London Day 2: Shopping And London By Night
Since our London sightseeing tour ended pretty quickly and it was also quite cold outside, we decided to walk along Constitution Hill, saw the Wellington Arch, then went to visit one of London’s famous stores: Harrods. Along with Macy’s New York, Harrods is one of the largest department stores in the world. Still, I think size is not the most impressive thing about Harrods.
Harrods is definitely worth a visit!
If you are visiting Harrods for the first time (like we were), you’ll most likely be blown away by the way the store is organized and the variety of things being sold. After all, their motto is “All Things for All People, Everywhere”. And boy, are they making good on that promise!
Harrods is more of a tourist attraction than an actual store and there are many reasons for visiting: it’s a picturesque place, the building’s architecture alone is really impressive and you’ll end up buying something for sure (maybe something tasty, like I did).
Falling in love with the Food Hall
To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of shopping. My approach to shopping was always “find it, like it, try it, buy it”. So I wasn’t too impressed by the departments dedicated to perfumes or clothes (not even Raluca was, and this means something).
On the other hand, being kind of a foodie, I really liked the Food Hall (do visit this link, the pictures speak for themselves). I could probably spend hours in that room. It was way more crowded when we visited the place (it was just 1 week after New Year’s Eve), so taking pictures would have been an adventure.
LATER EDIT: I just stumbled across some photos I’ve taken with Raluca’s compact camera. Pretty low quality, but I resized them and managed to create something:
Oxford Street by night
We ended the day by walking along Oxford Street, the place to be if you’re into some serious shopping. Clothes, souvenirs, electronics, jewelry… you name it, Oxford Street’s got it! Here’s a fun little website that I found, where you can see all the shopping streets of London and their stores: Street Sensation.
Raluca was looking for some shirts and stuff for the trip, I was looking for a wireless remote for my Nikon D40. While I got back to the hotel empty handed (managed to buy one back in Bucharest though), she bough a one or two things for herself and for the the folks at home. I din’t mind though, as what I really wanted to do was to try out my tripod and new camera.
Next we went to Piccadilly Circus (the Statue of Anteros was being renovated at the time) and then straight to the hotel, because we were exhausted and the next day we had a long flight ahead of us. Our first flight across the Atlantic! The flight didn’t scare me too much, what scared me a bit was that huge luggage we had to carry around until the check in. 
Oh, about that tripod…
During that day, I had to carry the tripod the whole time. While at Harrods, I was even stopped at the entrance and asked to try and keep it down low, which I did. Paying for a $500 bottle of perfume that got knocked down was the last thing I wanted to do!
Word of advice: if you’re going sightseeing or shopping, ditch the tripod! If you really want to take cool night photos, either buy one of those lightweight tripods (the Gorillapod SLR Zoom is on my shopping list) that you can easly carry around or just forget about the other activities and focus only on the photo shoot.
