Thu. 08-30-07 -- London, England
Originally published on 09-02-07
I slept alright last night in the bottom bunk. I kept waking up and checking my clock, but then I'd fall back to sleep. Not bad for my first night in a timezone 8 hours off from Portland and 11 hours off from Maui!
This morning we bought bread & jam for breakfast then ford the tube to Westminster. We claimed a spot across the street from the Houses of Parliament and ate breakfast with a close view of Big Ben! After breakfast we crossed the street and toured Westminster Abbey (£10/person... ouch!) We also sprung for one audioguide headset for another £4 which mostly I listened to. Overall I guess I was underwhelmed by the Abbey. I mean it was kind of cool to see the burial spots of so many famous people (Newton, Darwin, Edward Longshanks, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, etc) but just kind of... The building was impressive, but I guess the whole thing just didn't live up to the price of admission.
After the Abbey, we walked along the edge of St. James's Park until we reached the Cabinet War Rooms & Churchill Museum. This place was very cool! This was the secret underground bunker where Churchill & his cabinet planned and ran their part of WWII. A few of the rooms were left exactly the same ever since the war ended (the place was mostly used for storage afterwards). There was even sugar cubes found in the desk drawer of one of the officers (a valuable commodity due to wartime rationing). There was also a new high tech museum about Winston Churchill, but we didn't spend a lot of time there. It was alright, but I wanted to spend more time in the war rooms.
After we made it through, we were ready for lunch. We started walking toward Trafalgar Square while looking for a grocery store. We ended up not finding one until we made it all the way to the Square, but that was fine because it allowed us to eat on some stairs next to a fountain.
Once we finished eating, we were very close to the National Gallery so we popped in to look at some paintings. We saw paintings by Monet, Raphael, DaVinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Van Gogh, and plenty more. The most recognized painting we saw was Sunflowers by Van Gogh.
Back on the tube this time to the British Museum. Here we saw plenty of amazing objects from history. We even saw Cleopatra's mummy!!! There were lots of cool Egyptian things like the Rosetta Stone, giant statues, and lots of mummies and sarcophagi.
After a full day of walking around, we were really worn out. We rode the tube back to our neighborhood and bought meat and cheese (that's mature Scottish cheddar to you!) to make sandwiches for dinner. We ate dinner outside in the courtyard behind our hostel, and now we're reading and writing in an inside lounge. This hostel is really nice, the shared areas are very clean and comfortable (which is good since our room is so small!)
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