London

April 7

We landed at Stansted pretty late, and we were exhausted from our adventure to catch our flight. We decided to take the express train instead of trying to find a bus. The train claimed to get us to the Lime Street station in 46 minutes, rather than the one-hour 45-minute bus. By the time we got to London the Tube was closed so we had to find a late bus to Victoria. When we arrived at Vandon, Zach was asleep, so I pulled a cot into his room and Korey slept on the floor. Swaff and Dave found people to stay with, and Robbie crashed in the hallway.
My cot collapsed a few times throughout the night, and Korey must have found the floor unbearable. In the morning he was on a couch in the lounge. Nobody knew Robbie, so when they saw him sleeping in the hall they assumed he was a random drunk that had wandered in. They thought the same about Korey.
We couldn’t have planned it any better. The Olympic torch was scheduled to pass through the city today. Several of the students went to watch, but Korey and I went to Lillywhites instead. We looked in a tourism book and read that the stretch from Picadilly Street to Oxford Circus is lined with stores. We left Vandon house looking for St James stop rather than the more familiar Victoria. Somehow we ended up missing it and walking to the next stop, Westminster. Before we got on, we noticed a huge crowd of Tibet protestors and a full force of police.
At our first stop at Lillywhites, I found a Celtic soccer jersey and a few other things dirt cheap. From there, we headed towards the Oxford Circus stop. On the way we looked for Hamleys, a toy store we read about in the book. Supposedly, the store contains 28,000 toys! A few of the seven stories we of no interest to us, those containing young children’s or girl’s toys. I found several hobbies I would like to take up if they weren’t so expensive.
Our train back to Bangor left Euston a few minutes after 9. We had been a little worried because the Tube workers had threatened to go on strike, but apparently worked it out, as services ran as expected. After two changes and several hours we arrived in Bangor just before 2am. I didn’t take any pictures, so I stole a few from Dave of cops wailing on the protestors.