Weekend in the City

For our first weekend back in London we tried to knock off a few sights that we had discussed over Christmas & been disappointed we hadn't seen yet. Friday evening we ventured out to our first Brick Lane curry house, Sheba. It was fine, nothing super exciting, but we managed to "haggle" 15% off the price!! There are guys that lurk outside of each of the restaurants trying to lure you in by offering discounts or free bottles of wine, etc., so it's worth appearing a little reluctant even if you know exactly which restaurant you are going to :) We used this article to guide our decision: http://www.thrillist.com/eat/london/rating-every-curry-house-on-brick-lane. We probably wouldn't have noticed a difference between most of them but it was nice to know which ones to avoid outright!

Saturday afternoon we headed out to Kensington Palace to chill with Will & Kate & George. They were quite rude and stood us up unfortunately. Kensington Palace itself was a bit underwhelming. It was not nearly as grand as I was expecting and I probably wouldn't recommend to visitors to London to go through on the self-guided tour, especially at almost 20 pounds a ticket!! I admittedly may just be a little bitter due to the lack of Kate sightings.

Sunday was another day of stupid travel decisions trying to get to Windsor Castle. Something is up with Google Maps and it seems to be giving terrible advice for which routes to take lately! We ended up on a city bus for the first leg even though the tube would've been WAY quicker, and then a crazy expensive bus ride for an hour out to Windsor instead of a short train. In summary, treat Google Maps a little skeptically from now on.

Windsor Castle was awesome though. The ticket cost included an audio guide and we managed to randomly pick a weekend that some of the "semi-private" rooms happened to be open. Compared to Kensington Palace it was definitely MUCH more impressive & worth the cost.

Sunset at the Castle

Pretty winter gardens



View across to the private side of the castle

I also really appreciated that the audio guide is included in the price of your ticket. Usually you have to pay extra to get the audio guide so I rarely use them, but they really do add another level to the experience. This one had nice classical music interludes so it provided a nice atmosphere to the walk.

We finished up our time in Windsor with a decent Sunday roast at a local pub, coincidentally called "The Duchess of Cambridge" :)

I started back at school on Monday, and this week has been wild! I definitely didn't appreciate how easy our last semester was, and am really feeling the overload only 1 week in! I am debating deleting my Netflix account.

Ciao for now!