Company: Jana and Martin

Planned route: Tallinn-London-Tallinn

This started with a small surprise for Jana as the whole thing was organized as a surprise for our 8^th wedding anniversary. I was able to keep the trip as a secret as far as until we reached the airport where Jana finally found out where we were going. Actually she was thinking that we are just going to Viljandi to see a concert.

So, the Easy Jet plane took off towards London at 12.30 pm. When we arrived at the Stanstead airport we took the Stanstead Express straight to London downtown from where we started exploring the metro to get to Paddington stop where our hotel was located. As everybody knows staying in London is relatively expensive and even in our modest hotel one night cost 86 pounds. The room looked like a real London room- extremely tiny with an extremely tiny bathroom. It felt a bit like in we were in a ship’s cabin. But we did let that ruin our good mood and headed off to the city. First of all we went to one Japanese restaurant down town and had ourselves pampered with an extremely delicious three course mean and good wine. After dinner we went on to The Majesty Theatre to get a stunning musical experience by watching “The Phantom of the Opera”. As we have seen similar productions in Estonia now we realized what true professionalism really means. All the decorations, the music, actor’s voices and the choreography were so perfect that even now I can still picture the magical show in front of my eyes. After the amazing musical experience we took a small walk on the town before heading back to our hotel.

The plan for the next day was to visit all the major sites in London. The first place to visit was the Tower of London, then the London Bridge, Big Ben and then the Buckingham Palace. Everything was more or less in walking distance, but we still had to go through few stops with the metro. Afterwards we headed down to Oxford Street after walking through some amazing parks. That street is one of the most popular shopping streets in Europe. Our shopping desires were fulfilled in a matter of few hours, but we both felt that actually you could just stay and shop there forever. The prices when you compare them to the ones in Estonia where in some cases really ridiculously low.

As the weather was rather rainy we did not feel like staying outside for much longer. So, we had booked a visit to the London Eye which is one of the biggest Ferris wheels in the world by the river Thames and it was built for change of the millennium. Although we had hoped to get a ride during sunset, but due to the bad weather we got on an earlier ride. The ride itself lasted for half an hour and also included a nice glass of quality champagne. The view from the London Eye was breathtaking as one could see the whole London and I can definitely say that it was worth every pound spent on it.

The next morning we decided to make the compulsory trip to the famous Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. We made it there by 9 o’clock in the morning but the line waiting was already about an hour long. So after waiting in the line we got the chance to enter to the magical world of wax figures which also included a train ride inside the house that was also an interesting experience. Everything in that museum was extremely well done and presented and left an unforgettable memory.

From there our journey continued to the Gatwick airport and at about 6 pm our Estonian Air plane towards Tallinn took off.

As our visit to London was extremely short a lot of sights were left for the next trip, but both of us had a very positive experience both with visiting the musical as well as riding the Ferris wheel. The life in London is very face paced and one can only get a small hint of that by spending more time there. I really hope that we will have a chance to visit London any time soon and during that visit we will also have time to see a bit of the city outside of downtown.