Londontown

When my parents emailed me the name and address of the hotel we were staying at in London, I scribbled it down on a piece of paper and threw it in my purse. It happened to be in Kensington, the same area I stayed at last time I was in London. So, being a blonde, I just assumed it was the same hotel. Failure. I got off the tube, after travelling

Mom, Bri and I hanging out in London

all morning by myself on about 2 hours of sleep, and walked to the hotel. I looked around the lobby and was shocked to find that my mom wasn’t there waiting for me as promised. I took out my itinerary hoping to find some way of contacting my parents and noticed we were staying in the Regency. I was standing in the lobby of a Holiday Inn…my bad. I left the hotel in search of some caffeine, a map or someone who looked like they knew where they were going.

I luckily found a Starbucks and practically ran inside hoping that large amounts of caffeine would solve my current problems. I walked up to the baristas, smiled and greeted them enthusiastically, “Dobry den!” When they looked at each other and started laughing in my face, I quickly realized what I had done. I was in London, where they speak English. There was no need to attempt to force my broken Czech on anyone. I had been in London all of 30 minutes and already had 2 strikes against me. I wasn’t so optimistic about the rest of this trip was going to go.

Wembley Stadium

The Regency wasn’t too far away from where I was so I soon found my parents and spent the rest of the day walking around with them. We spent an hour in Harrod’s department store and probably only saw half of it. The place is seriously huge, like a whole city block long and 5 stories high. We also visited the Victoria and Albert museum and grabbed some lunch at a local pub. My brother flew in on Thursday night so we all spent Friday and Saturday hanging out in London doing all the touristy things.

On Saturday night, my brother, sister and I went to a party for all the Patriots fans that were in the city. It was at a really cool sports bar right near Picadilly Circus and there were hundreds of Patriots fans all decked out in jerseys and team apparel. I couldn’t believe how many Pats fans were there.

Pat Patriot and I

 The party was amazing, with lots of special guests: Pat the Patriot, Patriots owner Bob Kraft, former player Troy Brown, Boston Globe writer Dan Shaugnessy, and CBS sports announcer Steve Burton. We got to meet a lot of them and even got interviewed by Burton (Thankfully, our interview didn’t get on tv!)

We headed to Wembley Stadium on Sunday to hang out before the Patriots game. There were thousands of people tailgating and walking around. The stadium itself is brand new and is wicked cool. It’s huge (it holds like 85,000 people) and very modern. The game itself was really different from every other Pats game I’ve ever gone to. The majority of the fans were European so they weren’t so much Pats fans as they were fans of the NFL. It was more about the experience of the game than who was actually playing in it. I think if you surveyed the crowd, very few people would be able to name any players besides Tom Brady. For me, it was exciting to be at an American sporting event because that’s one of the things I have missed a lot since being in Europe.