It is OFFICIAL...

I have completely fallen in love with London! Just got back from spending 8 days in the city and I honestly didn't want to leave. I know I said that about Ireland too, but for real, I think London topped Dublin!

I flew out of Nice on March 5th and arrived in London around 5:30pm, London time. After going through the passport check, I went to the luggage carousel only to find that the suitcase I borrowed from Brittany lost a wheel during its journey. Dia Trieste! Any who, once I found out where the Stansted Express train was, I picked up my ticket and boarded. I am assuming that it typically took 35-40 minutes to get from Stansted airport to Liverpool station... but that was wrong. Instead it took about an hour. While on the train I had an British-English man ask me where I was from, what I was doing in London, and that I had a beautiful smile. I suppose that was a great way to be greeted for your first time in England. Hahaha.

I finally arrived at Liverpool station. Once I made it through the mass rush hour of people I saw Mom and Mike waiting for me on the other side of the exit. Not to my knowledge, I had to reshow my ticket from the train in order to leave the train. So I had to move to the side and search for the new location of my ticket. Talk about a pain in the butt! I finally found it, showed it to the exit man and ran to give my Mom a hug! It was so great to see her. It was just over the two month mark when I got to see her, it was fabulous! We left the station, jumped on the Tube and headed for the apartment. Another plus about London... the real estate is little bigger there then it is in France.

The first night there was pretty relaxing, especially since Mom and Mike had just flown 8 hours to get there. We made pizza and set plans with some friends of our, Steve and Lesley, who came into town because we were going to be there. The itinerary for the weekend was:

Saturday - Meet Lesley and Steve at Covent Garden, shop, and begin traveling through London
Sunday - Meet with L & S at Camden Street Market, do lunch and say our goodbyes

Once we did all that we began to explore even more. We saw St. Paul's Cathedral, West Minster Abbey, Parliament, the London Eye, Tower of London, Tower Bridge, and the Tower Bridge Starbucks [not a major destination, but highly needed].

All in all, we had a great week together!