London Calling

Our one-week language trip to London was a massive success! In mostly sunny weather, not necessarily a characteristically British feature, we experienced many new and interesting aspects of British culture.

After a very tiring and time-consuming journey to our final destination, we met our host families. Basically, our week was divided in two halves: in the mornings we were taught by native speakers in a language school in Greenwich and in the afternoons we visited many sights in the city.

One of our first gobsmacking impressions we got at Camden Lock Market which showed us how diverse this city’s culture and cuisine are. We were able to choose from Ethiopian to Polish, from Italian to Vietnamese food, it was absolutely awesome. On Monday we had a guided tour through Greenwich where we stopped at the Zero Meridian and gazed at the residences of former kings and queens. The historic days of famous seafarers such as Admiral Lord Nelson came alive at the Maritime Museum. The one museum that impressed us most because of the largest amount of archeological and historic artifacts was the British Museum where the worldwide known “Stone of Rosetta” caught our attention.  “Jack the Ripper” and the various crime scenes were shown to us on a spooky guided tour through the East End, an area that proved to be worth seeing due to a lively artistic community. Street Art with its multiple graffito sprayed on walls or sculptures and installations created by artists from around the world and visible to the attentative eye of the visitor revealed a completely different image of that part of the city. Our guides had a lot of interesting information and funny stories to tell so that we can safely say that this was a highlight of our trip. The last visit that we paid to a museum was to the Science Museum where we saw engineering milestones such as James Watt’s steam engine among other groundbreaking inventions.

After this adventurous but nevertheless exhausting week full of unique experiences in London we were happy to set foot on Austrian soil (and enjoy Mum’s home-cooked meals 🙂 ) again.