Day 8 - Trains & Hotels: Now this is proper holidaying
After a week of being in England, we can now say we are on “proper” holidays, having caught the underground tube, and staying in a hotel in the city.
13/11/2023
Today marks the day we have been in England for 1 whole week! Although, to be honest, it feels like we have been here a month. We’ve settled into our now standard morning routine of waking up and beginning work from 5am through to mid-morning. From there, we pack up the dining room table and move back upstairs to get ready for the day.
To give a breakdown of how we decide on what we want to do for the day, we sometimes just get ready, head to the bus and decide on the way where we get off. Other times it is weather dependent (don’t really want to go walking Hyde Park in the rain). But today, today we had a plan!
While living back in Aus, I (Matt) listened to a podcast all about Premier League Football, that was run by a couple of journalists who live in London. Well they are doing a live podcast tour and I thought it would be great to drag Chelsea along to this as well haha. So today, we are packing an overnight bag and heading into the city, as the podcast finishes at 10:30pm and both Chels & I thought it might be a better idea to not take the hour-long bus home afterwards, just to turn around in the morning and come back in.
After packing up, we decided to head into the city around 12pm. This generally would involve catching a 237 or 267 through Chiswick and then either a 9 or 94 into the city. Which, allowing for traffic, can take up to an hour or more. So today we thought we would be brave and take the “tube”. We were a bit worried about being lost underground for half a day, but we persisted nonetheless.
We caught the 237 Bus into Chiswick and walked up to Turnham Green Station. Walking over to the ticket machine to figure out where we were going, a nice lady came over and told us that the tickets are overpriced and only used as a last resort. We would be better tapping our cards and just walking through (making sure we tap off when you arrive at your station - opposite to the buses - confusing!).
That’s all good tapping on to get through to the platforms, but we had no idea which train to catch! She helped us some more by telling us to look for the district line and get on whichever direction we wanted to go.
We managed to figure it out and caught the district line into Westminster. We walked around and caught a few of the sights (Westminster Abbey, Tower of London, etc). and then headed up to Trafalgar Square for the Christmas Markets.
On our way, we stopped in at a cafe (Caffe Concerto) and grabbed a coffee each (Chelsea’s wasn’t that flash, but we’ve come to expect that with English coffee) + Matt also had to get a Cherry Frangipane (tart) - yumm!
We walked around the Christmas Markets at Trafalgar and were going to sit and grab a mulled wine (perfect weather for it, overcast and cold), but the lineup was long so we decided to move on. Instead, I picked up Milk Caramel coated Marshmallow (Mum would love these!) and we walked up towards Covent Garden via St Martin’s Lane, which forms the main area of Covent Garden’s theatre district.
The wind really picked up in the afternoon (hats flying everywhere!) and we were blown into a local pub to seek shelter from the cold breeze & showers of rain. The pub we went into is called "The White Lion, which funnily enough, we have a photo from the last time we visited London back in 2019.
We got a little corner booth and watched the world go by for a while (more like people being blown around and running for cover when the rain swept in). We have found ourselves around Covent Garden lots as it’s such a beautiful part of the city, so festive and decorated amazing already and it’s only mid-November.
After that, we decided it might be time to head to our hotel and get refreshed before the show. On our way to the bus station, we stopped off at an “off-licence”, which is English for "convenience store that sells alcohol”. Pimms cans for Chels and a few Fosters for Matt!
The Bus we got on took us through the city centre of London and through the large business district. It was cool seeing this at night (5pm), because you can see all through the office buildings above and just at the large scale of offices throughout the area. We wondered how it would be to be back working in offices and re-joining the rat-race! We also passed by St Paul's Cathedral, which looked great all lit up (no photos as the bus windows ruined any chance of a decent shot).
We arrived at our hotel, a place called Dockside Hotel. No link to click on for the place, as it’s not the greatest sight of a hotel you’ll ever see… but it was exactly what we needed - 4 walls, a roof & a bed to lay our head for the night. Pre-drinks just sitting on the edge of the hard bed - fancy!
After freshening up, we walked down to the Troxy and watched Football Weekly for the night. The show was good, pretty cool seeing the blokes I’ve been listening to for around 5 years! It was about 98% guys (rough ratio Matty haha). The podcast is all about the Premier League teams so it was lucky Chels & I had watched the Chelsea FC v Manchester City the other day or she wouldn’t have understood much!
After the pod, we returned to our little room, made noodles (surprise surprise, we still have noodles after a night out), and watched some Impractical Jokers before bed.
Tomorrow we will be heading to the Tower Bridge & Borough Markets!
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Cheers,
Matt & Chels
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