Europost Part I: London

I got back from Europe almost two weeks ago and I’ve only just now sat down to write this post.  Why is that?  First of all, I didn’t have pictures until last week.  Then I just got busy.  And I’m often so exhausted when I come home from work that I never had the energy to give the subject the attention it deserved.

But now it’s Saturday morning, I’m on the couch with Henry, I just watched Glee, and I’m ready.

(And now it’s Monday night and I still haven’t finished this post.  But I’m trying.  Gimme a break; it’s long.)

I flew into London Heathrow on the 17th of August after a long flight with two layovers that made me wish Apparition was a real thing.  My flight had a layover in the Dublin airport and I must admit a tiny part of me hoped really hard to see Henry Tudor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.  Jan flew in from Italy as she’d been there the past week with her boyfriend Peter and some other law school friends.  We met up in the airport and proceeded to our hotel which was in Kensington by the Gloucester (pronounced Gloss-ter) Road Tube stop.  The hotel was super nice, but the best part was watching Jeremy Kyle every morning as we got ready.  Jeremy Kyle is the British version of Jerry Springer, except that his being British automatically makes his show about 1,000 times more entertaining.  His British accent made his show seem less trashy even though the subject material was exactly the same.  There are dumb hicks in England.  Really.

Our hotel was within walking distance of Buckingham Palace, so after we got settled into our hotel, we took a walk to the Kensington Gardens, which is this enormous beautiful park right next to the palace.  The weather was perfect and there were people everywhere.  Many were tourists, but most were Londoners just out to enjoy the weather, which is something you don’t see in Austin except for that one week in October in between Summer and Not Summer.  Everything was so green and verdant (something else you don’t see in Texas).  The Kensington Gardens are the home of the Prince Albert Memorial, the Diana Memorial Playground, and a Peter Pan statue.  We tried very hard to refrain from making the same joke every other tourist was making about Prince Albert in a  can.

Kensington Gardens

After the first day, my concept of time totally left me, so I have no idea in which order the rest of the events of the trip occurred. I’m pretty sure the next day we went to see the Changing of the Guard, which was really neat, although every tourist in London was there too.  Jan got some good pictures of the backs of people’s heads.

Some of the highlights:

Buckingham Palace. We took a tour of Buckingham Palace and totally saw Prince Harry!  No, not really.  All we saw were the state rooms open to the public, which are certainly nothing to sneeze politely at.  The State Rooms are where formal ceremonies and meetings with Important People take place.  We saw the room where Queen Elizabeth II got married, which was neat.  The tour also took us through a room that housed gifts the Queen has been given from world leaders throughout her reign.  Some of her incredible dresses were also on display.  We weren’t allowed to take pictures so here’s a picture I found on Google Images of the Portrait Gallery, which was one of the State Rooms where, you guessed it, portraits of British people hang on the walls.  Look at that ceiling!

Just a typical lunch

Tower of London. I may be a huge dork, but I thought this was awesome.  The tour guides are the Yeomen Warders. The Yeoman Warders’ original function was to guard the prisoners, but now they wear costumes and give the same tour five times a day.  For some reason they’re nicknamed the Beef Eaters.  My Yeoman said that the name came from the time when beef was scarce and the Yeoman were allotted a certain ration of beef, presumably so they could keep their strength and therefore keep the Very Important Prisoners from escaping and killing the King or something.  I saw the tower where Mary Queen of Scots imprisoned Princess Elizabeth (before she was queen) for conspiring to murder her!  That is so awesome!  That’s in MOVIES!  Also, the ToL is supposedly haunted with a ton of ghosts.  Wonder why.  Probably nothing to do with the fact that the ToL is where all the VIP executions took place.

Tower of London

Tower Bridge. It’s like half a block away from London Bridge and it is gorgeous.  (London Bridge totally sucks.  It’s brown and dirty and boring.  The best thing about it is that it fell.)  Tower Bridge is huge and blue and beautiful and just see for yourself.

Tower Bridge

High Tea. The Brits do two foodie things well: chips and high tea.  Jan and I had high tea at a very fancy hotel whose name escapes me at the moment.  It was right by the Wellington Arch.  High tea consisted of lots of tiny delicious pastries and cucumber sandwiches and amazing tea in a fancy room with the most courteous, friendly waiters I have ever encountered.  Oh, I also almost knocked the pot of tea over when I set my purse down.  That totally went down well.

Platform 9 3/4. Duh, of course I went here.  Platforms 9, 10, and 11 at King’s Cross Station were actually under construction, so they took the part of the wall at Platform 9 3/4 where they’d put the cart in the wall and moved it to another platform.  Whatever, I got a picture.  I AM NOW IN HARRY POTTER.

Platform 9 3/4 and me, Hermione Granger Acker

Trafalgar Square. Enormous.  Beautiful.  Lots of monuments.  Bordered on one side by the National Gallery, which we didn’t have time to go to.  The Wikipedia article has a really neat 360 degree picture of it.  My picture is not so cool.

Trafalgar Square

Globe Theatre. We went to go see Troilus and Cressida at the Globe Theatre!  The Globe is an exact replica of the original Globe Theatre, which stood about 750 feet away.  This was completely awesome.  Oh, and all the men in the play were extremely attractive, which helped make up for the fact that for the entire first half neither of us knew what was going on until we asked the woman in front of us at intermission.  She looked at us like we were aliens from the planet America and told us that Troilus is a Trojan warrior who has fallen in love with a Trojan maid named Cressida, but the Trojan army has decided to switch Cressida for that slut Helen who ran off with Orlando Bloom.  Troilus cries and almost slits his wrists, Cressida gets sent to Greece and has to kiss everyone in the Greek army (seriously), and Achilles dies.  The end.

Our seats at the Globe.

British Museum. Now when I listen to “A Foggy Day in London Town,” I know exactly what charm the British Museum is supposed to have lost.  My favorite thing at the British Museum was the Rosetta Stone.  We understand hieroglyphics because of that!  That is so cool!  We also spent way too long in the Renaissance section taking pictures of creepy eyeball-less statues.

Shelley! My friend Shelley lived in London until like two weeks ago.  She moved there after college because since her mom’s British she had dual citizenship.  She’s moving back to Texas but Jan and I got to see her in London while we were there.  We had lunch at a pub that served Thai food (no joke, and it was good, too) and then met up with her and several of her work friends at a pub later that evening.  I loved meeting some real Londoners and hanging out at a non-touristy pub.  Shell, see you soon!

Cockfosters. We are 12 years old.

Teehee

I’m sure I’m forgetting some epic awesomeness, but this post has already taken me several days to write, so I’m going to stop recounting stuff we did and move on to thoughts and stuff.

General observations:

I didn’t really notice any bad teeth, but then again I wasn’t peering into people’s mouths.  Except on the Tube when there’s nothing else to do.

Everything in London is beautiful.  Everything.  All the buildings in London are old and they evoke a sense of history in you that you just don’t feel in the U.S.  Everyone dresses nicely and is polite.

There are more attractive guys in London than I have ever seen put together in the whole of my life.  It.  Was.  Mind-blowing.  They were on every corner.  Ask Jan if you don’t believe me.  We started using the word mochaccino to refer to hot boys so we could talk about them.  Shelley said all the hot guys were either Australian or gay.  Surely some of them were straight.

The Tube is the most fantastic invention ever.  And I love the names they use for the lines, stops, and stations.  See Cockfosters above.  We rode the Piccadilly a lot.

Thus ends Part I of my Europost.  Part II will be about Paris and will probably take me an equally long amount of time to write, although I will probably get around to it sooner than three weeks from now.