London My Favorite City
By embitca
London is my favorite city in the world and it's a place that draw me back to it again and again. My first trip to London at the age of 19 was my first solo trip anywhere. I found a homestay program in one of my guidebooks and so I spent my first several days staying on the outskirts of London near Ealing Broadway. Each morning the older lady I was staying with would come into my room and place a cup of tea by my bedside and then wake me up so I could have breakfast and start my day of sight-seeing. It was like having my own British grandmother.
On that first trip to the UK, which was three weeks long, I was supposed to spend a week in London and then the rest of the time in Liverpool with a pen pal of mine. Well, after traveling up to Liverpool and spending two days with him, I determined we really weren't such great friends after all, so I spontaneously decided to take the ferry from Liverpool to Dublin and make my way to County Galway to see some of my family. Partly, I wanted to go to Ireland. And partly, I just wanted to get away from my penpal and couldn't afford a whole week on my own in England, so family to the rescue!
After a great week in Galway with my relatives who lived out in the middle of nowhere I went back to London for a few more days and ended up staying with some relatives there I didn't even know I had.
One of the funny things about that entire trip was that every single day I was in London it rained. The only time it didn't rain was the week I spent in Ireland.
Other trips to London
After the success of my first trip to London,I was back over there again in 1987. This time I went with some friends of mine at college. We were going to the World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton, England, but we scheduled several extra days around it so we flew into Paris, spent a few days there, took the train/ferry to England, spent several nights in Earls Court, London and then went to the...