London Calling (Day 1)

I definitely have been too lax with the updating, having not updated since our trip to London. There are a ton of posts to do since then, so hopefully this week I'll be able to post about everything and get up to date with my trip, since we only have 4 weeks left.

After Aachen was a week of pretty mundane work, not too much excitement. This was largely because we were heading to London that weekend though (June 12-14)! On Friday, June 14th, we were slated to catch a flight to London at 6:50 AM. This required us to leave our Dorm at 12:30 pm on Thursday night though, and catch a train at 12:45 from Dortmund. This is because we needed to find the Dusseldorf Weeze (Pronounced Veetse) airport, and the last possible bus we could catch there left Dusseldorf Hbf (the main train station) at 3:30 am. And so this meant that we had to catch a train from Dortmund to Dusseldorf in time to catch this train. The last train to leave Dortmund in time left at 12:45, getting to Dusseldorf at about 2. This meant we had a lot of down time on our trip, but it didn't seem that long because of all the different connections we had to make. By the time we got to London, we were just happy that the Ryanair jet hadn't crashed in the middle of the water or something on it's way over. (See me below, reliefed at our arrival).














After catching the hour long train to center city, we finally got to the center of London at about 8:30 AM. We were staying with my friend from Basking Ridge High School, Sundeep, and so he met us at the station before he went to work. We got some underground passes for the next 3 days, and then went back to his place to drop our bags off. He had to go to work, so we left his place and began wandering around London.














We took the train to the center of town and found Buckingham palace. Then we hung out for a while, absorbing the view, and watching the guards outside the gate do their thing. After moving on from Buckingham, we found these really strange statues of what looked like emaciated rabbits that had gone through a stretching machine. I really don't know any other way to describe it. But we felt the need to imitate, and while hanging out around these perculiar statues, met some old guy from London. He apparently had lived outside the city his whole life, and moved just down the block 20 years ago. He was some architect who had built a bunch of buildings in the city, and in other countries, including Dusseldorf, which he told us when he found out we were studying in Germany. All in all an interesting guy.














He told us to go to a pub that he'd been going to for 20 years or so, and when we found it, it was really cool and old looking. So we stayed there for a drink. Some random street performer came into the bar and started doing magic tricks with cards. He was pretty ridiculous, and was able to make cards come out of anywhere. Until he started asking for a tip at the end...and after he left I made sure I still had my wallet and camera.

The one most annoying thing that I've noticed about Europe so far is how no one likes to have drinks extremely cold, or put ice in them. It has become C-Bass (my roommate) and my quest to constantly find drinks that come with ice cubes. So it was only fitting that in the lobby of Sundeep's friend's apartment building, the Ice Cold Drinks machine was out of ice cold drinks.

I was angry.















That night, we went out to a club called the Ministry of Sound. C-Bass frequents a website called www.djmag.com which rates the top clubs in the world and the top dj's. This website rated Ministry of Sound at number 6 in the world, and the dj that was playing there that night, Markus Schulz, was rated at number 8 in the world. So we were excited for what would turn out to be a great night.



















The inside of the club was absolutely ridiculous. There were 3 different rooms, each playing different music. these 3 different rooms were seperated, however, with glass doors, which completely blocked out the sound from each other room. The main room of the club had a floor that vibrated to the beat of the music, using air compressors in the floor. Once Markus Schulz got on, the place went crazy. He's German too, which was kind of funny considering. Apparently he loves to come to the Ministry of Sound though, and comes there usually once or twice a year. So we happened to catch that club on a fantastic night.