By Kirsten Kapteijns
In Fall semester 2015, CultureCo announced a trip to London and my heart made a small leap; London, one of the cities that has been on my travel wish list for so long. After falling completely and utterly in love with England through books and series such as Merlin, I promised myself to travel there. That was 5 years ago and though I visited a great amount of places, London still had not made the cut. And thus, after years of envisioning myself going there, the choice to sign up for this trip was easily made. This was my chance to cross off London.
With bus and train we went from Middelburg to London in a short night. When we finally got to stretch our legs again, we were in the beautiful land named England. The rain drizzled down and it was chilly, but it felt like everything I had thought of when picturing England. We left our luggage at the hostel and went exploring. With the underground, of course, we went to Buckingham palace and from there we walked through London, seeing the big red buses, red phone-booths, just relishing in the fact we were there. When we felt our stomachs starting to growl, we came upon Nando’s, a restaurant I had heard about before, in fact I had once had a very odd dream about. Don’t ask me why, but it made me want to see the place once for myself; another thing I could cross off my travel list this trip. It turned out to look nothing like my dream, and after enjoying our meal, it was time to gather and get ready for the pub crawl. Off to a slow start, the evening ended in a lot of fun and dancing, after which our beds were very inviting!
After a very English breakfast with toast and tea, we headed to our next experience. We decided to go to Camden, with its many colourful stores and lovely food stalls. After finding the perfect snow globe for my travel collection we strolled over a big market with almost any object you could want: paintings, lamps, food, LP’s, or even instruments. When we got hungry, we went back to the food stalls and tried to choose from the wide arrange of offers, I settled for a classic fish and chips. To conclude our two amazing days in London we went to Waterstones, a famous English book retailer. Skimming the bookshelves we found ourselves lost in the beautiful world of English literature. With a bag filled with books and a very content feeling in general, we embarked on our journey home, looking back to the city I am sure to visit again. After all, I still haven’t seen the Big Ben.
Kirsten Kapteijns, Class of 2017, is a Cognitive Science, Life Science & Lab major, from Lage Mierde, The Netherlands.
