By: Timothy Xia

On July 14, I boarded my plane trip to London with my dad and my sister. It was a 10- hour ride and after that we got to London Heathrow. We had no idea what to do because this was our first time in London. We got on a train and immediately went to our hotel. We checked in and my dad was surprised because there were only 2 twin-sized beds and there were three of us. It was a hard decision to make about who would sleep on the ground. In the end, my sister decided to, so the hotel brought in a small bed for her to sleep on. We stayed in London for 3 days, doing about the same thing. On the first day, we went to the British Museum, which was pretty close to our hotel. The line was long which was annoying, because it was also raining. It took a long time for us to get in. Once we finally did, I was surprised to not see a lot of ancient things. There were only some items from different civilizations. We spent most of the time from all the dynasties in China. That was basically it for the first day of our trip. Once we got back, we just slept until dinner and went to a small neighborhood called Soho to eat, and called it a day. It was hard to sleep because the sun was already up by 4:00 AM so it was very bright. On the third day, we went to see The Big Ben. It was next to the British Parliament and apparently, King Charles the Third was there in the morning.

The next day, we boarded the EuroStar to Paris and the SNCF to Normandy. We went to Omaha Beach and then checked in at our hotel. It turned out that our room was in someone’s house. There was a main room where we would eat breakfast and many other rooms where we would live. We were in Normandy for 2 days until we boarded the SNCF again and arrived in Paris. On the first day, we went to the Eiffel Tower and I was really excited to be under a world famous tower. Our tour of the Eiffel Tower was at 11:00 and we just explored the site and took some photos. In the afternoon, we went to the Louvre Museum and saw the famous Mona Lisa. On the second day, we went to the Palace of Versailles where King Louis XIV and the XVI stayed, although I thought he stayed in the Louvre. We also went to the famous Arc De Triomphe which we went to the top of. We learned that the project was started by Napoleon after he annexed Austria and the Arc De Triomphe was finished by Louis XIV. I was wondering why almost everything involved Louis XIV. On our last day in Paris, we boarded the EuroStar and went to London, where we stayed for one night before leaving for the airport.

Image Credit by Amar Saleem