The Introverted Traveller: My London Mini-Break at The Rembrandt.

On Monday afternoon my boyfriend and I headed into London. More specifically, we headed to South Kensington, where for two nights we would be staying in a fairly swanky four star hotel. The trip came about as a result of my boyfriend saying that he would like to treat me to such a trip for putting up with his body building lifestyle and accepting the fact that he works pretty much everyday. As I'm the organised one he gave me the task of researching hotels, but specified that there had to be a bath and the hotel had to be at least three stars.

Originally I was looking at hotels in and around Shepherds Bush, as he had suggested we go to Westfields one of the days we were there. But once he'd come home from work and gave them a quick look he decided that we should look into some other places as well. That's round about the time that he said I could decide where we stayed -so long as it was no more than £380- as it was my trip.

The Natural History Museum is my all time favourite museum and I was determined to visit it again this summer. The museum is in South Kensington, and -slightly obviously- the Kensington Gardens aren't too far from it. I was also meaning to visit the Kensington Gardens as it is not only the home of Peter Pan, but also his statue. Deciding to roll these destinations into one with my mini-break in London, I moved my search to hotels in South Kensington; and that is how I found out about The Rembrandt.

The location of The Rembrandt was absolutely perfect for my itinerary. It had a host of restaurants, that were a five minute walk away or less, on both sides; and it was a ten minute walk away from the Natural History Museum, which was always going to be my first port of call.

Your view when you walk through the main entrance
-including Dippy, my favourite thing at the museum-
[Source]

When we reached our room after checking in I was pleasantly surprised, especially by the bathroom. The actual room was very true to the images I had seen -I was expecting it to be smaller as rooms often appear larger in well-angled photos for websites. The bathroom surpassed all my expectations though. There were two different sets of lighting, a large mirror, a heated towel rack, and a lovely, large shower/bath combo -the bath even had jets, which I thought was really cool.

We decided just to spend the rest of the day settling in and freshening up before heading out to dinner. We weren't really sure where we were going to eat, as we'd not seen any restaurants with familiar names as we made our way to the hotel. Eventually we decided just to head back to the little strip of restaurants on the way to the station. After my boyfriend perused a menu fixed by the side of a restaurants entrance for a carb-free dish, we decided to head in. The result was a lovely, but pricey dinner in a really nice Lebanese restaurant. If I wasn't so tired and drained the following day I'm sure we would have ended up having dinner there again Tuesday evening.

The LUSH Honeybee bath-bomb I treated myself to Monday evening.

Tuesday was our only full day and it was definitely the most hectic. We were rudely awoken at 5:48am by the hotel's fire alarm. So I had to throw on a dressing gown and made my way down the hotel's external stairs, round the block to the front of the hotel, and then almost immediately back into the hotel as I heard a member of staff at the door tell another guest that it was a false alarm. Needless to say I wasn't to cheerful.

Thankfully though after another hour and a half's worth of sleep I was feeling more human and began to get ready to go down for the breakfast buffet. I can't really say enough about both the buffet and the staff working within that area of the lounge -and that applies to my experience on Wednesday morning as well.

Once we'd finished breakfast, we headed back up to our room so I could attempt to do 'beachy waves' for the first time. Aside from accidentally turning the straighteners off half way through I'd say it was a success. Then we grabbed our room cards and headed out into the heat. As I said before the Natural History Museum was to be our first port of call, so that's where we headed.

There were tonnes of people inside the museum. I had never seen it so packed before. In the first exhibit I could barely move, and the whole place was baking. The sheer amount of people and the resulting heat within the museum got too much for me very quickly. By the time I was a quarter of the way through the dinosaur section -my favourite part of the museum, joint with the the room with the blue whale; which incidentally I didn't get to see, as I will explain below- I was fed up and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. The fact I was sweating, dehydrated and engulfed by tourists and school kids put me in such a bad mood. It completely ruined that visit for me, which I found really upsetting as I love that museum so much.

After I had forced my way through a non-moving crowd I stormed out of the dinosaur section, not looking at a single display or bone, and not even caring if I lost my boyfriend along the way; brought a bottle of water; drank half of it and then stormed out into the sun.

We then made our way to the Science Museum as that's the one my boyfriend wanted to go to. It was exactly like the Natural History museum in the sense that it was packed and filled to the rafters with school kids, which did absolutely nothing to help alleviate the foul mood I was in. By the time we got to the end of the first room my boyfriend had had enough too; so after being in there for about ten minutes we walked right back out again. Then we began to make our way to the Kensington Gardens so I could get a picture next to the Peter Pan statue -I know that might sound like a random thing to visit, so I might write a follow-up post explaining my love for Peter Pan.

Then we headed over into Hyde Park in order to get to Oxford Street. By this time our feet were killing us and we were boiling -jeans and chinos were not good legwear decisions that day. After grabbing a bite to eat we headed to H&M so I could get a top I saw on Instagram, followed by Primark so my boyfriend could by shorts to change into, and then finally before heading back to the hotel we had a sit down and cool drink in Starbucks. Once we got back to South Kensington we made a final stop at a little Japanese restaurant called Tombo to get some food to take back to our hotel room for dinner -I had a noodle bowl with chicken that was absolutely amazing! I would definitely eat from there again.

Then on Wednesday we got up, had breakfast, packed and then checked-out. So nothing too exciting. Although, on our way we did discover that Chipotle has opened up a few restaurants in London, which we got pretty excited about. So I will definitely be heading back into Central London for a meal in one of them this summer.

Sorry if super long posts aren't your cup of tea. I just wanted to share the main bits and pieces of my trip with you.
I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless!
-Hannah. :)