Tag: london

Staying in London: Stratford

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It’s a challenge to find a place to stay in London when you’re on a budget—particularly when you also have a jam-packed itinerary and can’t risk leaving your precious few hours of sleep in the hands of unknown hostel bunkmates. I look forward to the day when money’s not an obstacle and I can just crash in Mayfair or whatever with the posh people, but right now, I’m 23 and work at a nonprofit. So I spent many, many, many hours scouring Expedia for accommodations on those nights when I wasn’t going to sleep on a bus.

Ultimately, after weighing several dozen options and getting dangerously close to my departure date, I settled on the Epsilon Hotel in Stratford. At $70 per night with free wifi and breakfast included, the price was right, and though it’s not especially centrally located, the tube stop ten minutes away meant it wasn’t too much of a sacrifice location-wise.

Honestly, I liked my hotel in Stratford precisely because it was a bit out of the way. Continue reading “Staying in London: Stratford” →

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Test Driving Megabus Gold

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Experiences with Megabus in the States did not make me eager to try its European counterpart. It’s at best cramped and at worst unbelievably unreliable (or, you know, deadly—it’s hard to forget one unfortunate encounter between a bus and a bridge near my hometown).

But as I struggled to fit a day in Edinburgh into my most recent trip to the UK, I knew I was going to have to travel back to London overnight to make it work. My options were the cheapest possible ticket on a Caledonian Sleeper train (too expensive), a seat on a regular overnight Megabus (too uncomfortable)… or a bunk on the relatively new Megabus Gold service. Continue reading “Test Driving Megabus Gold” →

Spoiler: There Wasn’t Money in the Banana Stand

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As I’ve already mentioned a couple of times, it’s finals crunch time here at the University of Sussex, and like every other college student in my situation, I’ve become desperate for procrastination methods. I just added the second book in George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series to my iBooks library. I’ve actually been remembering to blog. And I finally finished watching season three of Arrested Development (after binge-watching all of the episodes I’d already seen, of course).

Turns out, that procrastination choice was not a huge mistake. Actually, it was incredibly well-timed. I already sort of knew that because the internet has been going insane as the launch of the Netflix reboot gets closer. But I didn’t know that just four days after I finished my Arrested Development marathon, the show would be setting up shop in Leicester Square. It literally took me less than ten minutes on Wednesday night to read about the event, process what was happening, and find myself staring at a Southern booking confirmation page for a spontaneous trip to London the next day — some next-level TV-related procrastination. Continue reading “Spoiler: There Wasn’t Money in the Banana Stand” →

A Day in London

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So one of my goals for this semester is to travel to as many European cities as possible before I go back to the US and (hopefully) another summer internship and then my last year of school and then (again, hopefully) law school and then (fingers crossed!) a job that requires me to work 80-hour weeks for the rest of my life and never have another chance to travel. Accordingly, I’ll try and document this spring’s mini-trips here so I can look back and reminisce about the good old days when I had free time.

I’m off to a pretty awful start – I was in London two weeks ago and I’m just now posting this. Whoops. Continue reading “A Day in London” →