Thursday, July 29th, 2010
London Calling.
Today we had an agenda: get to London as early as we can and do as much as we can before we die from exhaustion. Well the last part nearly happened but I’ll get to that shortly.
Ate breakfast as quickly as possible then scurried to the train station, where, because of long lines we missed the first train to London Bridge station by 10 seconds! Had to wait another 30minutes before the next one arrived then it was a nearly two hour ride to London. I had bought a paper to pass the time and had fun reading all the strange little bits thrown in with the real news.
When we finally get there we made our way, with relative ease, to London Bridge. Took pictures of ourselves with the Tower Bridge off in the distance, took same pic for a cute asian girl, then we headed on down to The Tower. Very cool and yet not at all what I expected.
It’s not really a ’tower’. It’s a complex of buildings, all built/rebuilt in different times and all serving different purposes, none of them originally meant for prisoners or torture. Part of it was actually a palace at one time and another part (The Bloody Tower) was home to Sir Walter Raleigh and his family. Apparently it’s also the place where the two little princes were supposedly murdered but they don’t really know so it’s just legend.
Then we stood in line to see the Crown Jewels. It was a serious queue but it didn’t take long. The English certainly know how to move a line along! We got to see almost all the royal crowns since the 1660s, along with the scepters, orbs and rings the monarchs wore during coronation. I was really interested in seeing the Koh-I-noor diamond. The history of it is amazing and the superstitions that surround it make it even more cool.
After that we headed on over to Tower Green so we could be in the area where so many super historically famous figures were executed. It was really kind of creepy and sad at the same time to see a site where such intense drama and history played out, all sanitized and harmless looking. We also ventured into the small church who’s crypt houses the bones of all those executed, including Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Catherine Howard and Thomas Cromwell. It was really surreal.
So after that cheery bit we decided to pop into the small area where they show medieval torture devices and then we found the tower (Bell Tower) where supposedly Thomas More spent his remaining days before he had his head chopped off. The Tower of London was such a gruesomely intriguing place to go!
After The Tower, we made our way across Tower Bridge, taking lots of pics and looking for the The Globe Theatre. We found it, but it turns out they actually use it for productions and it’s really not the original thing (obviously), but just the original site. Then we went looking for the Tate Modern but not before we had some fish and chips from a pub/restaurant near The Globe. It was a little bit more fancy than the other pubs we went to and much bigger, but the fish and chips were EXACTLY like the kind I used to get with my grandmother in Triangle City. Yeah. In SC. I got a little nostalgic but we washed that away with the best Hoegaarden I’ve had since Belgium and a Leffe.
Then we found the Tate Modern and enjoyed all the goodies they had to offer. Jason was in his element, getting all Stendhal Syndrome over some de Chirico and Dali and Pollock. Then I found the Rothko and cried. It was glorious.
They don’t really have that much there, but what they do have is brilliant. Mondrian, Monet, Pollock, Dali, Bacon, Tanguy, Ernst and Lichtenstein. We got loads of funny pics.
After that we got seriously lost looking for the street in Soho that had all the record shops on it. I was SO NOT digging all the walking. I felt like my feet were going to explode. All I could think of while I was walking was ‘this is how it must felt to be marched as a slave with an invading army hundreds of years ago’ or “now I know how Sam and Frodo felt going to Mt. Doom.” Not happy Manda there. We failed with the Tube and then got irritated and pissy being dehydrated and tired, only managing to find one record shop only ten minutes before they closed.
We had to leave with only a few things and could not have been happier to get back to the B&B. We were STARVING cause we missed eating in London and didn’t get back to Canterbury until after 11 when all the bars were closing. So we ended up getting chicken kebab at a late night eatery run by Turkish guys. It was so delicious, but that may have been because we were dying from hunger and thirst and exhaustion. Who knows.
After that we were dead to the world, though I managed to somehow get a second wind and blog a little, get on Facebook for a few minutes and didn’t end up going to sleep until 1:30am. That was a LONG effing day!
