London Day 4

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.

Entrance to the British Museum

Entrance to the British Museum

Inside the museum

The Rosetta Stone

This guy has toes like me

Turkish Tomb 

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.

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! 

View of the Tower of London, taken on Saturday on the way to Tower Bridge

Tower guards

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. 

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). 

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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London Day 3

On Saturday morning we ate breakfast in the room and then headed over to Leicester Square (via Trafalgar Square) to look for the tkts booth, where tickets to see shows for the day could be purchased at a discounted rate.  We didn't see any shows on the discounted ticket list that we were really dying to see, so we decided to hold off for the day and enjoy the sites of the city instead.  

Trafalgar Square

Trafalgar Square

We started at Westminster Abbey, and realized that we had made a lucky decision because the abbey was only open for another couple of hours, and closed on Sunday! We took advantage of the free audio tour and learned all about the famous people who have been buried there, or who have a memorial there. The pamphlet told us that Westminster Abbey has been the nation's Coronation church since 1066, when William the Conqueror was crowned there. Not unexpectedly, David spent a good deal of the tour looking at the ceiling and stone work and marveling at how they managed such detailed work so many years ago. 

Westminster Abbey
 

I figured we need proof that we were actually in London

David was more excited about getting a shot of the abbey than of me

After Westminster Abbey we walked around the House of Parliament, looked at Big Ben, and crossed Westminster Bridge. We opted out of the London Eye (the Ferris Wheel) and instead hopped on the tube to go to Borough Market with David's co-worker (from the US office but in the UK for 18 months). At Borough Market we enjoyed a chocolate crepe, some mulled wine, and perused all of the various produce, cheese and meat stalls.

House of Parliament and Big Ben from Westminster Bridge

Borough Market by London Bridge

After the market we all walked over to Tower Bridge and to take a look at the Tower of London. It had gotten too late in the day to actually Tour the tower, so we said goodbye to Aaron and made our way home via Borough Market again, where we picked up bread and cheese for breakfast and enjoyed a freshly squeezed juice and chocolate pastry. 

Tower Bridge

The bridge opening (this apparently happens about 600 times a year)

Back at the hotel we spent some time looking online and through our guidebook for a dinner place and settled on Porter's English restaurant - the name seemed appropriate for us! It was pretty good, even if a little touristy. It also gave us a chance to wander through Covent Garden, and I "bought" a series of mounted photographs while there (I always like to buy a watercolor or photograph representing the cities I visit in other countries). I put bought in quotations because after we picked it out we tried to pay the vendor and she exclaimed that she hadn't even seen us and we could have run off with it! Then she said, you should run off with it, it's St. Patrick's day (she was Irish) and wouldn't take our money. Once back at the hotel we spent some time planning the next day and headed to bed. 

A nice,  relaxing dinner at Porter's English Restaurant

London Day 2

David had to work Friday so I spent the day at the hotel working, relaxing and looking through the guidebook for cool things to do. Around 4:00 I left the hotel armed with handwritten directions to the Stroud office so that I could meet up with David and his colleagues and grab a beer at a pub. I have to admit that it feels very unsettling to walk around without a cell phone (and one with data!) now that it has become such an integral part of my life. Luckily I only had a short walk with a few turns and David and I met up quite easily. We spent a couple of hours chatting with his work friends at the pub, and then headed back to the hotel to find a place to go for dinner. After a bit of time looking online and at the guidebook we decided to just head out in the general direction of an area on the map that looked like it contained a high restaurant population. We weren't looking for any particular type of food and ended up at an Indian restaurant that was very busy and quite tasty.

  

On our walk home we stopped at a grocery store to buy some bread, cheese, fruit and salami for breakfast the following morning (we kept them on the balcony in our room so they would keep cool overnight). We also bought some Aero chocolate pudding, since we'd never had it (and everyone knows how much I love chocolate). Back at the hotel we spent some time looking through the guidebook to make a tentative plan for Saturday, and we continued a fight with the shower that had begun Thursday night. David and I have decided that bad showers seem to follow us around. This one produces lukewarm water that is warm enough so that you aren't in a bone-chilling shower, but not warm enough that you actually feel like it's a warm shower. We read the somewhat odd directions for the shower carefully, and decided that we were indeed using it correctly but that it just didn't get hot. 

 

The sink, and the tub, both had hot water. We ended up calling maintenance the following morning, which got us nowhere other than they offered to let us shower in another room, but were clear that the room would be used just for showering. Given how odd that sounded to us we decided to keep our lukewarm shower. We managed to improve the temperature slightly by either flushing the toilet multiple times throughout the shower (which really just got us laughing) or by turning the cold water on for the bath while showering. The latter worked pretty well, but meant that you had cold feet.