Well folks I finally decided I better wrap up my memories of our fantastic trip to the UK. I know it's been months now (oops) but better to finish it out than leave an entire weekend and city out of my UK story!
We decided to spend our last weekend in London. Although I was sick and Mark was feeling the burnout from the hours demanded by a working vacation, we were both determined to make the most of it. As you saw from my Harry Potter post, I was thrilled to train into Kings Cross Station and the sites only got better from there. We got in late Friday night and by the time I was done gawking at the station and we had successfully navigated our way through the underground, it was time to crash. Up until our trip to the UK, our vacations are always late nights and sleeping in, but this trip it was almost always to bed by 10 and up as soon as we can get me my coffee!
On Saturday (July 3) we started out by going to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guards. This was the least spectacular thing we had ever seen but we were glad to say we'd seen it, nonetheless. We were both tainted by drum corps precision, me growing up with Navy influences, and generally thinking that "military precision" should be a lot more interesting than people walking back and forth kind of in step/time. The icing on the cake was when the band came and did what the Husky Band fondly calls a "park n blow". As in, they stood there and played. What's worse, they played what would normally be a song with a killer backbeat, but the straight edge of the band made it super lame. And then they played the batman theme. Mark and I and most of the American tourists were openly laughing. I'm sure the Brits thought we were very rude but here is this military band, standing in a concert set, playing the slowest, straightest, lamest arrangement of batman I have ever of, and none of them are cracking a smile, and most of the foreign tourists don't recognize it. Here's some video:
After having our fill of the palace (we opted to save our money and just view it from the outside) we wandered towards the city centre to view some more sites. We ended up seeing Big Ben, The London Eye, The Thames River, The Parliament building, West Minster Abbey, and protesters neatly and politely making their opinions known in a single square block of the city.
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| Look right! We were still getting a kick out of it, even though we were used to left sided thinking by our 3rd week in the country. |
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| Big Ben was so much more impressive in person than in pictures. One of our favorite surprised of London! |
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| The Parliament Buiding, on the Thames |
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| Eye of London (infamously known as the eyesore of London for awhile, though I think people are used to it now) |
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| Westminster Abbey |
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| For some reason all of the protestors were collected in a single square block. We suspected there was a law about protesting, and were grateful for our good ole American right to make jerks out of ourselves where ever we please. |
In anycase, we saw a TON of stuff. We were amazed at how close everything was and we took advantage of seeing what we could. We rounded the day off with a trip to the British Museum and then finally the British Library before heading back to our hotel to crash.
The British Museum had some of the most amazing exhibits Mark and I had ever seen. We HIGHLY recommend making it a stop on your trip if you are going through London. Mark pointed out that "Britain has been pillaging other countries for centuries, of course they have all kinds of cool stuff." Mark and I aren't really history buffs or museum people but we could have easily spent an entire day in the museum. I wish every person could have the opportunity to see such amazing primary sources. Here are some of my favorites:
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| Mark, by the Rosetta Stone. Woah. |
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| My hand, touching hieroglyphs while Mark whispers something about a sign that says do not touch. Oops. |
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| Cleopatra!!!! So cool. |
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| Oooooh scary unwrapped mummy! |
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| Moai statue from Easter Island |
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| An artistic representation of the life of a man and a woman. All the medicines taken over a lifetime! These are representations of two real people, and the art is the collaborative effort of a doctor and an artist. The more I studied it, the more moving it was! Amazing to see a life this way. |
After we left the British Museum, we had barely enough energy left to tour the British library which is located just across from King's Cross Station. Most of the amazing things in the library were in highly secure, temperature controlled, humidity monitored rooms and there was no way our big giant camera was making it past these guard. But I did see some of the best things of the entire trip there. If you are ever in London, the British Library has to be on your list of places to visit as it is free and awesome!
We got to see the magna carta, which was really a cool thing to see but it turned out we couldn't read any of it as it had been damaged in a fire and obviously is not written in a font easily decipherable, let alone modern English. But it was still very impressive to be able to view such an historic item. Mark and I also spent a long time viewing several hundred pieces of ancient religious writings. Not just Judeo-Christian writings (those were certainly there) but writings from all sorts of religions from all around the world, dating back thousands of years. We both really wished we had one of those universal translators!
I saw some original manuscripts of Alice in Wonderland, a ton of Beatles stuff including some lyrics brainstormed and jotted down on napkins, and original works from Leonardo DaVinci. I also spent a lot of my time taking in the music section. They had an amazing collection of original manuscripts dating back to (I think?) the eighth century. Some of the music didn't even have modern notation, just general dots to show a basic shape of the pitch. They had original Purcell, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart sheet music all written by the composer's hand. It was incredible to look at those pages and imagine Beethoven's hand madly scratching out the notes, or Mozart's hand painstakingly perfecting each note to have exactly the same stem length! Looking at the originals is not something that can be described, nor something the can be missed for any musician or music lover. For anyone who loves or appreciates classical music, if you're ever in London you MUST go to the British Library and check out their collection!
After I got pulled away from staring into the music (the library closed) Mark and I stumbled down into the underground and headed back to our hotel for dinner and another early bedtime. Our only regret for pictures is that of all our adventuring we didn't get a single picture of us on the underground! The whole experience of riding the underground was pretty negative. It was hot, humid, smelly, incredibly dirty, crowded, slow, claustrophobic, and expensive. But it got us where we needed to go and that's more than we can say for the LA buses!
