Today I got up with a mission - ride the London Eye, see Big Ben, the houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.... and then.... explore a bit and see what I manage to run into.I did just that. Got up at 8:00, ate a free breakfast at the hostel and took off toward the London Eye via the tube. Got there and the line was only about 5 minutes long. Kathy had told me to go early to avoid the lines and she was right. By the time I got off, the line was about 5 times as long.
The first pic is a view down the Thames from the Eye and the second picture is of the egg things that you ride on. The whoe trip took just over 30 minutes because it goes so slow around but lets you have lots of time to see London and take some fantastic shots.
Got a great view of Big Ben - or officially the Clock Tower of the Houses of Parliament. Big Ben apparently is the name of the bell inside the clock tower. There's a bit of London knowledge for you.
Westminster Abbey is actually just a block away and the grounds includes St Margarets which is the church of the Houses of Parliament and even house a seat reserved for the Speaker of the House. It's where Winston Churchill got married and is still in use as a church today. Pretty cool building actually.
Then Westminster Abbey itself.... FREAKING BEAUTIFUL. I've never in my life seen anything like it. Number one - so much history interred there that it is almost overwhelming. So many people buried there - Kings of Queens of London - William and Mary, Mary Queen of Scotts, King Edward (well three of them), King James, Queen Elizabeth I, Charles Dickens, Isaac Newton, George Handel, Laurence Olivier, Geoffrey Chaucer, Rudyard Kipling - Even Charles Darwin... It's astounding how many English greats are in that same place.
Then the fun started. I took off walking down the Thames just to see where I ended up. I ended up in the London borough of Lambeth and ran into the Imperial War Museum. The museum commemorating mostly Britian's involvement in World War II. They had some stuff from WWI also. It's the kind of museum (free by the way) that you can spend all day - 8 to 5 and not quite see it all. It too was a little overwhelming. They had a cool Secret Service area dedicated to MI5 and MI6 (English versions of CIA and FBI) and a 2 floor Holocaust Museum inside - that was the most incredible memorial to the Holocaust that I had ever seen. It was a little bit much emotionally - it was really a no-holds-barred look at the issue that was refreshing - but REAL.
Outside was a Tibetan Peace Garden dedicated by the Dalai Lama himself in '99 and a peace of the Berlin Wall. A really cool find for the accidental tourist today. I'm back at the hostel - it's about 8pm and I'm beat. I have to move to my "permanent" home tomorrow where I'll be for about 5 weeks during classes so I think I'm gonna head to bed early tonight - but tomorrow is another day!
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There's a place in Paris called the Pantheon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panth%C3%A9on_(Paris)
ReplyDeleteIf you go to Paris, you should totally look it up. It isn't a church, but it's a pretty cool building and where the French bury their greats--Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, the Curies, Voltaire, Rousseau, Louis Braille, Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola, etc.
Btw, semi-planned accidental tourism is definitely the way to go in London.
Oh--and did you get the doc I emailed you? LOTS of good info there. Try to go by Sir Soane's Museum. It has weird hours, but totally worth it. It's one of the free museums in Museum Mile in Bloomsbury.