24 hours in London

I love London, always have and probably always will. Living in Newcastle, pretty much as north as England can get, I’ve always found it to be so much more exotic than my home town and have been visiting a few times a year for work, shopping, or just a change of scenery since I was about 15. Last week I had the all-important embassy appointment at the American embassy. Now as we know, last week wasn’t exactly perfect what with the being ill and the lots of work, but somehow my sleep deprived self-managed to survive the 7 hour coach and get the visa stuff sorted.

My trips to London always seem to be short but sweet, and this time I found myself in the capital for a grand total of 24 hours. I’m being serious, that’s from getting off the coach right through to getting back on the coach. Take off from that the 2 hours spent at my appointment and a good 8 hours sleep, we’re down to a mere 14 hours to eat, drink and be merry see the sights. Okay who am I kidding I was merry and saw the sights.

Having such a short amount of time I wanted to stay somewhere that was in easy distance from the coach station, the embassy, having been to London many times before ease of sightseeing wasn’t top of my list. After trawling countless websites trying to find somewhere both affordable for a student, but not a hostel (I needed to get a good night’s sleep!) I eventually found the Victoria Inn, in Victoria, for a good price with reviews that didn’t sound too bad. Now I don’t know if my expectations for hotels are really low, the last hotel I stayed in didn’t have running water in the main building, or if previous reviewers were just harsh critics but I was pleasantly surprised. The hotel was in a nice location, clean and had friendly staff on reception 24/7, although the room was on the small side there was plenty of space for the night and a bed each. A cooked breakfast was also included in the price, a total novelty for this cheap skate traveller.

Our megabus arrived into London at 15:00pm and we headed straight to the hotel to drop our things and freshen up, before heading on out. Now I know most people would recommend getting a tube pass if you’ve got such little time, but being on low student budgets we opted to walk and I think we definitely still saw plenty.

We set off without any real plans other than to make sure I knew the route to the embassy since I’m brilliant at getting lost if I have a deadline. In true form, the half an hour walk from our hotel to Grosvenor square took us nearer an hour, by which point we just wanted to eat food and window shop, so we wandered along oxford street played house in John Lewis (yup, that happened) and bought the most delicious coconut and chocolate orange cookies from Ben’s Cookies. Seriously, why don’t we have them up north?! 100% recommended.

After our playtime on Oxford Street we strolled down past Piccadilly Market which was just closing but had some cute and quirky things, through St James Park, just as the sun was setting and up into Westminster where we of course got to admire the houses of parliament and big ben. No matter how many times I visit London I still find myself visiting Westminster just to look at the grandeur of the buildings.

 After our afternoon exploring and sightseeing we ended up at Loco Mexicano, a small Mexican restaurant just a 5 minutes’ walk from our hotel in Victoria. As you’ll learn Mexican is definitely my favourite type of food, and to be honest nachos, fajitas or anything with salsa is instantly the way to my heart. The food was gorgeous, nachos and fajitas to share were devoured in minutes, it was cheap and had an offer on cocktails.. What more could we want?!

The next day after the embassy appointment we met another of our friends and headed along to the south bank. It was a beautiful spring day, and deceptively hot – I actually managed to get sunburnt in the few hours we were out there! The south bank is another of my favourite places to pass time when I’m in London. I love just wandering along watching people bustling about their business and you can guarantee on a gorgeous day there’ll be plenty to watch, from photo shoots and interviews to street performers and bands, it’s all going on.

After enjoying the gorgeous sunshine, eating ice cream and watching plenty of street theatre we headed back to Victoria to pick up our bags and get a bite to eat at giraffe – yet again one of my favourite restaurants and another chain I wish we had back home!  By three pm, exactly 24 hours after I’d arrived, I found myself hugging everyone goodbye and climbing back up the stairs for another 7 hours on the coach back to Newcastle.

I had the most fantastic couple of days, and it was brilliant just to get away and clear my head, add to that the fact that my visa got approved (hello, America!) and I think I can say it was one of the best trips I’ve had in a while. It reminded me that while we quite often scoff at being a tourist somewhere we know, actually if you take even just a little time to explore you can find excitement round even the most familiar of corners.