London Locals-Day 128-May 19th, 2018

After a nice sleep that wasn’t in a hostel, I woke feeling pretty refreshed. Soon after, both Sam and Andrew woke up too. We took our time getting ready this morning and had some cereal for breakfast.

Once we finished eating, we took Sam’s two dogs out for a long walk. There are a few hiking trails very close to his house, so we used those. After a short walk with the dogs, we made it to the top of a hill where you could see pretty far.

Sam with his dog

Andrew and Sam on a bench

 

Once we got back from the walk, everyone showered and got changed. We were going to London for the day and Sam was going to take us to his favorite spots. This meant stopping at the occasional place for food or drinks with sites and stores in between.

To get to London, Sam drove us for about twenty minutes and we got on a train. This process seemed very similar as going to NYC from my house.

Our first stop of the day at around 2 was this spot called Gordon’s Wine Bar. You can predict what we did here. We grabbed a nice table where we sat for an hour or two and had a few glasses of wine.

Sam arriving with the house White

After Gordon’s we started to go to some shops. We happened to be near by the Lego store and naturally had to go in. This is something that I believe should be done in every city. There were a bunch of Chinese people speaking Mandarin and Andrew went up to start speaking with them in Mandarin. They were very surprised and confused to Sam and I’s entertainment.

Andrew with his new friends

From the Lego store we headed to some other shops. We love to do this act where you go to expensive stores and make it look like you’re going to buy something. The next stop was the flagship Burberry store which is massive. We ended up getting into a ten minute conversation with one of the employees about what direction he thought the brand was going towards under their new creative director, Riccardo Tisci. Safe to say we were successful in our quest of pretending that we were going to buy something.

We spent the next few hours in a mix of looking at more stores and seeing some of the more touristy sites. This was Andrew’s first time in London and he hadn’t seen anything before.

Andrew and Sam on some street, Union Jacks on full display

I didn’t document the day a ton, but sometimes it’s better just to live out your day and focus less on writing the perfect blog. Once we had finished with going to Buckingham Palace and Harrod’s, we were satisfied with all our browsing and sight seeing. We stopped for a quick bite at McDonald’s to refuel us. According to my phone, we had walked around seven miles. All of us had very tired feet at this point.

Our last destination was one of Sam’s favorite bars, which I cannot recall the name of. We stayed there for about an hour and each had a drink. I got a Birra Morretti, which is one of my favorite Italian beers. After hanging out there for a while, we took the tube back to the train station, then took another train back to Sam’s car. On the way back, we stopped pick up two pizzas. I didn’t mind at all only eating burgers and pizza today.

We got home and feasted on the pies. After eating and cleaning up, we just relaxed in his living room for a few hours and didn’t do much. This was one of those times where doing nothing can be really enjoyable.

A little before midnight, we all headed to bed.