Woke up bright and early and headed to the designated meet-up point for the Old City Walking Tour. It was a wonderful tour and our guide, Anna, was animated and made history fun. The tour started at the Tower of London and from there we made our way to the Tower Bridge (often mistaken for the London Bridge), the London Bridge, the financial district of London (and the Bank of England), plenty of small streets, Millennium Bridge, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the famous Church of the Knights Templar. At one point we tried to break the world record of how many people can you cram into one of those red phone booths. The record was I believe 14, we nearly broke it when 13 of us managed to fit inside! :-) Everytime I see one of those booths I wonder if it leads to the Ministry of Magic.

The tour was about 2 and a half hours. During the tour I met David, a literary agent from Thailand who was in London for a book fair. He finally had some time off to do some exploring. We had fun stopping to take photos during the tour and then running to catch up with the group.

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The London trip (April 23-26) marked my very first experience with solo travel (not counting Copenhagen). I spent a great deal of time figuring out the logistics of my short weekend stay in London, everything from the flights there to accommodation to sightseeing plans.

I decided to fly with easyJet (the Southwest Airlines of Europe). For accommodation, Preben had informed me earlier about Couch Surfers and Hospitality Club, awesome concepts where people offer their couches or bedrooms to travellers for 1, 2, 3 or more nights in exchange for friendship and stories. I joined both sites but was unable to find accommodation quickly enough due to lack of time (and because I only sent out 3 hosting requests; I didn’t want to spam everyone, lol). However I remain a member of both sites because I definitely plan to do more traveling in the future.

I ended up settling with the Astor Hyde Park hostel, my very first experience with one! I was a bit wary of the fact that my room was mixed female and male, but according to the reviews online no one had any problems with it so I decided to give it a shot!

The easyJet flight on an A319 to London was fast and smooth. I was a bit nervous, thinking, “what am I doing, coming to London all by myself?!” I was also very excited — London was one of the cities I’d read so much about and now I was going there!

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Last Friday night I felt like getting on a train and going somewhere in the morning. So on Saturday after choir rehearsal I got on the S-Tog intending to go to Kobenhavns Hovedbangården (The Central Train Station) so that I could get a regional train ticket, but accidentally got on the train going in the wrong direction and ended up at Østerport Station. Totally not a problem, I just bought my ticket there. Decided to go to Roskilde, a suburb within the greater Copenhagen area. It is an ancient town. The ride only took about 25 minutes or so.

While there, I just strolled aimlessly down the pedestrian walking street near the train station. Checked out the shops. Bought a much-needed change purse on sale (for 50 Kr) and a nice purple purse. On the way home I stopped at a Kvickly to get some groceries but the store had a power-outage and could not check out anyone’s items. They were unable to get the power back on so I (along with many others) ended up giving my things back to a worker to put back on the shelves. Ah well. It sucked because they had what looked like some really nice Japanese stir-fry sauce that I wanted to try. I’ll see if I can’t find it elsewhere.

Next time I go to Roskilde I’ll try to check out some of the museums there and walk around inside some of the old cathedrals.