New Year

Happy 2009, everybody! I hope the new year has gotten off to a great start for everyone. New Year's Eve was fantastic on this side of the pond. I met up with a group of friends in London and we went to a fair in Hyde park. They had a pretty strange assortment of rides and attractions there, like a tilt-a-whirl topped with a Christmas tree right across from a haunted house. Unfortunately, we went through the haunted house, which was, as expected, not so great. It was silly fun, though. :) There were also lots of Christmas craft stalls open, and even an ice rink. It was ridiculously cold that night, so I'm glad we didn't go ice skating or I might have turned into an ice cube.

Around eleven o'clock we headed for the river so we could see the midnight fireworks. I guess we should have started out way earlier, because it was a total madhouse. Seriously, I've never seen any place so crowded as that part of London on New Year's Eve. Anyone who is even remotely claustrophobic would have gone crazy, I think. People were all mashed together in this huge crowd that went on forever, everybody trying to press forward to get to the river. Every so often we would pass a line of police officers in their bright neon vests, which I thought was a little creepy at first, but for which I quickly became grateful. It was a little unnerving, really, to be stuck in the middle of that massive crowd. Because there were so many people, we couldn't get anywhere near the river, so we stopped in Trafalgar Square and watched the fireworks on the huge screens they had set up. It would have been cool to see the fireworks firsthand, but this was cool too. We could see the sky beyond the buildings of the square light up from all the fireworks, and at one point it was so bright it was like daylight. So like I said, very cool.

Getting home after all the festivities were over was a transportation nightmare. We ended up walking for like an hour to find a tube station that was a) open, and b) not completely mobbed by hundreds of other people trying to get home. That was actually pretty fun though, because we got to walk around London and see what everyone was doing to celebrate the new year. When we got to Waterloo Station, Gabby and I had to make our way through another huge crowd being herded into the station past barricades, which took like half an hour. And when our train finally got in (they were running trains until like five in the morning), there were so many people rushing to get on the train that the train car we were on was worse than a can of sardines. I can't say that being crushed into a train car for half an hour at 2:30 in the morning was great fun, but it's certainly an experience that will stand out in my memory for a while. ;)

So all in all, New Year's was crazy, crowded, and super fun!

New Year's Eve (Blog)