London Pt. 2

Having a glorious day free of classes, I should probably post here, it's been awhile. I guess I'll pick up where John left off on our London adventure.

Saturday morning we tried to wake up extra early and failed as usual. John went down to scope out the hotel breakfast, which turned out to be free and very good. I went down when he got back, and we finally got out the door and walked to the Underground station. We figured it out relatively quickly, for it being such a big system. I think we only messed up once, and that just involved watching a train we could have taken leave and having to catch the next one, no big deal. We got off at the Tower Bridge stop, and took some pictures of the view that immediately greeted us. The line to get into the Tower of London wasn't too long, and we got the student discount, making the tickets almost reasonable. We hopped on a huge tour, and got led around. For those of you who don't know what the tower of London looks like (I sure didn't before we went), this is it:

It's a very cool fortress/castle thing. It's been added on to over the years, so there's a lot of varying architectural style. I think it's most famous for the prisoners that it's held, and as the execution site of a lot of monarchs, think Henry VIII's wives and Lady Jane Grey etc.

We saw the crown jewels, which were even more spectacular in person. VERY shiny. I also had my first encounter with London sentries, looking stoney, but also watching the crowd like hawks. Needless to say, we took Betty pictures with them. We saw the Bloody Tower, where two young princes were most likely murdered, a lot of famous prisoners were held (their carvings in the rooms were so cool), and also where torture was supposedly to have occured. We also explored the White Tower, which had a lot of neat stuff in it. Lots of suits of armour, replica horses, and weapons. Also discovered the base of the flagstaff, which apparently was sent over from British Columbia by the Vancouver Boy Scouts. It used to be a 159 ft. Douglas Fir, that has supposedly been a sapling in the 1550's, and now is the 85ft flagstaff. Very cool and rather random.

After we left the tower we took some pictures of the bridge and wandered back to the station after buying some postcards and booked it back to the hotel to get ready for our big night out. Called a cab which then proceeded to drop us off at the wrong theater. It was raining. I was in heels and a dress, no coat. Ugh. Luckily, we discovered after waiting in the wrong ticket line for awhile, that the theater we wanted was just across the street. But we went to the wrong door, and had to walk all the way around the block to get the right one. We picked up our tickets, and promptly brought an umbrella. A Wicked umbrella, which has a witches hat peak, it's incredible. John looked very posh carrying it around with his suit. We found a nearby pub to inhale dinner at, which wasn't too bad. Temporarily satisfied my salad craving (forreal not getting to eat enough veggies here, it's bothering me).

Our seats in the theater were in the dress circle but we could see rather well. I had to keep dodging around the lady in front of me who had big hair. We spent the pound to rent opera glasses, and I had a lot of fun spying on all the techies and actors taking their places (very poorly concealed for a professional show tsk tsk). The show was amazing, needless to say. I enjoyed every second of it. Caught the train back home after, and spent the rest of the night trying to thaw and watching silly British TV and a bit of the Olympics.