Backtracking #4 (January 23: Bus and Boat Tours)

Day 4 marked the last day of orientation, and it was also the day that we would get to go on a bus and boat tour of London. After getting through the last bit of school business, we started off with the bus tour. Our tour guide was hilarious as he shared some trivia about certain places in London, and cracked a few jokes along the way.

On our bus tour, we started by going through Camden, then proceeded to go around the City of London. Of course we stopped at Buckingham Palace, and I decided to take more pictures again as it was sunnier than it had been the day before.

The gates had opened up to allow a man with a horse drawn carriage to enter

We then saw more iconic sights of London such as Tower Bridge, The Tower of London, and parts of the London skyline. 

Our bus tour ended in Greenwich, where we had about an hour of free time to walk around before we needed to get to the docks for our boat tour. Regan, Leah, Jackie, Maren, and I wanted to get a quick snack before heading to the boat, so we stopped by Nando's for the first time. Knowing that I like to take my time when I eat, I decided to order a hot chocolate and try their famous chicken another day. Soon after, we boarded the boat and began our trek along the Thames. 

Since the weather was getting colder as the day went on, most people opted to stay inside the lower deck of the boat for much of the tour. However, my friends and I thought that it would be cool to experience the tour on the top deck, and we decided to brave the cold and head upstairs. The combination of the setting sun, cold air, and wind from the boat moving forward meant that it was extremely chilly on the top deck, but the views were pretty cool and made up for it! My hands actually felt numb from the cold as I tried to take pictures. We saw iconic sights of London yet again, including the O2 (which I didn't manage to get a clear picture of). Sadly, my camera wasn't really cooperating and most of my pictures are pretty blurry. But here are a few somewhat decent pictures that I managed to take. 

A view of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich (where I recently visited The Chapel and Painted Hall, blog post to follow about that!)

Not quite sure what this is a picture of, but I thought that it looked kind of cool haha!

Tower Bridge at dusk

Tower Bridge at night (took this picture from Maren, hehe!)

The Shard

Big Ben

The London Eye

Once our boat tour ended, we grabbed a bite to eat at an Italian restaurant. Then some of us split up and went to a karaoke night at a bar, though none of us ended up singing haha! After that we headed home, and had a good night's sleep since we didn't have any set plans for the next day.

Almost nearing the end of week 1 with these backtracking posts…gah! I'll try to remember what I did during the last few days of week 1, but I think for weeks 2-5 I'll write about highlights from each week (since it's taken me so long to just write about four days…haha fail on my part). I'm going to try to do short daily posts as well, hopefully about things that I actually did on the day that I post! 

'til next time!