Dessau, Ni Hao: London

I'm finally getting around to my last installment of the Holiday Trip series. I'm such a slacker, I know! But the thought of picking my favorite pictures and then editing them was too overwhelming with finals looming over me. Thankfully, the end is right around the corner. Not thankfully, it's almost time to leave this wonderful place. But that's for another post.

London! My favorite city on the trip, and maybe ever. I just fell in love, everything about it was amazing. After a rocky end to my Paris trip anything was up from there, but I like to think that had nothing to do with it.

Christine and I arrived to London in the evening, and even though we had some tricky night-time transportation to deal with -- tricky mostly due to the fact we were so ungodly tired we could barely keep our eyes open -- we made it to our couch surfing hosts' place. If you don't know what couch surfing is.. well google it right now. It changed the way I think about travel and now I consider "connecting with locals" high on my travel must-do list. Anyway, Christine and I were lost for a bit in a rather shady part of town (opposite direction of where our host's pad was), but magically, a fox appeared and led us to a park, where the place was just around the corner from. We had never seen a fox before and I may have squealed with delight. After that we lovingly referred to that fox as our "spirit fox guide".

Our host set us up in her living room with a blow up mattress, and to our delight their Christmas tree was still up. We were so happy, I can barely describe that moment. Drunk off of lack of sleep and finally getting to lay down, all while underneath glowing white lights.

Needless to say we slept until 1pm the next afternoon. It was much needed rest, but we were quickly losing daylight. After a wonderful home cooked breakfast by our hosts, we set out to take some picture of Big Ben + the Parliament (the next Florence + the Machine?) and walk along the waterfront. Christine and I enjoyed each others company but we were sad to find that no food places were open, and of course we had set a mission to find the best fish and chips in London. We settled on a coffee shop instead.

On day two, Christine and I met up with Kaitlin who was staying with a different couch surfing host. We did some stops on the Harry Potter tour (that last picture is of the inspiration of Diagon Alley!) which made us insanely happy. We also did a little shopping and I found some cute new things, and some presents that were unfortunately left at a bar in the latter part of the London trip. Sad times.

The rest of the trip we managed to shop, and shop some more (which explains were most of my January money went) and just relax. It was so nice to just hang and chat with the girls and not take on London at full speed like the rest of our trip. We found lots of time to eat, drink tea, BUY tea (yummm), visit free museums (London rocks), get haircuts, and just relax. We did manage to get our fish and chips, thanks to Kaitlin's host.

The last night, Christine, Kaitlin and I met our hosts for drinks at a hip bar in Soho, London (news to me that the one in NY wasn't the first). This first bar was the black hole in which my gifts were lost... but the night was amazing from there on out. Our hosts had to go home and get to bed, but since our flight was really early and because we didn't want to oversleep, we decided to just party and then sleep on the plane. Oh, the life of the responsible. We hung out with a co-worker of our host who was cute as ever, and her date who was also way adorable considering he danced like a goofball with a group of girls, and had to share his date with us. We danced, did some shots (some of us not so successfully... Christine), and met a tranny -- hooray! Best night ever!

We went back to the house just to pack and get our things, and then to the airport we went. It was a miserable time, as usual, due to lack of seating and the super fast security (which surprisingly is a bad thing when you have time to kill).

Then it was home, sweet Dessau. I was sad to see the trip end, but reminiscing on it all is still really exciting. I still can't believe that all happened.

Pinch me.

Prost!

I had all these amazing posts written in my head, about the first snowfall, cooking my first whole pumpkin and making seeds and pie (DELICIOUS pie... thanks to Paula Deen and The PW), and my plans for my trip, but plans unexpectedly changed and now I'm leaving TODAY. A friend's parents invited myself and some others to go to Berlin tonight to have dinner, and it just didn't make sense to come back for only half a day. So hello Berlin! I'm adding you to the stops on my Christmas Break Adventure!

Since I don't have time to give this post the lovin' it deserves, I'm just going to show some favorite pictures I found via Flickr of the places I'll be going. This is probably the most adventurous trip I've ever taken and I'm beyond excited about it. Seeing new architecture, experiencing new culture... this is the pinnacle of what I came to Europe to do!