Well, I'm in Italy now, but both this entry and the next will be about Day 3 and Day 4 in London. I'll type about Rome soon though, I promise! I just want to make sure I don't forget what I did there. So, without further ado, here we go!
The Tower of London was our first stop on Sunday. In retrospect, we dubbed this day history day, just to give you an idea of rest of the stuff we did that day. Anyway, it was also the day we got up later than we meant to and so missed breakfast (it's from 7:30 to 9:30 AM) which meant it was time to get something quick from a shop in the Underground before we got on the train. So I got a chocolate drizzled croissant and a local brand of Cranberry-Raspberry flavored water (which was delicious). We got off at Tower Hill, which is a stop we seemed to frequent throughout our trip, and went straight to the tower. Quick note about the tower; it's huge on the outside. Check it:
But you have no idea how large it is until you’ve gotten on the inside and looked at a map. That’s when you’re like, oh gee whiz:
The picture doesn’t do it justice so much but believe me, it was huge. And yet, I secretly thought we’d be here maybe 2-3 hours…yeah, I’ll get back to that later. First, I’ll talk about the tours; we were going to do the tour with the Yeoman Warder, but there were so many people we realized fast that we’d get nothing out of it. Instead we bought the audio tour handsets and microphones so we could go about as we pleased. There were about 5 tours (as you can tell from the picture above), and we did the first 2 relatively quickly. During them, I figured out that ravens are officially my favorite type of bird:
Not only are super pretty, but they are ridiculously smart. They can talk and count up to 6! They didn’t want to talk to me unfortunately, so I was a bit sad. But they’re still fantastic; the oldest raven, dubbed Jim Crow was 44 years old when he died in 1924. If ravens could be pets, I’d love to take one home with me.
Anyways, then we went into the White Tower to see the Fit for a King exhibit, which was pretty interesting. It had a lot of different suits of armor and information about the various Kings who wore them. I learned more about Henry VIII in this place and couldn’t help kinda laugh at his suit of armor:
Just a bit ridiculous, then again he was kinda a huge prick. Whoops, was that a pun? Ha ha. Anyways, the whole exhibit was a bit tiring after so many floors of armor and weapons, and history to read. It was also very warm in there, which didn’t help. We went through it all but after we jumped right into the line for the Crown Jewels, since it was beginning to get longer. They were very very sparkly and pretty. I won’t bother attempting to describe them in all their elegance, since I know I’ll fail. So moving on, after that we both were thirsty, having skipped lunch again, and got ice drinks. I picked something with mango in it and it came in a souvenir sippy cup thing. I’m such a kid. By this time it was raining and I had to drape my scarf around my head, so Britt laughed at me a bit. I had no hood on my jacket so c’mon, this made the most sense. We rushed through the rain and jumped into an exhibit about Britain’s history and such. The Revolutionary War section was particularly entertaining. After that we couldn’t believe how long we had been there. So we rushed through the last audio tours, stopping only to get another handset since both of ours died, we were there that long, and one we finished them we split. It was a lot of fun, but we were both so tired of it after at least 5 ½ hours of walking around it.
To get away from the Tower of London, we went to the Millennium Bridge, which according to Britt, is the bridge the deatheaters destroyed in the 6th Harry Potter movie. It was pretty cool, especially with a guy selling the world’s smallest kite:
I think I maybe should have bought one. Oh well. We walked to the Globe Theatre and found it was closed, so we decided to make it our first stop on Monday. And since there wasn’t a train station really close, we decided to continue walking up to the Tower Bridge. We got a lot of cool pictures.
Now, the main thing I’ve wanted to do was see Kensington Gardens, because it’s where J.M. Barrie set one of his stories about Peter Pan. And it so happens to be my favorite of them: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Brief summary: it’s about how Peter Pan became the Boy Who Would Never Grow Up. It’s wonderful. Getting back to the Park however, it even has a statue to Peter Pan, which is even better. So we took the Underground to the park and walked around it while I geeked out, and soon we got to the statue:
Amazing. Simply amazing. There was a little girl obsessed with climbing the statue, which was kinda funny to which. In a weird way, I think Barrie would have been happy with that, although it did make it difficult to get pictures of just the statue. Oh well. I was super happy. I did tear myself away however so we could go get dinner at a cute café on the river just before we headed out as it was getting dark. We began to take the Underground back, but when we went to change trains, we found out it had closed down for the night. We were luckily within walking distance of our hotel, but it was a bit scary, since it was about 8:00 or so and we didn’t have a really good idea of what area we were in. But it was an adventure! And we found our hotel without any trouble, so when we got back to the hotel we both laughed about how ridiculous our imaginations can be and later went to bed.
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