That was our last night in Hackney, so the next day we carted our bags off to the hostel we had booked in a different part of north central London. It was called The Brazen Backpacker, it was a bar (The Brazen Head) on the ground floor with the hostel in the 
floors above it. Pretty cool setup! We left our bags there and headed for Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard. It was, of course, packed with tourists but we worked our way into some decent views as the new guards processed in. There was then a ton of waiting around as the ceremony proceeded, the band played a few tunes during a few parts, one of which was the Game Of Thrones theme song. It turned out this was actually the
Canadian royal guard, which was interesting. Eventually all the guards had been relieved and the old guard processed away. The crowd started to disperse and we wandered north towards the park to plan our next move. As we waited to cross a street the gate leading into it from the palace opened up and a motorcade flying the royal standard came zooming out. We saw the queen(‘s motorcade)!
We took a seat in the park and determined that we were going to walk over to Trafalgar Square, find some lunch on the way there and then go tour the Tower of London. We started walking and found ourselves in the theatre district and particularly Piccadilly 
Circus. We wandered around and ended up at a restaurant featuring English fare. I had a chicken tikka masala pie, Sarah had a chicken and mushroom pie. Delicious! We found Trafalgar square and snapped some photos. Then we looked at the time and realized we had not left enough of it to go to Tower of London with the recommended 3 hours before it closed. So we wandered into the National Gallery.
The National Gallery was cool, as usual we most enjoyed the impressionist section, and I was particularly impressed by the Van Gogh pieces. I was also distraught to learn that Sarah isn’t a particularly big Van Gogh fan so she will probably be rather bored when I spend our entire visit to Amsterdam in the Van Gogh museum.
At 4:30 we got on a train to Westminster Abbey, where we entered the church for their choral evensong service. It was beautiful. To sit in this gorgeous ancient building where kings and queens are married and buried and hear it completely filled with the organ and the voices of the choir was extremely impressive.
We left and headed to the hostel to see what was going on before getting dinner. We walked into our dorm room and found a few of the bunks occupied. There was no greeting and the room was made a bit awkward by the guy in briefs laying on one of the bunks staring at us, also a strong aroma of fart had crept into the room in our absence. Joy!
So we headed out, sat in a park, looked at restaurant prices, went to a grocery store, got a meal deal, and took our goods to the Regent’s Park.
Side note here on food to go in London. Food to go is all over the place in London, every store has a selection of premade sandwiches, wraps and salads to take home or to the park or whatever, and many have “meal deals” where you pick one of the sandwich/wrap/salads, a drink and a snack for a set price. It’s really nice. There are also restaurants devoted entirely to this concept. We figure this is essentially the equivalent 
of all the drive-through fast food in the states.
Anyhow, in Regent’s Park we sat on the grass and ate in a lovely setting. We then went and sat in the rose garden until someone told us the park was closing. At that point we went back to the hostel where we had a pint downstairs in the pub before heading up to our room.
The room was dark (but the smell was gone), several people were in bed and we tried to get changed and in bed with as little light and noise as possible. We then climbed into our squeaky bunks and booked a private room in a nice flat on the south bank one block from the river and within easy walking distance of various attractions, all for about $7 more per night than the hostel (thanks AirBnB).