In 2015, I traveled to the UK for the first time. I was in my last year of undergrad and I was invited to a conference at the University of Bath, all expenses paid, for little 22-year-old me, for some reason lol. I stayed in London for about a week and went to Bath for the conference for the day. I remember that during that stay, I caught a cold, I had to study because I had an oral exam on my way back, I had to finish a research paper, prepare for the conference presentation, and so on. I did manage to see the city, yes, but I was super busy with all the other stuff. I spent most of my evenings in my hostel studying and working like the loser I am, although I do remember I did pretty good in my oral exam on my way back, so yay I guess (?).

That was 10 years ago and since then, I’ve been to London several other times since we moved to Germany, but the schedule hasn’t really changed, as most of the time I’ve had to travel due to a conference or workshops. A few other times I’ve traveled to go to concerts, but usually for not more than 2 days. Basically, even after going several times, I felt like I didn’t know much about London at all.

But this fiiiiinally changed a few weeks ago!!!!! My two sisters and I just spent one week in London in full vacation mode. So here’s what happened.

Trip preparations

My middle sister has been obsessed with London ever since she watched Sherlock like 10 years ago, and we originally had a trip planned back in 2020 for Easter, which had to be cancelled because of the pandemic. So I knew they were going to be super excited to go.

Given that I had sort of like vacation-planning burnout after organizing my trip to Korea back in May, I told my sisters that I didn’t want to do any planning whatsoever, and they had to do everything by themselves. A good thing about having type A siblings is that they totally deliver lol. My younger sister planned an exhaustive itinerary, following the template I made for my trip to Korea.

I won’t go into detail about what we did each day, as this is already on
the itinerary, but I wanted to share some highlights.

Food

We had the best banana bread I’ve ever had from a bakery near the British Museum called Fortitude Bakehouse. I’m very serious about banana bread; it’s always my to-go option when I go to cafes. We went to Maltby Street Market and ate a Bahn Mi that was soooo good. We also went to the typical bagel shop on Brick Lane, twice, because one salmon cream cheese bagel for less than 3 pounds was not enough.

Sightseeing

Horizon 22 was definitely a highlight. It’s a..viewing platform? viewing building? Not sure how to call it. Basically a corporate building that was an observation deck on the top floor. It’s free but you have to make reservations beforehand. My sister really outdid herself with this. It was super unexpected and the view was amazing. It was not too full, so you could take pictures quite comfortably.

We also went to Marx’s grave right before the Labubu fiasco.

Museums

We went to the Yoshimoto Nara expo at the Southbank Centre. The expo opened in Germany last year, at the Museum Frieder Burda, which is almost at the frontier with France, too far for me to go (still getting over my German train trauma after my last trip to Amsterdam…more on that in a next post).

When my sister was planning the itinerary, she asked me what my non-negotiables were. I told her that, besides Marx’s grave, I wanted to go to the Tate Modern. Having recently read a few of Susan Sontag’s essays, where she mentioned the Tate Modern a few times, I really wanted to go. As with other museums, it was free, and really cool. They offered a few free tours, which I would’ve taken if I had been alone, but we were tired and it was late, so we explored it on our own.

Lastly, the Camera Museum was such a cool place to visit. It’s a tiny venue with old cameras on exhibit. We were literally the only ones there; they have a cafe on the ground floor and a shop where they repair cameras. As it seemed like a very non-touristy place, I asked my sister how she knew it existed. She told me she checks the surroundings of the area we plan to visit at a given time, just to check if something is interesting that she might have overlooked. Again, Type A travel planner.

Overall, we had a great time! We did everything we wanted to do, and ate very yummy things. A couple of days were very warm, and it rained once, but luckily we were indoors.

A small sidenote that we noticed after our trip ended: we should’ve taken only the bus to travel everywhere as the subway fare is so much more expensive and they don’t charge it right away, so you don’t see the charge in your creditcard until 1 or 2 days afterwards and then pafff!, 10 euros of charge; they say a full day trip is around 8,99 pounds, and the Euro-Pound conversion is no good for Euros and we could definitely feel that lol the bus is so much cheaper so we should’ve stuck with that.