Christian Blankenship
London School of Economics
London, England
2018/19

I decided to spend my Christmas break in London so that I could experience the city without the responsibility of school, and also to travel a little through Europe. Admittedly, it felt extremely odd being away from home for Christmas, but my brother came to visit for a week at Christmas which helped. He spent a total of four days in London, and we also visited Paris for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and then we traveled to Brussels for two more days. While in London, we attended an Arsenal match which was extremely fun and also the first match I attended while in London. I also tried my best to show him as many famous London sights as possible in only four days while also doing less touristy things.
We only had two days to experience Paris and two days for Brussels, so we were crunched for time to see everything worth seeing. We also did not plan our visit to Paris very well which resulted in some complications for us. Our biggest problem was finding restaurants that were actually open without a reservation made in advance. We had so much trouble that we ended up searching for almost two hours trying to find a restaurant for dinner on Christmas Eve. Luckily, we did end up finding an open restaurant for dinner and we did not have a problem finding places to eat for the rest of our trip. In Brussels, we did not have any problems finding open restaurants or stores since we went on the 26th. Our Hostel was also in the center of the city, so we had easy access to a huge amount of restaurants, museums, and shops.

While in Brussels, we visited the Atomium which was an interesting monument to say the least. It was constructed for the World’s Fair back in the 1950s and depicts nine iron atoms together. The coolest part of the Atomium is that each sphere is a room with specific information about the Atomium’s construction and the World’s Fair it was built for.
We arrived back in London on the 28th and spent my brother’s last two days experiencing the insanity that is the Boxing Day sales. After he left on the 30th, I figured it was time to get back to work for school. I needed to finish a marketing project, do research for a fashion show being organized by the Fashion Society, and start studying for my Macro exam that’s on January 11th. Staying here for Christmas has been a new and odd experience, but it has also been nice to have some time to chill by myself and relax before becoming swamped with work again.