London, Paris, maybe Tokyo...

First off, I apologize to all of my loyal readers for the nearly month long blog hiatus, it has been a busy and exciting month though so you might want to sit back, relax, grab a cup of tea (or coffee depending on your personal preference and perhaps the time of day) and several cookies, and prepare to read what will probably be a long (but hopefully interesting) post.

Secondly, you may be wondering, "why on earth would she make the title 'London, Paris, maybe Tokyo...'" and here is my answer, when I was a young child, I had a slight obsession with Hilary Duff (embarrassing, I know) and this was the line in a song of hers. At the time, I had never been to any of these places and they all seemed so foreign and far away, yet here I am now, having been to all three. "What in the world? I've read the blog post about Paris, remember Marie went to Tokyo with the Uni High Japan trip...but London? when did this happen?" is what you must be thinking now, so I will start by talking about London which I went to this past month and got to spend New Years with my friends Anna and Big Ben.

My last day in Granada I went to part of the Alhambra that I hadn't been to, walked through the city and took pictures of cool Graffiti (which there is a lot of!), and also sent a bunch of postcards because I had several that I had been meaning to send, and I also realized that the 15 euros of stamps that I had bought probably would only work with the Spain post office... so I couldn't wait until I got to Germany to send them. I also sent a package to my family. The last day the post office was open before holiday break. Talk about timing.

I was a little bit bummed to be getting to Germany the evening of the 23rd, because Anna had said that all of the Christmas markets would be closing. However, I actually got there just in time to see the Rüdesheim Christmas market. After hearing so much about them, it would have been a shame to miss it. And it did not disappoint. The germans that I met in Spain were always saying that Spain didn't even know what a christmas market was. And now I must say that I agree. This was not just a little Christmas market in a plaza, but rather the whole town transformed into a Christmas market. So that was a fun welcome. Also nice to be greeted with open arms by Anna and her wonderful family! So I spent Christmas in Germany, and for those who don't know, Christmas is officially both the 25th and 25th of December here! With Christmas Eve the 24th still, but most people open gifts the evening of the 24th.

Then a few days later, we left on a night bus from Frankfurt to London! There were 8 of us in total, and I had briefly met everyone going to London with us before, so that was good. It's also a pretty nice way of travelling to leave at night and sleep on a bus then wake up and be there (more or less). I also got to sing the song "I see London, I see France, I see ____'s underpants" while crossing the English Channel and have it be true ;)

The first day there (which was New Years Eve) we saw Buckingham Palace and ate a traditional English meal of Indian food, then went into the heart of the city and saw the count down and fireworks and walked around and such. Then the next day we did a lot more touring and I got to feel like Harry Potter on several occasions, from walking through platform 9 3/4 to being surrounded by death eaters on Millennium Bridge and ending the day by walking through Diagon Alley and bumping into the Weasley clan with the trips night bust tour (yes of course all of this really happened, I would never exaggerate). We also saw London Bridge, Big Ben, went through Camden Lock area, St. Peters Church, Westminster Abbey,  and other touristy stuff. But anyway, London was really really fun and it was so cool to be there over New Years with the 250,000 other people along the Thames River.

For those of you who don't have facebook, here are a few key photos from the trip:

The whole group!

Then just a day after we got back from London, Abby arrived and we hung out in Rüdesheim for a few days and then headed off to ski in Austria! To keep this post from getting too intimidatingly long (I've found that the intimidation level in reading two medium sized posts/articles/anything is much less than in reading one long one).