Today is my last full day in London, so there were a few things on my list that I have to see before I can go home! The first is seeing the Olympic stadium and olympic park. We took the tube out to the park, but unfortuantely for security reasons we could not really get anywhere near it. Luckily one of the department stores nearby had set up a viewing station, so we could at least get a pretty decent view. We entered the department store, which was absolutely beautiful. I think it was built just for the olympics. They had a giant olympic store and we got a little distracted before finding the viewing platform. We did come across a really cool replica of the olympic stadium built out of lego. Employees told us that people had worked all through the night putting it together and it has just been finished that morning. So we were some of the first people ever to get to see it! Pretty cool, I have put a picture below so you can see it too.
If you look carefully in the crowd you can see a lot of different characters including Harry Potter, Darth Vader, Indiana Jones, the easter bunny and many more. We spent a long time looking at it, but we finally moved on and got a look at the real stadium. It wasn't nearly as interesting as the one in lego.
The next stop on my list was to visit the Abbey road crossing, made famous by the Beatles. We had a little bit of trouble finding this because I had a less than adequate map. So I figured if we hopped on the tube to the Abbey Road station it would take us right there. This was absolutely wrong. This took us to the Abbey Road in the ghetto. We got off of the tube for about 2 seconds and then turned around and went back. We decided to head to the beatles store off of Baker to ask for directions, because I was pretty sure I had walked to Abbey Road from there on my last visit.
The store set us in the right direction and we were able to walk through a very nice neighborhood until we were able to find the crossing. My dream to appear on the Abbey Road camera finally came true, and my awesome sister was able to get a screen capture for me! Now when I watch the camera while I am bored at work I can really say "I've been there!"
Abbey Road was really the last thing on my list that I absolutely had to do before I left, so we spent the rest of the afternoon walking through Hyde Park. While we were in Hyde Park it started pouring rain. Surprise, surprise London. We walked to Kensington Palace for some cover, but unfortunately when we got there it was closed for tours so we just spent some time wandering through the gift shop. We spent forever in there but it did not stop raining, so we decided just to go for it, since we were already pretty much soaked.
We continued on around the park and walked along the Princess Diana memorial trail which led us to the memorial fountain. It was hard to enjoy it in the rain, but it was still very pretty. We returned to the city, and at this point it had really started to pour. We stopped for dinner at a place called Pret, recommended to us by our friend we met in Edinburgh. The food was good and super cheap. I was super hungry so I really didn't even taste anything anyways.
We sat in the restaurant for awhile, but still the rain was not giving up. We decided to just explore a little bit longer before heading home. We walked through the Buckingham Palace gardens and around Buckingham Palace to take some pictures. The nice thing was, with so much rain there were not a ton of people out. So I got some decent photos around the Palace. The rain was still coming down hard and I was sick of it and ready to go home and be dry. We headed back to the hostel so we could shower and be warm.
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