I arrived in London on Friday afternoon. After dropping my bags off at the hotel, I headed across the Thames to the London Eye. It was fairly gray and cloudy outside, so my pictures didn’t turn out all that great. The view of London was still amazing, and I had a good time. Once I was finished there, I didn’t have enough time to do another major tourist attraction before having to get back to the hotel near Russell Square for the kick-off meeting for our tour. I ended up stopping at Covent Garden on the way back to my hotel. Covent Garden is an old square that is home to many shops and restaurants. I found out the next day that Paul McCartney actually played an impromptu concert there that same afternoon! I must have just missed him!

The next day, we did a bus tour of London very early in the morning. We went by all the major sites like the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, Tower Bridge, etc. I think I will try to do an in-depth visit at the Tower of London on my last day in London, at the end of the trip. One interesting thing I learned is that, within greater London, there is a district called the City of London. The City is only about one square mile. It houses the financial district and is responsible for the majority of the GDP for all of the UK. Each work day, there are about 350,000 people there, but only 7,000 residents. The City has its own officials and authority. I also learned that underneath the streets of the City is an extensive network of tunnels that used to be used by the many banks. After the bus tour, we went directly to Liverpool.