Ok, back to the story.
The next day we woke up at a fairly decent time (10 am or so) and went downstairs from our room in the hostel to get some food. After breakfast, we went to Old Trafford. Old Trafford is the stadium for Manchester’s soccer team, Manchester United. There was a big game going on there that day, but since we didn’t have tickets, we caught the tram back to the central part of town and found a pub to watch the game in. It was a fun time. Unfortunately we didn’t really have time to see anything else. After the game we got something to eat (dinner), went back to the hostel to get our stuff, then caught the bus back to London.
I ended up sitting next to a German lady who had been at the game in Manchester and was a big Manchester United fan. Orion (who sat just across the aisle from me) and I ended up talking to her for pretty much the entire bus ride back.
After getting back to London, it was almost midnight. We booked a room at a different hostel than the one we stayed at before in London. I think that was a mistake because getting to the new one proved to be very difficult. As the directions said, we were supposed to catch the Underground to another stop where we could catch the Overground from. The problem was that that station was closed and even if it had been open, there was no Overground there. So we ended up going to the stop after that which was, again, the Tower of London. There we found we could catch the Overground until we realized that the station was closed due to maintenance. So after arguing for a while, we finally found they had replacement bus services. We waited for a bus and everytime one would come by, we would ask the driver if he was going to where we needed to be and everytime the answer was the same: no.
Eventually, we saw one of the drivers again (apparently he was on a circle route) and he said to get one the bus and go to Canary Wharf where we could catch the Overground to Greenwich (where we needed to be). We finally ended up doing that. Once we got off at Greenwich, we still had difficulties finding the hostel because the directions were wrong on the sheet. Eventually, we stopped in at a pub to ask and we were quite lucky because the hostel was above the pub and owned by the same people. We went to bed pretty much right away.
The next day was our last day there and so we wanted to do a little bit of shopping. I wanted to buy a couple of books in English, a couple of CDs and some souvenirs for people back home. We first went to Piccadilly Circus and found a souvenir should there where I bought some T-shirts, then we went to a CD shop there as well. We never did make it to a bookstore. Afterwards, we wanted to try to find something to eat. We wanted to go to a pizza place near Piccadilly Circus, but they had posted a notice saying they moved. We tried to find the location, but couldn’t find it. So after wandering around for a while, we finally went to a Pizza Hut. The service there was really bad and it was extremely expensive, so we decided to leave before we ordered anything. We ended up going back to Victoria Station where we knew a bunch of restaurants were. There we ate at the same pizza buffet place we ate at with Tomomi the first day we were there.
After eating, we went to buy bus tickets for a bus back to Stansted Airport. Orion and Rieke had already bought theirs online, but John and I needed to buy ours there. After that, we still had a little bit of time to kill before catching the bus so we went to a small bookstore in Victoria Station. Then we caught the bus to Stansted Airport which is about a 3 hour ride. We then checked into our flight and everything then finally headed down to our gate to get in line so we could all sit together. We flew with Ryanair which is a very strange airline in that you don’t have assigned seats. You simply get on the plane and find a seat which is why we wanted to get in line early so we could sit together.
At the gate we found out there would be a 2 hour delay because of ice on the runway at Bremen or something like that. We then sat there in line (since the line got very very long very quickly and since we were nearly at the front) for 2 hours. Finally we boarded and flew back to Bremen where Rieke’s brother drove us home.
