful array of food and got to see the Shard, Globe Theatre, Parliament and Big Ben (well, the clock anyway, the rest was under construction), the London Eye, the bridge from the 6th Harry Potter movie, the Tower Bridge, the Gherkin, and everything else in between. Kate and I decided boat tours are our thing. 

The only things I was missing from Winning London was a polo match and meeting a cute British guy. Next time...