In 2005 my friend Beth and I spent a semester in London. While I’ve been back twice since we returned, Beth hasn’t revisited one of our favorite cities, and we haven’t revisited together since we left. Earlier this year we decided to use the Adele concert at Wembley Stadium as a reason to return. Well, if you read the news you know how the Adele part turned out, but we still made the best of our time in London, which included a fair bit of reminiscing.

Despite having spent a good chunk of time in London, there’s still so much we haven’t seen, so we spent the bulk of our visit checking off those bucket-list items. We checked out the new Princess Diana fashion exhibit at Kensington Palace and took a daytrip to the Cotswolds, on what was honestly a perfect day weather-wise. We visited the Churchill War Rooms and saw a musical. We finally went to the British Museum and to a special exhibit at the Victoria & Albert. High tea at Brown’s Hotel, of course, was in order, as was blending our own unique gin at The Ginstitute. Another thing we’d never done was go inside Westminster Abbey, which we did on the morning of our departure. Adele or not, we still saw as much as we could.

For meals, we enjoyed Holborn Dining Room, Red Rooster Shoreditch and Dalloway Terrace. We returned for lunch at Pizza Express, a favorite during our study abroad days, and grabbed a box of our favorite cereal from Marks & Spencer’s. We ate lunch at Borough Market, always a must-visit on a trip to London but even more so this time as a show of solidarity. We hopped around from The Langham, London, where I couldn’t help but read the ghost stories and where we loved the Club level, to the Rosewood London, with a prime location and a modern edge mixed with luxury, and to The Curtain, a brand-new (it was only open for about a month when we visited) and very cool property in Shoreditch.

It was certainly a whirlwind, but no matter how long the visit, it’s always worth a trip down memory lane — my times in London have been some of the best of my life, and that’s something and somewhere I’m always happy to revisit.

— Kim Krol, editor in chief