The Final Day in London

Today was one of the days I was most looking forward to in London- shopping! In the morning we headed out to High Kensington Street to check out Topshop. This is a shop kind of like Forever 21, but more expensive. We didn’t see anything we loved enough to pay a lot of money for so we left. But it was still fun to check out that area of London.

Next we hopped on the tube to Hyde Park where we had a picnic lunch. Claire got scared by a pigeon that flapped its wings when I tried to shoo it away with my foot and a squirrel that crawled out from under the bench next to her foot and stole the potato chip she had dropped. I was really entertained.

After lunch we walked down to Harrods, the most insane department store I’ve ever seen. It is huge, elaborate, and expensive. We went up to the Georgian Restaurant on the fourth floor for traditional afternoon tea. It was quite an experience. At first Claire and I felt very out of place, like we were obviously Americans who had no idea what we were doing. We ordered strawberry kiwi tea and were brought plates of tea sandwiches, scones, and desserts by a very twitchy waiter. It seemed like we were the only people there making messes of their plates as we picked at our sandwiches and took apart our scones to remove the raisins. Though we felt slightly better when we noticed the proper-looking old lady at the table next to us had destroyed her scone as well. We then waited for someone to bring us a check, which they never did. No one came to check on us either, so we couldn’t ask for the check. We’ve been noticing that waiters over here give you a very long time to enjoy your food and don’t bring you the check unless asked. Eventually I caught a waiter’s eye and when he came to check on us we asked for the check. It took about 5 minutes to get the check. We put our credit cards in the book and waited for it to be picked up. It took probably about 20 minutes for someone to come pick up our credit cards. After that it took over 30 minutes before they brought us back our receipts to sign. So overall it took us an hour to pay. But it was still fun to sit there and chat and experience tea the way it is supposed to be experienced.

Then we did something that any self-respecting Harry Potter fan must do: we went to King’s Cross Station and took pictures with the trolley at Platform 9 ¾. We had to ask for directions, just like Harry did, but we were met with a much nicer response and directions as to where to find it. When we got there there were already people taking pictures so we didn’t feel as silly.

We returned to our hostel, did laundry, and packed up to leave for Edinburgh the next morning.