A friend of a friend recommended Strawberry Tours to us. They're 'free' in the sense that you take the tour without paying up front, and then at the end you tip your tour guide according to how much you liked the tour (or in our case according to how broke you are on a scale of 1 to college student).
We started out with their Harry Potter tour, which was the last thing I mentioned in London Part 1.
Afterward, our guide suggested a discounted dinner at a restaurant near Leicester Square, so we took her up on the offer and had the best fish and chips of the week:
Over dinner we became BFFs with our guide, Katie, who moonlights as a theater/voice actress. In addition to being the one who created the Harry Potter tour for Strawberry Tours, she was also really knowledgeable about a whole host of other things in London, like where to eat, drink, visit, and buy the best souvenirs.
Because we loved her so much (just kidding, this was a complete coincidence) we ended up on her Jack the Ripper tour that night after dinner. We all know the story of Jack the Ripper, obviously, but Katie showed off her story-telling skills as she walked us through each murder - sometimes literally through the former crime scene.
Strawberry Tour Guides obviously do their research - again, can't say enough nice things about both tours we took with them, and the discounted meal we had with Katie was some of the best food we had while we were in London (it's tied for first with a meal we had later in the week - coming up soon).
The next day we saw an anticlimactic changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace - they were in blue coats, not red! But apparently a member of the royal family was home at the time, so who knows? Maybe I was just a few hundred feet away from the Queen.
The highlight of the changing of the guard was when this policeman came over and invited us all to pat his horse. Softest. Horse. Ever.
Then, we managed to get cheap tickets to see...
It was my first time seeing Wicked, even though I knew at least half of the songs already since it had been wickedly popular in high school (see what I did there?). It was really good, and definitely worth it considering we got a huge discount for buying last minute tickets. The website we used to get discount tickets was advertised all over the tube for a lot of different plays and musicals - sadly, nothing for Cursed Child, although we did stumble upon the theater while we were looking for antique/secondhand book shops.
The next day we took ourselves on our own walking tour....
And then I got to meet up with an old friend from Sevilla who lives in London, which was great. We went to our 3rd Wetherspoon's of the week with her and her boyfriend and spent a good 4-5 hours catching up.
This Wetherspoon's was much fancier than the previous two we'd been in - just look at the statue in the bathroom!
Friday, we made it to Soho, where we had a traditional English Breakfast (at 2pm) in The Breakfast Club, walked around the British History museum, and then went to a few pubs to finish off the week.
Saturday we had our best meal of the week (in my opinion). We headed back to Brick Lane, which we had already seen under cover of darkness during the Jack the Ripper tour. This time, the markets were open and the neighborhood was much livelier. Out of an old reconverted World War 2 ambulance, we had buttermilk fried chicken, french fries, and a combination of homemade sauces.
Oh. My. Gosh. Check out Mother Clucker if you're ever in the Brick Lane area for lunch, because this was so good. Normally, you can dump hot sauce on anything and I'll be happy, but this was just out of this world. They have a couple of locations around London, including a stand at Camden Market, so this is not something to miss.
That ended up being the last thing I took a picture of in London - and that's probably a good thing, because how could I top that?!
We could not have had a better week, but it was just as painful to leave at the end of our stay as it was to get up at 4:30AM on Sunday for our flight.
See you next time, London!
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