✈️ 9 Days in The City of London ❤️ [Part I]

!!! WARNING !!!   PHOTO-DUMP   !!! WARNING !!!

Thursday 26th of February 2015, my 2-year wait was finally over. The day had finally come when the London borders would be raided by my classmates, teachers and myself. After having packed just two nights before and hardly slept out of sheer anticipation and excitement, we started our journey from the school in Graz at about 10 o' clock in the morning and arrived at the Vienna airport at approx. 13 o' clock. 

There our journey officially began...

Me, boasting about with my green ECOWAS passport and my friend/roommate/stalking companion with her black Croatian one.

PLANE SELFIES!!

#firstpicturesinlondon

We got to the London Gatwick Airport at half past 4 and still had a two hours drive on an extremely tight coach ahead of us. By 19 o' clock we were at Blackheath living the London life! There we got picked up by our respective host parents, whose houses we would be staying at throughout the trip. To my utmost surprise, I found that the house my roommate and I would be staying at had these small African statues, masks, pictures and artworks, it later turned out to be that my host father was indeed a Nigerian, which explained the rather exotic home decoration.

 I just had to show how real the struggle was to charge our phones.
 

At a corner we found this nicely kept collection of toys that brought back childhood memories and the next day we got to meet our "host granddaughter" Freya, the cutest, nicest, and by far most sociable little girl in the world. She definitely made our day with every morning we got to see her.

Next morning we were off to school by 08:30 because thankfully school in London starts as late as 09:00 and not necessarily at 08:00 -.- 

And so I finally finally got the chance to see and actually sit on one of the world famous double-decker buses even if for a few stations a day! *.*

I gladly could and would give up the idea of being a cool kid and sitting at the back of the bus if it meant me having this wonderful, makes-me-feel-like-a-boss-view from the front of a double-decker bus every day of my life (at this point, most Brits probably think I'm over exaggerating with these adjectives and the description in a whole, but ah what the heck!)

After a 3-hour lesson at the Mycenae House we were graced to be a part of, our teacher somehow came up with the idea of making us walk all the way from the school to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, which was like a 20-30 minutes walk... with about 30 students! 

One person was not fazed, my MVP!

 As I, for some unknown or rather forgotten reasons, couldn't take any pictures at the Observatory, I hope to compensate with a group picture of my friends and I right in front of the building.

I found the police, but they didn't find me...THANK GOD!

...and so I did.

Up next, we (61 students and 4 teachers!) were to go on an "Educational Visit" to the Tower of London which, among other things, used to be a prison, an armoury, a treasury and the home of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. 

 And while others were out at night watching drunks fall of a sidewalk or sleep in the luggage rack while flinging beer cans across the train coach, my roommate and I turned most of our nights to movie nights, which actually wasn't that hard given that our host mother had a complete selection of outdated, latest and everything in between movies... there was nothing more we could have asked for!