Notting Hill Carnival

It's so funny how much the the planned day differs from the actual day.  As of last night, Nicole, Linda, Jenesis and I planned on meeting at 9 walking to the train station, getting on the train around 9:45, making it to the Westminster Abbey service, and then going to The Notting Hill Carnival.  But as plans never really work out and how much better is life because of that.  So we missed the train, despite being there at the train station.  We watched it leave and didn't realize for another 5 minutes that, oh that was our train haha.  But another train was leaving within a twenty five minutes so it wasn't a big deal.  Oh! When we went to buy our tickets, we had a group of four so we knew that we would get a discount, but we had no idea how much it would actually come out to.  When we were buying the tickets, the cashier asked if we would like to buy the tube passes and we asked if they were cheaper there and he said yes.  In all we paid 11 pounds for a roundtrip ticket to London (or what they call a "return" ticket) and a day travel card!!!  When I traveled with my mom, she paid 30 pounds for a return ticket and over 6 pounds extra for a travelcard, so we got a steal somehow!

We realized at that point that we weren't going to make it to Westminster Abbey by 11:15.  The problem with that was that Jenesis' friend was meeting her there.  She will be studying in London until December and Jenesis was planning on meeting up with her before the service.  Since we do not have cell-phones, communication is a little difficult when things like missed trains occur.  But we got to Westminster and we waited for her friend to get out of the service.  Jenesis finally found her when we were going to leave so that was a lucky catch.  From Westminster we headed to the Notting Hill Carnival.

Notting Hill is a HUGE Carribean Carnival.  We knew that there would be costumes and dancing, but I don't think we expected what we found - Red Stripe, some crazy dirty dancing, portable speakers/stages, and tons of people.  The pictures don't do the festival justice (though I think my head started to hurt again by just looking at the photos).  Most of the stores in the area were shut down, and many of them even boarded up their windows and doors.  It is estimated that over one million people show up for this festival.

After a few hours, some of us were ready for a little peace and quiet so we left and tried to go back to Westminster.  Unfortunately, the Organ Recital was too full so we failed a second time to see inside the abbey : (.   Everyone was exhausted by that point so it was probably for the better that we started heading home.