London

Last Wednesday I skipped town with my friends from Mizzou and headed to London for the weekend. Getting there wasn't too difficult although we didn't get to our hostel until about 3am because of a series of complications with the London bus services. But relieved to have beds to sleep in, we checked into our hostel and went to sleep. Here's our hostel:

London may be the most difficult city in the world to see in a couple days, but we did our best. We started out by just taking the tube to the river Thames. It was a funny feeling looking out over the river because it's been the setting of so many novels I've read, and to actually be there visualizing Marlow from Heart of Darkness telling his story in a little boat, or Pip from Great Expectations looking out at the water as a gentleman, it was a very cool feeling.

We saw the Houses of Parliament and the Clock Tower (Big Ben is the bell):

And also had a good view of the London Eye:

Since London is so big we decided to take a free walking tour to get our bearings. On the tour, we walked through Hyde Park and St. James' Park:

And we just so happened to run into some redcoats on their way to St. James' Palace:

The Duke of Wellington was the man who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, and his influence is all over the city. This is the Wellington Arch, which originally had a statue of the man on top, however was replaced with a statue representing peace after he died.

We walked past Buckingham Palace, which is imposing, but much smaller than Versailles:

This is where the Princes Charles, William, and Harry live:

Me in a soldier's guard-post outside St. James Palace:

Here's St. James' Palace, which started out as leper hospital, then became a palace for the monarchy, later a barracks for Oliver Cromwell, and finally the administrative building and residence of King George's 1-3. From what I'm told it's in the Tudor style, but what I know is that it looks an awful lot like my Junior High.

Next, we walked to Trafalgar square, with Lord Nelson on the top of his column, and the National Gallery in the left-background. It's a meeting place for big events, and on the millennium New Year's eve, there were 1,000,000 in this square.

It's hard to see clearly, but this is literally a nose stuck on a wall. Why? Because the British are a funny people. Supposedly it may either be rubbed for good luck by men on horses, or it may be a representation of the massive schnoz of the Duke of Wellington.

Here are the royal horse stables on the parade grounds where the Queen celebrates her birthday every year.

That little black building in the middle is 10 Downing Street, otherwise known as the home of the Prime Minister. While the royal family lives in far from normal quarters and do minimal government work, the PM lives in a normal residence and does a lot of work. Such is life.

And we ended up between Westminster Abbey, the Clock Tower, and the Houses of Parliament.

In a basement room around the right hand side of the building, Guy Fawkes and his colleagues famously loaded 36 barrels of gunpowder in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Fawkes was in charge of setting off and blowing up the Houses of Parliament with all the leaders and monarchs inside, but the plot was found out on November 5, the day of detonation. Interestingly, wiki says our term "guy" meaning a man derives from his name.

One thing that puts Paris a step above London, in my book, is that most of the sights and museums in London are between 10 and 15 pounds, which is around $20-$30. In order to avoid paying to see Westminster Abbey, and so that we could really see it, we waited until 5pm on Thursday afternoon and went to a church service. The choir was great but I was surprised at how many invocations were sung by one man in the middle as well as the fact that the "lessons" as they were called were just short passages from the Bible. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I was hoping for a little bit more. Having said all this, the church is absolutely beautiful and enormous on the inside, and it's a little bit of a sombre feeling to be sitting in the church where Princess Di's funeral was held.

Here the blog is going to get a little unorganized because Friday I went to Normandy to see the WWII memorials, but all you need to know is that the trip was awesome but stressful with respects to travel. To get there my travel went metro, train, overnight ferry, bus, bus. And reverse that for the return trip. Normandy needs its own blog so I'll do that soon.

But I was surprisingly energetic when I got back to Portsmouth Harbor and got on a train for London Saturday morning.

The train ride was actually really great and I got to see a lot of the English countryside, with a lot of sheep, forests, quaint (but wealthy looking) houses, and horses wearing coats. It was the perfect scenery to envision gentlemen jumping horses over brambles while chasing a stag.

I got back to Waterloo station and decided just to walk around. I ended up down by the river and the London Eye, and stopped in for a genuine English breakfast. It turned out to be pretty much a normal American breakfast, but nonetheless was better done than most. There's a lot of things I like in the picture below but I'd like to point out the bowl of sugar cubes on the right side and the fact that my coffee came in a pot, with a mug in the center (without a handle so most people use two hands like drinking out of a coconut), and also a little thing of warm milk. That's coffee done right, although be wary of the addictive quality of sugar cubes.

After breakfast, it was still too early to meet up with my friends so I just started wandering. I saw Cleopatra's needle:

Obviously a lot of the river:

St. Paul's Cathedral:

Shakespeare's Globe:

Cool British looking pubs and squares:

A replica of Sir Francis Drake's ship. That's a deer on the front. Why? Like I said, the Brits are funny people:

The cathedral of Southwark:

And between pictures of the cathedral of Southwark and London Bridge, there's an interesting story linking the two. Long ago before there were bridges across the Thames, John Owen raked in large sums of money ferrying people across. He was a notorious miser in every sense of the word and decided to fake his death because people would be so grieved that none of his family or servants would eat that day, which would save him some money. So he did it. The problem was that the servants began to feast and celebrate. So Owen came up out of his fake death and started yelling at everyone, which startled one servant so badly that he "dashed Owens' brains out" with a broomstick. Owen's daughter Mary was so grieved at actually losing her father that she donated the rest of her life and her money to a church, which is now the cathedral of Southwark.

H.M.S. Belfast, which fought in WWII and the Korean War:

Tower Bridge. Tower Bridge is the bridge that most people confuse to be the "London Bridge" because it's much more noteworthy. Although it has never actually burned, there have been some incidents such as opening while a double decker bus was on it, and getting buzzed by a plane.

After a great walk down the river, I headed for where I thought a metro stop was so that I could head west and see the changing of the guard. Little did I know that some of the dots on my map labeled "metro" did not refer to the "tube", which is a metro in my mind. Thus, I wandered through the Tower Bridge section of London for a while and had an enjoyable time seeing London where normal people live.

I did make it to the changing of the guards, but unfortunately learned that even though it happens every other day, it's popular. Of course I should've known to go earlier but I did manage to see a little of the action and take a picture of some men wearing bearskin (That's what the big black hats are made from. It's real, too.).

In the afternoon on Saturday Mark and I went to the Churchill War Cabinet Museum, which was an underground basement of strategy rooms, sleeping quarters, and communications rooms (closets is a better description). This was where Churchill ran WWII and although he allegedly only slept down here 3 times, this was where he held meetings, planning sections, and where much of his staff stayed. The reason for the bunker was to avoid the German bombings of London during the 1941-1942 War of Britain. It is rumored that Churchill enjoyed watching the bombings just on top of the bunker aboveground.

This is the main meeting room:

And here we have one of the coolest museum exhibits I've ever seen. It's a touch-screen table with all the years from WWI to after WWII, where you can hone in on a specific year, month, even day and see what Churchill was doing.

This is the aptly named phone room, which housed the phones connecting to the royal air force, army, navy, and special forces.

Did you know? Arguably the greatest Brit in history, Churchill's mother was American.

The obligatory phone-booth picture:

Saturday night we decided to go to the musical "Billy Elliot", which was heralded as the musical of the decade. I'm not huge on theatre, but I was excited to sit down in an old theatre and feel like I'm doing something cultural.

However, I quickly was met by a woman who had the same seat as me. Strange. It didn't take me long to realize that although my entire group had tickets for the 7:30pm show, I somehow had a ticket to the 2:30pm show, and after talking to the usher, my only option was to buy another ticket (no chance), or leave. I will say that the woman at the ticket window was extremely helpful and went through probably 100 ticket stubs to find mine so that I could argue with the private ticket vendor.

The whole experience happened much faster than you would think, but honestly, I walked into the pub next door, ordered a beer brewed in London, and realized that the Masters were on TV. Suddenly, I was very happy not to be watching a dancing boy with an abusive father.

Sunday, I had it in mind to see the British Museum which Rick Steves heralds as "simply put, the best exhibit of civilization anywhere". In fact, it was the one thing I entered London wanting to see above everything else. Sadly, we had a bus to catch at 1:45pm, and I first needed to go back to Leicester Square and try and get my money back for Billy Elliot. After finding out the manager doesn't work on Sunday's, I wandered around the area, which was very cool, and then decided that better than spending $30 to run through a precious museum, I would calmly explore the upper Kensington and Notting Hill neighborhoods, checking out the Portobello street market.

This little area is one of my favorite neighborhoods that I've seen largely because of the mix of different types of people from ethnicity, social class, and style. One thing is for sure: With those big uniform houses in the middle picture above, the people that can afford to live in Notting Hill have more than a few nickels in their pockets.

We were late for the bus, which meant later to the airport, but we caught our plane in plenty of time, and I arrived back to Antonio, Dolores, and the turtles around 8pm.

Overall, London is absolutely great. But I think size-wise it's even bigger than Paris, and I felt that it was much more difficult to get my bearings and also took more effort to explore neighborhoods and what not. I think I would need a week or two to really see it because it has anything you could want.

All the people were very hospitable, and although I didn't spend much time there, I'll say I think the people in Spain are much more outgoing than the British, and the French are a little bit more helpful. All in all, awesome.