Our crazy 2-week holiday adventure was rounded out with a trip to London for New Year’s Eve.  Our friends, Erick and Jess (who live in Rotterdam), were staying with one of their good college friends, Nick, in Kentish Town.  While Kentish Town is a little ways out of central London, we decided to rent an Airbnb in the same neighborhood thinking that getting home from the party on NYE would be easier if we didn’t have to worry about hailing a cab.

London is actually a very short, one-hour flight from Basel; however, getting from London Airports into the city was quite a pain.  One hour and three train transfers later, we arrived at our Airbnb in Kentish Town and hustled off to a cozy dinner.

During the days, we played tourist.  On our last visit to London in 2010, we did all of the big touristy things (walking tour, changing of the guards, Big Ben, Parliament, etc.), so this time we decided to focus on some of the lesser visited attractions.  On the first day, we toured The Museum of London which covered London’s history from the prehistoric ages to modern times.  That afternoon we wandered into a great Indian Restaurant and over-indulged in curries, grilled meats, and okra fries.  It was delicious!

Sarah has always wanted to see a show while in London, so she splurged on tickets to see The Lion King that evening.  The production at Lyceum Theatre had some hiccups (they had to pause the show for about 20 minutes and recast the role of Nala), but the show was lovely and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.  Afterward, we met up with our friends at a piano bar and had a fantastic time dancing and singing along to covers.  Chris was thrilled that the band selected his song request as their last song for the evening, and once again, D.C. got a pretty good shout out as we all swayed to and sang (rather shouted) “Wonderwall.”

Though the bar was closing, our crazy group wasn’t ready to call it quits just yet.  We went to a 90’s themed bar which turned out to be incredibly weird and empty, but we stayed just long enough to request the sweet, sweet tunes of Whitney Houston.  Finally, we ended the evening at a restaurant called Duck and Waffle – it is situated on the 40th floor and is the highest restaurant in all of London.  Even though it was 4 in the morning, we sat down for … I’m honestly not sure what to call food that is eaten at 4 in the morning. Pre-Breakfast? Late-Dinner? Either way, we enjoyed some serious comfort food (Sriracha grilled cheese, sloppy joes, and duck and waffles) and took in amazing views of the city.  Staying out until almost 5 am the day before NYE was certainly aggressive, but we had a fantastic time and regret nothing.

We obviously got a bit of a late start the next day, but we still made it to the Churchill War Rooms.  The line to get in was long, but Chris grabbed some pizza for us to eat while waiting and boy did that make the other patrons jealous.  We honestly could have sold that pizza for one hell of a profit, but we were too famished ourselves to give it much thought. We found The War Rooms were very interesting – perfectly preserved and much bigger than we had both expected.  One of our favorite parts of the museum was the map room.  The technology is obviously dated now, but it was really fascinating to see how troops were charted and tracked.  If you looked closely, you could even see the pin holes from the movement of thumbtacks.

That evening, we celebrated the New Year at Nick’s apartment.  There were about 20 people there in total, and it was a healthy mix of ex-pats and Londoners.  Everyone brought food and drink to share, and we had a fabulous time meeting new people, counting down to midnight, and watching fireworks from the window of a London apartment.  While neither of us made New Year’s resolutions for 2017, we have a feeling that it’s going to be a great year.