Sunday turned out to be an absolutely gorgeous day (unlike Saturday which was kind of drizzly and cold). We started off by going to the British Museum, which was located very near to our hotel. The museum was very impressive, and quite cool. We saw the Rosetta Stone, lots of Egyptian stonework and mummies, sculptures taken from the Parthenon in Rome and various other historical artifacts. We had planned to spend about an hour at the museum and then go to another museum before our planned tour of the Tower of London at 2pm, but there was so much to see at the British Museum we stayed for about two hours.
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| Entrance to the British Museum |
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| Entrance to the British Museum |
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| Inside the museum |
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| The Rosetta Stone |
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| This guy has toes like me |
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| Turkish Tomb |
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| A mummy |
After the museum we didn't have much time before the Tower of London so we decided to just walk through Green Park and by Buckingham Palace on our way to the tower.
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| Buckingham Palace |
We toured the Tower of London as part of "London Walks", a tour group recommended to us by my friend Meredith. Aaron joined us for the tour, which was quite good - but freezing! We learned a lot more about the history of the tower and fun anecdotes than I think we would have wandering around on our own. The Tower of London was started in 1078 by William the Conqueror and had many subsequent additions by kings and queens that followed. The tower has a history of executions and was where the royalty lived in times of danger (but has never actually been attacked). The Yeoman warders still live there today. Also at the tower we saw the incredibly impressive Crown Jewels - the diamonds were massive!
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| View of the Tower of London, taken on Saturday on the way to Tower Bridge |
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| Tower guards |
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| The White Tower |
After the tower we raced over to the Churchill War Rooms to try and get there in time for the last admission at 5pm, and ran by Big Ben just as it struck 5. We arrived at the War Rooms just as they were locking the gates, and alas they would not let us in. Feeling quite dejected we wandered around for a bit, and decided to check out Piccadilly Circus before it got dark. We wandered down the famous Regent St. and grabbed a snack at a Whole Foods store, then headed back to our hotel.
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| Regent St. |
We enjoyed our afternoon London Walking tour so much we decided to go to an evening tour called "Soho unzipped". This was a tour of the Soho (called this because of what they yelled out while hunting ducks, which is what the land was originally used for) area, with lots of info on its history and current reputation (food, music, theater, and sex apparently). It was a pub tour so we stopped in a couple pubs over the course of two hours for a drink of English beer, and then after the tour we grabbed dinner at a random Italian restaurant called Amalfi in the area that seemed to still be pretty busy (many of the kitchens were already closed after the tour).
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| One of the pubs from the Soho tour |
After the tour we headed back to pack up our things and end our trip! David left on the train Monday morning to head back to Hull and I took the tube to the airport and flew to JFK, where I was met at the airport by my friend Viki. I stayed the night at her and her husband's house and came back to Boston early Tuesday morning.
To see the rest of our pictures, click here!
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