Day 2- Brits love to queue

My second day in London was all about the y=mx+c. Long lines, short lines, pizza lines, bathroom lines. Lines everywhere. Every time I had something to do, I had to join a line, or as the British like to call it, queue. I've heard this word queue approximately 50 times during my three days in London and while this may sound like I'm exaggerating I'm really not. So a little preamble to how I found myself in this queue to get tickets for Wimbledon. Basically the only way to get good tickets is to queue up. Tickets are usually available online but they're almost impossible to get so that left me with no choice but to suck it up, buy a tent and camp out if I really wanted to see some of the bigger tennis players (I'm a huge tennis fan.)
So Thursday morning bright and early, Kai and I woke up at about 5am packed our backpacks and tent and headed down to the All England Lawn Tennis Club. From the time we stepped off the train there was Wimbledon paraphernalia everywhere! Of course I immediately started breathing heavily as I was not sure what my place in the line would be. The queue works as follows- you join the queue, and a steward (yes like game of thrones steward) gives you a card that tell you your number in line and basically that number determines whether or not you get tickets for center court, court 1 or court 2. When we got there we were number 153 in the line so I immediately knew I was going to get center court tickets since there are about 500 queue tickets available for each court.
So we pitched our tent, which by the way I had never done before in my life, and made ourselves at home.
Seeing that we were so heavily jet lagged we slept for most of the day and about after lunch we decided to wake up. On the right side of us was a group of 6 friends from London and New York that made queuing up at Wimbledon a yearly tradition. As soon as we woke up they immediately invited us to their "picnic party" which already consisted of an Italian guy that was their neighbor, an American guy and a Canadian guy that was the Italian guy's neighbor, 2 Chinese girls that were our neighbors on the other side, and a Scottish guy and an Irish guy that were the Chinese girls' neighbors. We all sat around on the grass chatting, drinking, eating and dancing, and soon enough it was time for dinner. Ivan, the Italian guy insisted that we all try some authentic Italian pizza so 4 of us decided to walk down the street to a nearby restaurant called Franco Manco to get dinner for everyone.  While walking to the restaurant James, one of the British guys taught us how to throw a rugby ball and surprisingly I was quite good at it. As soon as we got to the restaurant, the first thing we saw was a queue (obviously!) and it about half an hour we got the twelve pizzas we ordered and headed back to the Wimbledon campsite.
After dinner we hung out with our new found camping buddies and at about 10pm when the sun was just beginning to set (crazy right!) the stewards made their rounds and told us that we had to be in bed by 11pm and that we couldn't make any noise. When it became fully dark we told our friends goodnight and went into our tent to get a good rest because the stewards usually make their rounds at 5am to wake up all the campers.

*** I uploaded photos from days 1,2 and 3 when I made the post for day 1.... Sorry!

Day 1-London or Hades?

My first time in London was hot! And no, not just regular hot, but "nobody uses air conditioning units" hot! It was so hot that Kai (my best friend who I carried along on my European adventure) and I were literally walking around the city looking for businesses with air conditioning and free wifi just to cool down. Picture this. It's 5 o clock in the afternoon. Everyone's heading home from work. The train is jam packed, not even a little space to scratch your forehead. It's 90 degrees F and there's no air conditioning on the train. Now picture yourself on this train. 4 stops and this train takes you right to Hades. But anyways apparently this was the hottest day in London over the last few years and it usually never gets this hot, which is why many places in London don't have cold air built into their infrastructure. I was just lucky enough to be there on this day.

Anyways, apart from the heat I enjoyed every part of sight seeing in London. Seeing that all we brought on this trip were our backpacks (and a tent which will be explained on day 2), as soon as we landed in London on Wednesday morning we took the train directly from Heathrow airport to the city and got tickets for the hop-on hop-off sight seeing bus. It's called the Original tour and I would suggest that if you're going to London to do the Big Bus tour instead cause they have more buses on their routes. Our first entry into London was through Trafalgar Square and we were immediately wowed by the architecture. It was like rel neverseecomesee! These two black Caribbean boys that had never been anywhere except to America and the Caribbean found themselves in the middle of London Wednesday morning, selfie stick in hand, ready to explore.

Now I am not typically interested in History just cause I think it's boring but for some reason I thought that the tours were quite interesting. One thing I can remember specifically was when the bus dropped us off to see Buckingham Palace that we had to walk quite a bit to get to the street where the palace was located. The tour guide said that one morning Queen Victoria woke up and saw the big red buses in front of the palace and thought that it was too ugly to be there so she banned them from passing in front of the palace ever since. We also saw the Big Ben, the London Tower (and some other places I can't remember the names of), and went on a river cruise down the Thames river.

After sight seeing we contacted my cousin who gladly offered her place for us to stay while we were in London, and decided to meet in Convent gardens (I absolutely love this place). After getting lost many times and final

ly finding the meeting spot we then took the train to Hades on the way to her house. As soon as we got home we got cleaned up and went back into the city for some late night exploring on our own. The most difficult part for us was navigating without internet which we somehow managed to do but it was all an adventure and that's the purpose of this trip.