Celebrating the end of Second Year!
With second year now completely done and just a few last results to wait on, I decided to celebrate by travelling to London to meet with a friend from school. London is a really convenient place for us to meet as she is studying at Surrey and it’s easier and cheaper for both of us to head into London rather than try and travel to the other!
The train from Coventry to London is ridiculously cheap. Obviously, train fares can vary a lot depending on when you’re going, but I’ve never paid more than £15 (and that was booked only a couple of days ahead) – most times if I’m flexible on when I went to get there, I can pay about £7 with my railcard.
We decided to spend the day re-visiting a childhood favourite of ours: The Science Museum. Neither of us had been in several years, so it had changed quite a lot as the exhibitions were completely different. We totally underestimated the size of the place though – we spent most of the morning wandering around what we thought was the whole thing, only to then realise that that was only one wing! There are lots of interactive aimed at children, but of course we were celebrating the end of a very hard year of being responsible adults, so the natural thing to do was to play at being kids again for the day… And I’d like to point out, we certainly weren’t the only ones!
We’ve been to London a few times together now and we always like to try and visit the attractions which are free, as there’s just so many so it’s perfect even when you’re on a tight student budget. The Science Museum is free – they do recommend a donation but when I cheekily asked if it was compulsory and mentioned that we were students, we got waved through with a chuckle… We tried to convince ourselves that when our degrees have made us rich and famous we’ll pay them back…!
In the afternoon, we headed down to Camden Market. This was new for both of us, but so many people have recommended it that we had to give it a look. The weather was absolutely gorgeous so of course this did mean the place was heaving with people right from the moment we walked out of the tube station! There are more temporary market areas all the way from the station down to Camden Lock, where the main market is based. Here, there are lots of traditional market stalls both inside and out selling various items such as jewellery, clothes and souvenirs, intermingled with a few actual shops as well, as well as a huge food stall area called ‘Kerb’ (there are other ‘Kerbs’ across London as well, but most of these are only set up at lunchtime, whereas the one at Camden is there all day.)
There was so much to choose from that we had to walk around the whole thing several times before we could work out what we wanted to eat. My friend is vegetarian so she was a bit concerned how much choice there would be for her, but there was loads! From steak to salad, pasta, burritos, churros and doughnuts there was quite literally everything you could possibly want to eat. I settled for an ‘L.A Chick’ which was chicken in a lime marinade in a bagel, along with sweet potato fries (I’m a sucker for sweet potato fries) and Gemma went for a falafel wrap which looked pretty good even from the perspective of an avid meat-eater! We whiled away the time chatting down by the lock and appreciating the breeze from the water, and before we knew it, it was time to head back to the train station already!
It was such a relaxing day and made a change from all the long stints in the library I’d been doing in the last few weeks, so all in all a great way to celebrate the end of second year!
