Start of our Eurotrip

WE ARE GOING TO.....

&

Brussels & Amsterdam!!!

To my parents, who are likely confused & concerned as I should be studying & it seems like I'm traveling everywhere: UCL has a reading week in the middle of February (Feb 14th- Feb 24th) and we will be traveling for half of that week. Jess, Ilana, Laura and I are flying to Brussels the morning of Friday, Feb 14th (sorry JJ) and staying the weekend eating waffles & chocolate :) Then we're taking a train on Sunday from Brussels to Amsterdam and will be staying in a hostel in the center of Amsterdam. Then, Wednesday morning we fly back to London and spend the rest of the week studying of course :)

Spitalfields Market

Today Jess and I decided to be adventurous and go to Spitalfields Market, which was supposed to have a great cupcake place, great food in general, and lots of art/clothing booths. After we got off the tube at Liverpool Street (the station is also huge btw), we honestly had 0 idea where we were going. So we assumed the market was close to the river and started walking towards the river.... nope that's wrong it's not-- it's actually in the opposite direction. So after getting Google Maps out to help us get to the general vicinity of Spitalfields, as was labeled on maps, we finally found ourselves looking down the street of open-air clothing markets. Walking down it a little bit, we found a road full of food trucks ranging from Chinese to Indian to Caribbean and we were SO excited to finally find Spitalfields! (Because like, we're evidently terrible navigators and have been wandering for at least 20 minutes by now) Also, since this was right after class, we were starving and wanted to eat. I got Indian food, Jess got a monstrous chicken wrap and the food was so good and so cheap.

So after eating we decided to look around at the market more and go find this cupcake place. After realizing that this market was literally one street long and only had sketchy clothing booths and knock off purse booths.... we started to suspect we were in the wrong place. And we were... We were actually about 10 minutes away from the REAL Spitalfields Market, which is indoors and actually really pretty.

Liverpool Station

The "market"

Food booths

Our food :)

Also, since we also apparently lack foresight, the market on a monday afternoon was basically empty-- as in no shoppers/viewers and no booths. Most of the market was largely empty and there was mostly only clothing booths with graphic T-shirts/dresses/scarves/coats...nothing that we were interested in.

But hey, it's no problem cuz we can get yummy cupcakes! Nope. After literally scouring the entire market and not being able to find the place, Jess went back to google and found out that the cupcake place was ONLY OPEN ON SATURDAYS. I wanted to killll her haha. So we settled on Lola's Cupcakes and headed home :)

a random pretty church on the way 

 the entrance :)

 inside

 row of nice stores

After we got back, I went to my new favorite library, the Archaeology one, and knocked out another MCAT practice test :) Cheers to studying & fun!

Sunday workdays

So Sundays are always the catch-up-on-work days but a couple hours of reading and reviewing science gets realllyyy boring. So instead I'd rather look at pictures of all the amazing food from yesterday :)

chicken pie at Covent Garden 

 Chocolate at Venchi

 Macaroons at Laduree

the packaging was so pretty! & the pamphlet inside had a description and instructions :)

Another round of guess where?!

...Edinburgh, Scotland! We just booked our train tickets for the first weekend in February!

Buckingham Palace & Covent Garden

Today we all woke up relatively early and were able to go sightseeing! Laura, Sami and I went to Buckingham Palace first, walked to the Wellington arch area and then took the tube to Covent Garden to browse the shops and get dinner :)

We took the tube to Victoria station and walked the rest of the way to Buckingham & passed the Royal Mews on the way there... still not entirely sure what's inside... that'll be a trip for another day :)

Casual roomie re-enactment of the statues outside Buckingham... yup people were staring and laughing haha

 

it was actually a really nice day when we started out and all of a sudden the clouds rolled in

the london eye from in front of Buckingham

Gates to Green Park

the guards :)

Then we went to Wellington Arch and saw all the memorials they had in that square. On the walk there we passed by the police on horses!

Wellington Arch

New Zealand War Memorial, dedicated to the war dead of New Zealand in the first & second World Wars

Machine Gun Corps Memorial. The small quote at the bottom says "Saul hath slain his thousands but David has tens of thousands"

Royal Artillery Memorial, a World War I memorial

Australian War Memorial, dedicated to the war dead of Australia in the first & second World Wars