A Not So Touristy Weekend

This weekend, we decided to do some more creative things with our time. We've lived in London for a month now, so the tourist traps start to look like traps. And we start to get annoyed when "new" people crowd the Tube and don't know where they're going.

So we started Saturday afternoon off by exploring a Vintage store. Apparently this is a traveling Vintage event too, which we thought was worth checking out.

Surprisingly, some of the stuff was fairly expensive. Half of the clothes were real vintage - 60s, 70s, or 80s style - which I would need to be more creative to find a way to wear it. Or it was really cute clothes that were the same price as the nearest Primark or Topshop, two of the cheaper and decent stores in London.

The area also came complete with a bowling alley, a pub, and a small cafe, with racks of clothes stacked on the floor above and around these extra downstairs pit stops.

A signature purchase: I invested in a nice change purse. The frequent use of British coins, rather than 'notes', was literally making my clutch burst at the seams. The change purse is way more functional for Europe.

On Sunday, we celebrated the Chinese New Year in Trafalgar Square and Chinatown, where streets were closed off and decorated.

It was pretty cool. Trafalgar Square was packed. So then the lesson of the day became that the distance from one historic place to another is not as far as it seems on the Tube. I walked from Trafalgar Square to Piccadilly Circus to Chinatown in about 15 minutes.

When you're on the Tube, the distance you travel between those points feels a lot longer.

Anyway, Chinese New Year turned out to be pretty cool, despite the lack of free food that some people thought would be there. Really, there were a ton of booths set up selling Chinese New Year trinkets and noisemakers, the streets were decorated, and there were some stages set up with entertainment. The only entertainment I actually saw was Kung Fu Panda.

That was exciting.

Then... we once again digressed in to more tourist stuff.

Introducing: The Natural History Museum.

This museum is part of a series of museums in South Kensington, about a 20 minute journey from my flat in Earl's Court. The building is absolutely breathtaking.

The best part of the actual museum was probably the dinosaur fossils on the first floor. The one on the left was pretty cool. There's also some galleries on the floor above, so you could look down over this dinosaur almost anywhere you go in the museum. After about an hour though, we felt like we had seen the best parts of the museum and decided to head out.

Except we ended up going the wrong way on a bus and ended up in Harrod's.

I've never walked through Harrod's before.

Looking at the building in and of itself is kind of stunning.

Going inside and glancing at some of the price tags is literally jaw-dropping.

Totally worth a step inside though, even if you're only walking through it to take advantage of the heat before reaching the Tube station, like we did.



In other news this past Sunday, my neighborhood was fairly excited about the Chelsea v. Liverpool match. [That's an understatement, folks.] It was a big deal because Chelsea had just signed a previous Liverpool player, Fernando Tores, in a record-breaking 50 million pound deal.

And Chelsea still lost 0-1 against Liverpool.

There were some pretty depressed people in blue and white walking around Earl's Court that night. So that topped any thoughts I had about the Super Bowl for awhile.

Phew. It was a busy, but incredible weekend. Note to self: busy weekends are better on so many levels.