Semester at Sea | Day Four: Baker Street + London Zoo

Today was our last full day in London. It’s hard to believe that tomorrow we will get on our ship and meet the people we are going to see the world with! I have two stamps in my passport so far and I can’t wait for the next 10!

Nathan and I are both huge fans of Sherlock Holmes. He has the collector’s edition of the books and I have read several of them myself, and we are totally obsessed with the Sherlock series on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it we highly recommend that you start watching it ASAP! It’s fantastic. We’ve seen all three seasons twice 😉

I mentioned last night that we tried to eat at the Sherlock Holmes restaurant and it was a big time fail. Well, similarly, the museum is the same. We had no time to waste today so we took a few pictures and delighted in the fact that we were on Baker Street and went on our way! Even the train station towards Baker Street has Sherlock art inside – it was really great. =)

After Baker Street we went through The Regent’s Park on our way to the London Zoo. It had been rainy all morning and was still a little cloudy when we left our hostel, but the sky cleared as we ventured through the park and we had a lovely morning walk. =)

Along the way we saw a lot of people sitting in the park drawing. I happened to see this elderly lady feeding the birds while an artist stood behind her and sketched the scene. I thought it was a fantastic photo op so I got my camera set up and I snapped a photo only to realize that a pigeon photobombed me. So I shot again and this time . . . no photobombing birds!

The park was full of soccer matches this morning! Soccer is to London as football is to America and it was fun to watch all of the little kids play! Some of them had some seriously sweet moves. There were four year olds who could kick my butt.

We knew that we would likely spend all day at the London Zoo and we were right! The zoo is massive and there is so much to see. We saw more species of monkeys today than I have ever seen in my life and they have so many walk-through exhibits where the animals are roaming free and can interact with you. Our favorite was the lemur walk-through! We went there just as the monkeys were being fed and they were walking all over the place (including through our feet). It was great. =)

We took a break after the zoo and came back to our room where I wrote my London postcards (keep an eye out family and friend!) and Nathan worked on repacking his luggage. We decided to have a nice dinner for our last night in London since we’ve been way under budget for this whole leg of the trip! We walked up to a little Italian restaurant near our hostel and had a great 3-course meal. The dessert was my favorite, but the food was good too. =) We will have to compare it to the food we eat when we are really in Italy!

Now it’s off to bed for us a little earlier tonight since we have to be out of our hostel by 7 AM to make sure we catch our train to the shuttle to take us to the ship! My update might be a little late tomorrow since we don’t know what to expect, but I’ll do my best to get one up and include lots of photos of the ship. =)