An Unexpected Detour
London is Calling
While we were in New York we did a lot of planning for the next part of our trip: Europe in the fall. Most of that trip planning included booking flights and accommodations, because those are the only things that really need to be done ahead of time. Our trans-Atlantic flight from NYC would land first in Amsterdam.
During our planning, we found out that AirBnBs in Amsterdam were in excess of 100 Euros per night. Suddenly our original plan to visit Amsterdam got very expensive. With a little more research, we found that we could get a flight from Amsterdam to London and find an AirBnB there for around 50 Euros a night. Over two weeks, this ended up saving us some money and that’s how we ended up unexpectedly visiting London!
We were delighted to discover that most of the museums in London are free, with admission by donation. The Victoria and Albert Museum had lots of Egyptian and Greek ruins, as well as the Rosetta Stone. The Natural History Museum had some dinosaur bones, a huge room of gems and minerals, and a vault with meteorite dust that’s supposedly the oldest thing we would ever see— 4.5 billion years old.
While not strictly a museum, we also took a day to head out of London and visit the Warner Brothers Studio Tour of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. This was a dream come true for Yuki, who (after Taylor Swift) is most excited about Harry Potter.
The Studio has real sets from the eight movies. It was interesting to walk through and they say it usually takes 3 hours… but we took 8 or 9 (including time to listen to a digital guide containing extra informative videos and photos).
Yuki took 900 photos of practically everything. The most interesting was a scale model of the Hogwarts castle at the very end of the tour — it filled the centre of a large room. It was used for filming and updated with each movie to add more features.
Of course, while in London we also did walked around the city to see some of the famous sites like Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. Unfortunately the Abbey was closed when we visited, so we weren’t able to go inside.
Curiously, we also went to the Institute of Civil Engineering because they had a free exhibit. At one point they had a huge model of a suspension bridge made out of Lego but it is no longer there. We also visited the Parliament building and Big Ben, but the latter was covered in scaffolding and is undergoing renovations (until 2019 apparently!) so we didn’t see much of it.
Along with the museums, we also visited the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery to see some famous paintings (by artists like Monet and Picasso) as well as the Tower Bridge. Yuki found out that due to limited marine traffic, Tower Bridge only raises on request and the request needs to be provided with 24hrs notice. We planned our day to see one of two openings of the day.
While most of the Harry Potter movies were filmed on sets, a few locations around London were used in the movies. Yuki figured out where these were and made her own self-guided walking tour. One of the places is Leadenhall Market, which houses upscale clothing shops… including an Optometrist whose exterior was used as the entrance to the Leaky Cauldron pub.
It seems like everywhere we go has to have some connection to Taylor Swift and London was no different. Yuki took us to a kebab shop and a bar/restaurant where Taylor Swift filmed part of her End Game music video. The kebab shop owner was really nice and told us about how Taylor Swift came in to eat and film, and we had a good dinner there. Next door to the kebab place was a pub; here, we went upstairs to the room where some other scenes were filmed. We were expecting to buy drinks to get in and take photos… but there wasn’t anyone around so we took our photos and fled.
We were hoping to get some photos of Taylor Swift’s End Game music video scene on the Millennium Bridge but it was closed for filming, so our tour of London ended up with photos from beside it instead.
