Weekend Trip to Brighton!

The pier! Very pretty skyline

This past weekend I went to Brighton with my friend Lisa for the weekend. We were visiting her friend from home and a few other girls who we met when they came to London a few weeks ago. We had to take the tube to the train station and take the train from London to Brighton, which was about an hour long ride. Brighton was a pretty cool town! It's known for being a beach-town with a lot of nightlife and a large gay community. After we arrived we walked around the pier and shopped in The Lanes (an outside shopping area of really small lanes that interconnect and are sprinkled with shops here and there) and we also stopped by the mall and a few other shops that were on the streets of downtown. We also went by the Brighton Museum and saw the dome building (I forget the name at the moment- but it's really pretty). For lunch, we dined at a pub called Pavilion Tavern, which was pretty inexpensive.

After shopping and sightseeing, we were all pretty tired and napped at their flat. We had to lug our backpacks around with us as we shopped all day so our backs and legs were killing us- Brighton is pretty hilly and winding; it looks a bit like San Francisco or maybe Providence, Rhode Island. Once we woke up, we all got dressed and went out to a club near the beach. Brighton is known for its nightlife and we had a pretty fun time, though the music was a bit redundant (house music the entire night gets old, in my humble opinion).

The following day (our last day), we walked around the campus of the University of Sussex and just outside of it in the English countryside and rolling hills (I believe the area is called Stanmer Park). It was so beautiful and very quaint. We saw cows and sheep and a lot of families play with their dogs in the open areas. After that, we grabbed a bite at a very cute and very English teahouse that was in the middle of the trail (I got traditional English tea with cream and a scone with jam). After that, we walked to Falmer and saw a pond and a ton of cute little houses made of flint that look like they have been their for ages. In order to get there, we had to sort of hike through a wooded area, and in Brighton there is a ton of flint rock and chalk (which comes from marine skeletal deposits). Brighton has a lot of sites where dinosaurs and archaic stone tools have been found, which is pretty remarkable; the earliest described dinosaur remains were found there! I took a piece of eroded flint and a rock of chalk with me as a keepsake from the woods. Also, apparently there's a hill in Stanmer that Winnie the Pooh was supposed to have lived on in the stories!

I enjoyed getting out of London for a weekend just to see what other parts of England are like, but I have to say I am a London girl at heart. I was excited to come back to the more bustling area of the city after our trip.

Shopping!

At tea

Tired looking cows

Domed building in Brighton

Very old cemetary at a church in Stanmer

English teahouse

Fruit scone with strawberry jam and English tea

A bit of scenery

A goose! (I don't see this kind in the US a lot, mostly Canadian geese)

Some kind of nauseating looking candy "sugar mice"

I wrote my name with chalk on a tree!