London for the Day

On Thursday, I went to London for the day to hang out with the Mississippi College girls before they head home for good. Their semester officially ended on Thursday! I'm gonna miss having them only two hours away! The train tickets from Stratford to London are pretty cheap, and I REALLY like taking the train! Even though the trip is a little over two hours, all I have to do is sit...no worrying about whether or not I'm going the right way, no paying attention to the road...I can listen to my iPod, read, even sleep! When I got to London Marylebone train station, I hopped on the Tube and headed to Southwark to get coffee at my favorite coffee shop - Monmouth Cafe. It's in the area of London where "Bridget Jones's Diary" was filmed, and it's about half a mile from the London Bridge. Once you leave the Tube station, you have to walk through a HUGE food market called Borough Market...it's pretty famous, and you can find just about anything...fruit, veggies, fish, poultry, even food from different parts of the world. It's really neat to walk though. I think the atmosphere at Monmouth is what makes me like it so much...it's very open, and they serve coffee from all over the world. My favorite coffee is from Guatemala. You can sit at a big table and eat bread with butter and jam, or sit on a stool by the window and look out onto the market. There's also a flower market a few stores down, which is gorgeous! Jeannie and I just happened to stumble upon Monmouth Cafe during a walking tour of the South Bank when we spent a month living in London. We definitely became hooked! The employees are really nice, too...the guy who made my coffee told me that my earrings were "groovy." :) After I had coffee, I walked across the London Bridge (it's hard to beat the view of London from the River Thames) and took the Tube to Covent Garden to look around. I browsed though a few shops but sadly, didn't buy anything. Then I met up with Mallory, LeeAnn, and Emily Rankin in their hotel near Russell Square. We hung out in their room for awhile, and then went to eat at Wagamama's, an absolutely delicious noodle bar. We tried to find the one closest to their hotel, but ended up walking to Leicester Square (the restaurant is a popular chain). You eat cafeteria style - long tables with stools. The service is pretty good! I think Wagamama's is definitely my favorite restaurant in all of Europe! After Wagamama's, we went to Haagen Daz for ice cream, on the other side of Leicester Square. The Haagen Daz in London isn't just a little ice cream store...it's an actual restaurant, and a pretty nice one at that! But it serves one thing only - ice cream! After we stuffed ourselves full, we hung out for a little bit, and then it was time for me to head back to Stratford-upon-Avon. On the train ride back, I had to switch trains in Hatton. Well, our train got a little delayed, so the conductor called the connecting train that I was supposed to catch, and they waited for me! That's one awesome thing about the National Rail in England...if you buy a ticket, they WILL get you to where you're going, no matter what. When I took the train to the airport on the morning that I flew back home, one of my trains never showed. So they called a cab for me, and I rode forty minutes in a cab to the airport...paid for by the National Rail! Although customer service in restaurants, shops, and banks is seriously lacking in the UK, at least the railroad company does it right! :) On Friday night, I went to a Rotary frog racing contest (it was for charity, and we didn't use actual frogs!), but I'll write about that in a later post. Have a great weekend!