New Year's Eve in London (Part I)

I am lucky to have a very close friend who lives in London now. Her name is Emily and we’ve been friends for like 8 years now. Before she went there, we had a huge fight. We stopped talking to each other for a few months, and then she called me one day, from her English cellphone number and told me that she managed to realize her plans and went to London, found a waitering job there and applied to a university for the next academic year. And then she told me to come and visit her, that she wanted to see me and that she has already forgotten about that fight and didn’t even want to talk about it anymore.

That’s how I ended up spending New Year’s Eve in London. She called me during Christmas time and luckily found me here, in Poland, spending it with my family. I didn’t think twice before telling her that I would come – I didn’t want to spend New Year’s Eve in front of the TV with my parents, watching some stupid concert. Honestly, I love this city. It is extremely expensive, but well – it’s London. One of the most fancy cities in the world! Piccadilly Circus, Tower Bridge, fireworks over the Big Ben... Just amazing. So, having this vision in my mind, I bought my ticket for 200 euros, both ways, with Ryanair just two days before going. It was really spontaneous and changes my plans entirely. New Year’s Eve in London. Awesome.

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Day 1

I went to the airport in Lodz, my home city, and took a direct flight to Stansted Airport, London. The flight lasted approximately one hour and a half – it is really close from here to London and thanks to Ryanair, we have a perfect connection. She wasn’t able to pick me up from the airport, so without further complications, I just took a taxi that drove me to her home. Luckily, I only had one hand luggage, with some clothes and necessary stuff that will allow me to live there for a few days. I paid 25 pounds for the taxi – a real fortune I would say, given that the pounds are even more expensive than euros, and in Poland we have zloty (1 euro is around 4. 20 zlotys... ). As I learned later, both the taxis and the public transport are extremely expensive in London. Emily lives quite far from the center of London, in a district that is mostly inhabited by foreigners – that’s Africans, Arabs and Hindu people. The first thing that surprised me when I got there was seeing a guy going to shop next to his house, wearing only his pijama and his slippers. And of course, the weather. English weather is just awful, honestly. And for someone who loves hot weather, it is even worse. So not surprisingly and according to english weather standards, when I got out of the taxi, grabbed my luggage and started to look for the correct door number, it started to rain. It was already dark too, and I didn’t really feel comfortable on that weird street. There was no one around, just a lot of buildings that seemed quite old, glued to one another, and a poorly looking primary school. Luckily enough, Emily saw me through her window and opened the front door for me before I managed to find it on my own.

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Day 2

Obviously, we spent the first night talking until the sun rose. It was around 1 pm when we woke up and we decided to go to the nearby Subway to get our breakfast. And then we went to visit the city. I have been to London before, but it still made quite an impression on me. We took a walk down the street towards the nearest underground station and waited there to meet Emily’s boyfriend, a Hindi guy with a complicated name. We made the line towards the ticket vending machine, what took us around half an hour because it was so huge it stretched out of the station onto the street. I decided to buy a week metro pass, which was the best option, as we planned to be visiting a lot. Once we were done with it, we headed towards the city center. We took a walk along the Thames River, went to the Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament that are just next to the Big Ben, crossed the Tower Bridge to the other side of the river and found a small restaurant where we had dinner and then decided to have hot chocolate with blueberry muffins for dessert. It was already dark outside when we finished eating, and not surprisingly, it was raining. After that, Emily took me to Westfield, a popular London shopping center, to have a girls’ night out. We took a ride with one of the famous London red, two-storey buses, and of course climbed to the second deck, where her boyfriend told us the story of how they met before we said goodbye to him and headed towards Westfield.

To be continued...

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