Friday 20 January -- Old Stuff in London

"Today, I walked by St Paul's Cathedral, took pictures of the Old Bailey, saw some cool stuff in the British Museum, first-bumped an ancient egyptian statue, walked through the Tower of London and went to evensong at Westminster Abbey."


I have pictures of these on my computer now. Here they come!

This was on Great Ormond Street. I'm not sure what it's for, and I've seen similar enclosures elsewhere in London.

This was in front of the "Ladies" whatsit.

This is a London dragon. Later in the week, I got a picture of the big one on Fleet Street/The Strand, but these little guys mark the main streets in and out of the City of London proper, or it might be called the Borough of London. I forget.

This is the Old Bailey. I read a lot about it in English Lit 1700-1789 and more practical documents from its records in English Social History 1500-1750. 

The statue on top is so ominous.

It's still the central criminal court. There were lots of people lined/queued up outside, but I didn't think it would be appropriate to take their pictures.

Justice with her sword and scales on top of the Old Bailey.

This is St Paul's Cathedral. Very big, imposing, and has a big dome. I poked my head in, but it was ridiculously expensive for a tour.

 This was all seen before 11. I developed a pattern in the hostel of falling asleep around 21:00 and waking up between 5 and 7 AM which haunts me still. Actually, I wake up a lot during the night; I'm not sure why that persists as no one comes in and talks loudly in french right by my bed between midnight and 3 AM.
At 11, I went to the British Museum to meet up with the Whitworth group again. I hit up the tourist store outside for something for Andrew and found him a "My sister when to London and all I got was this lousy shirt" shirt with a british flag on it for authenticity. Then we went through Egypt, China, a little bit of India, and Japan.
I fist-bumped a statue in the Egypt section. You'll see why it was so appealing:

He was clearly waiting for a reciprocating fist bump.

This is my favourite painting. I mostly like it for the wave, as I'd never really noticed the mountain lurking  in there. It's a very famous Japanese print, and I'm not sure if this is the original, and if it is, how the British Museum got their hands on it.

The Tower of London. I think the whole thing is the Tower, since there are several towers inside the walls.
It was expensive to get in, but so worth it. I saw the crown jewels and also the place where lots of people were beheaded. 

The Tower Bridge! Not London bridge, as many are wont to assume.

I would have taken a million more pictures, but my camera was full. It was a good day. After the Tower, we went to Westminster Abbey for evensong, which was okay. The choir was good, but I prefer men's choirs to consist mainly of men's voices. All I could hear of this one was the kids, who sound oddly feminine. I believe that this was also the day that I tried "apple and beetroot juice" (beetroot being the british word for beet), and it was pretty good. I was mostly intrigued by the pink and the oddity of seeing what is generally a vegetable reserved for the table (unlike carrots, which go well in juices) in juice.

Thursday 19 January 2011 -- The Day the Laptop Vanished

This is also the day that I went to Westminster Abbey (and met up with the Whitworth pre-med friends), Buckingham Palace, Regent's Park, and the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221 Baker Street.
Pictures! I'll do my best on the captions, because it was about two weeks ago.

I walked down Oxford street (down which you cannot go 90, although the demon Crowley did) and may have also passed SoHo (home of funky little bookshops and interesting inhabitants) on my rather circuitous way to Westminster. Most of my interests in London were of a literary, and often Pratchett-inspired, nature. Speaking of which, I saw either Sir Terry Pratchett himself or a remarkable doppelganger hurrying past me when I left King's Cross station on Wednesday, but he was moving too fast for me to stop, balance my luggage, and ask him for a picture and an autograph.

Edward (possibly "VII" and definitely Victoria's son) built that for Victoria, as people who can read latin would know from the sign. It's basically a huge gate-y thing outside trafalgar square.

I really like this monument. It has all the uniforms and/or trappings of the jobs that women took over in the absence of the men.

There were no pictures allowed inside the Abbey itself, but this is in the chapel outside the abbey and is fairly representative of the architecture inside.

This unremarkable old door is actually THE old door. See below.

See? I love the "most likely" and the comment of a Whitworthian that they could just go around slapping "oldest" signs on most old things in London and no one would know any better.

St Stephen's Tower, home of Big Ben the bell. Taken in much better light than on the bus tour.

The houses of Parliament. Just like in Sherlock Holmes! The movie, that is. I'm always impressed by how spiky everything is.

Pelicans and also a heron in the background in St James' Park. There were so many birds.

Shiny statue outside of Buckingham Palace. I think I caught this on the bus tour, but from a different angle through some trees.

There it is. The sometimes home of possibly the most famous people in the whole world, or at least in the western world.

Cool gate, bro.

Bearskin hat! I fail to see the point of those.

This is from the tube station at Baker Street. The little dots that this is made up of are that same silhouette in  miniature.

ZOMG 221B Baker Street OMG OMG.
I don't care if Sherlock Holmes was made up and never lived here, it's a real place that featured prominently in some of my favourite stories.

It was less cool than I had hoped.

Still, we had fun with it. Megan's on the left and Gina took the pictures.

The hat looks lopsided because it is. My hair is not hat-friendly.

I rather suspect that they put that in after the movie, but the attendant indicated that he did that in the books. Of course, she kept referring to everything as if it was real, which irked me.

A pipe collection. I was pleased that not all of them were those funny curved-stem affairs.

I like it that they included all the stuff that would have probably been in the rooms of Sherlock Holmes, had he been real.

This was intriguing. I think it was originally written for east asians, as the first set of descriptions were in asian characters. I don't know enough about them to distinguish language, just cuisine.
Anyway, the brochure thing has some hallmarks of the Holmes craze as well as some lesser-known but more book-common features. It debunks the deerstalker hat myth while pointing out that, yes, Sherlock Holmes did hard drugs.

 More stuff. I didn't photograph the preserved ears. It's anybody's guess as to whether they were real.

THESE. Why are these plants blooming with tropical scents in the middle of January?!

Regent's Park, which features in one of the hallmarks of my childhood, 101 Dalmatians. 

Water feature in Regent's Park. They were everywhere, and very pretty.

I'm not used to the regimented neatness of London parks. I'm more used to the "here's some grass and some trees. Don't hit the trees when you play games, okay?" style of parks.

It was big and had big avenues running through the whole thing.

Griffins? Or just winged lions?

The fact that my laptop was stolen when I got home rather ruined the peace and tranquility of the day, but it's coming back to me now.

I'm back!

Most of you who read this know that I'm back in the states; actually, I think most of you have seen me. Well, I'm moved in to my new house (dubbed "The Manor" by its inhabitants), which I keep trying to call a flat for reasons that don't make any real sense, and am about to change the title of the blog to simply "Raeann's Adventures", as I might keep updating with tidbits about my life that strike me as adventurous and interesting but that happen here in Spokane.
But not before I fill in the London blanks!
Posts to follow in the approximate order of their dates.
Oh, and I'm posting this from BruceWayne (or just Bruce in company). It's a rather dashing-looking black Lenovo that can't hope to be as awesome as Max (aka the Mac), so I named it after Batman to increase its coolness factor. I'm thinking about getting a batman logo sticker/skin, either to make it look cooler or to replace the manufacturers's protective sticky thing that I've left on the cover to protect it while moving and haven't got around to removing.
In spite of my still-strong attachment to the Mac, Bruce is growing on me. For one, he has a name and gender. I still think of the Mac as an it, even though I named it Max in the last few months of ownership. I'm rather enamoured of the fingerprint logon for Bruce, and the fact that he does in fact have two-finger scrolling capability was ridiculously exciting. The keyboard is nice, even if the number pad does get in my way sometimes. The processor is way slower than the Mac, but I really only watch movies that I've seen a hundred times before and am just watching now to fill the silence, let's face it. Also, it can hook up to a TV if I have cables, something that the Mac would only have been able to do for several hundred dollars.
Is this my new favourite computer? Absolutely not. I miss the Mac, and the multitouch, and OSX, and the more sensitive scrolling, and the fast processor, and the way I had conformed it to my needs. But, in the absence of the Mac, BruceWayne will have to do. After all, he's secretly Batman.

London -- Sunday 22 January

Today, I took advantage of the fact that the trip that Megan and Gina are on is a church-centric trip and went to mass at Westminster Abbey and a eucharist service in the evening at a "new monastic" church called Moot. Details may follow.
My slight inclination towards a cold, in the form of a stuffy nose and cloggy throat when laying on my back, turned into a serious cold that turned my nose into a snot-pumping machine ("I'b sick. I need SOUP," although it was CHIPS in my case); I wasn't exactly on top of my game. This was not helped by the fact that I woke up at 0430 by some late-night partiers returning and being... noisy. I was planning on going to St Paul's for the early morning service, since I was up anyway, cough cough shut up cough, but I had to buy kleenexes. I ended up getting a whole box, which I carried around the whole day. I used about half of it, and it's coming on the plane tomorrow. I missed the service because my sickness and exhaustion and lack of having anything nutritious in my stomach (just night-draining snot and some "pineapple" juice drink, oh boy!), and decided to hunt for some chips. For some reason, they were fixed in my mind as the thing that would make me feel better. Unfortunately, while I was too late for the service, I was too early for anything to be open, much less serving a lunch menu.
I had a lot of fruit smoothies today. Sorry, bank account.
I met up with Megan and Gina and the tour group at 10:30. The service was interesting, and explained the line in Good Omens about Crowley looking a bit guilty, like someone who hasn't been to church in a long time and has forgotten which bits you stand up for (this is at the beginning of the second little prologuey thing, when Hastur and Ligur begin to recount the "Deeds of the Day" before giving him the infant anti-Christ). My enjoyment of it was lessened by my being sick, since my head is so clogged up that I get dizzy when I stand too fast and my ears keep being plugged.
I was hoping to hit the Twinings store when it was open, but I also wanted to go on the harry potter tour, which ended up being less awesome than I had hoped. I did see some cool stuff that I had wanted to see and learned some non-harry potter stuff (didn't actually learn a whole lot about that...) about London. I saw the great fire monument, for instance, and got some nice pictures of the Tower Bridge. I also ended up with some chips. They weren't too great, but they were quite filling. By the time the tour ended, we were on the other side of London from Twinings and it was 10 minutes to closing. Sad day. I got pictures anyway.
We went to Moot, and it was... interesting. They were basically anglican with some different formatting thrown in. The study trip group described it as a mix between the monastary they stayed in in France and the anglican churches, with some modernity thrown in. It was nice.
After that, I trailed the group to The Blackfriar Tavern, which was out of their only vegetarian entree. I went with the fried mushrooms and the tomato soup instead, and the fact that I'm sick probably helped my hunger to be sated. Plus, the soup was acidic enough to burn my poor, badly-chapped lips. My nose and lips are horribly chapped; remember that half a box of kleenexes?
Now, I've been switched to a new room, my luggage is all present and accounted for, and I have booked a taxi to the tube station to avoid putting myself in a terrible mood before I even have to deal with people by dragging my uncooperative luggage around. I've given myself lots of time to navigate the tube station, and I should arrive at Heathrow well within the recommended two hours prior to my flight.
It's weird, that I'll be leaving England for the foreseeable future. I've done so much and made so many friends here that it's really weird to think that we're all separate now.

Bath -- Saturday 21 January

Firstly, forgive my capitalisation. I'm on a very sluggish computer and feel lazy.
So I went to bath, with the intention of taking a jane austen walking tour. Unfortunately, I didn't plan out my tube trip to Paddington (I'm at king's cross, if you feel like looking it up on a map), and the line that would have taken me there in about twenty minutes was down (I took the wrong line anyway, and only discovered the faster way after I realised that my connection wasn't), so it took me an hour to get there. Just in time for the train that was an hour later! Unfortunately, I'm bad at timetables (obviously), but fortunately, the conductor didn't kick me off at the first stop (it was Reading, pronounced redding, which threw off the asians in front of me).
Bath, once achieved, was pretty nice. I soundly missed the tour, but decided to have a look around, find the jane austen centre, and get my flip phone unlocked.
It has not been a good week to be my technological crutches. Computer: stolen. Earbuds: one little rubber cushion thing lost (kind of defeats the noise-cancelling effect that I love when my roommates are noisy; I have to use an earplug to even begin to block out the noisy french people, the snoring guy next to me, and the coughing guy in the bunk below me), my SD chip is quite full, and, to top it all off, my cruddy little brick pay-as-you-go phone decided to die last night. I tried putting it on the charger, thinking that it might have used up all the battery in the two hours since I'd checked the time, but to no effect. I tried switching my sim cards, since both phones are samsungs, but my t-mobile phone was locked and angrily informed me that I was using the wrong sim. Since I needed a clock, I put the US sim back in, making sure it was on airplane mode. While we have t-mobile over here, I doubt the US network would smile upon me, and I wanted to avoid the roaming charges.
So I was on the hunt one of the many little, slightly unofficial phone stores that advertise repairs and unlocking, resolving to do whichever was cheaper. In the end, it was £10 (the exact amount of cash I had) to unlock the US phone, which promises to come in handy anyway. Besides, I've really missed that keypad. I hate the one on my brick.
I digress. After leaving my phone with the capable-looking store lady, I went in search of a cheaper SD chip. I couldn't roam bath, with its wealth of "roman stuff", without memory space. Luckily, I found a 4GB chip for just £8, a vast improvment over the £13 for a 2GB that was in the phone repair shop.
After collecting my phone, which works beautifully with the new sim, other than all my UK contacts are gone, I went in search of the Jane Austen Centre.
I finally found it, and it was pretty well worth the £6 I paid to get in. The presentation was informative, and the exhibition was nifty. It was a better deal than the sherlock holmes museum, actually. Of course, Jane Austen was a real person... I even got a picture of one of the places where she actually lived, just up the street from the centre. I think they went for the house they have because number 25 is a denstist office now, and that's probably quite different from in the early 1800s.
I also got another badge for my bag; it says "I [heart] Darcy"
Fact.
I caught the proper train and resolved to search for the twinings store, and also one of the older pubs in london, as per the Big Bus Tour (on the same street, if memory served), mostly to see where they were and if I could access them Sunday. I found twinings AND the pub (Ye Golden Cock or something -- Ah, Ye Olde Cock, and funny story about the Ye thing: older versions of english had a character for the "th" sound, sort of like greek with the "ch", I guess, and it looked sort of like a Y. When printing came around, they just used the Y instead of making a new letter block for the TH thing. Hence "Ye Olde Everything", now pronounced with as yee, but properly pronounced as the. The more you know...)
I found them both and took pictures just in case; I will go back to twinings, but the pub is less certain. I'd like to eat there, but it's not vital.
If you're an arachonophobe, you will want to skip this paragraph. If you weren't, you probably won't be after this.
I've been shooing a determined spider away from my computer area for about half an hour now. I don't feel like going and getting a big enough piece of paper to squash it, and no one else feels threatened by it (cough jessi cough), so I just make sure that the little crawlings on my neck are from my hair in the draft rather than a smallish arachnid. He's really not that big.
Sorry to the arachnophobes in my readership.

NO MORE SPIDER TALK NOW. IT'S SAFE.
So, tomorrow I'll be frequenting a few churches (a service at st paul's by myself, then a service at westminster with Megan and Gina and the rest of that trip), and dragging megan and gina to yarn and tea stores.
I'll probably post tomorrow night, but after that, I think I'll have to pay for my internet.
Because I'll be in airports!
Laters.

Oh, ps. I just realised that my computer was stolen on a thursday. I hate thursdays.

London again -- Friday 20 January

Today, I walked by St Paul's Cathedral, took pictures of the Old Bailey, saw some cool stuff in the british museum, first-bumped an ancient egyptian statue, walked through the Tower of London and went to evensong at Westminster Abbey.
I have pictures of all these things, but I can't get them from the card to the computer.
I actually had a really good day. I'm coping with the lack of computer as best as I can, and trying to keep myself busy with London. One of the workers at the hostel told me that I'm not alone in my dilemma, as lots of computers get nicked. I'm a little angry with the girl who was on reception duty for not pushing the locker harder, quite frankly. If all these computers keep being stolen, they might at least make a bigger deal about the locker.
Grump, grump, grump.
Tomorrow I'll be in Bath on a Jane Austen tour! Yay!

London -- Thursday 19 January

Other than the torrential rain this morning, most of the day was pretty good. I met up with my whitworth friends at westminster abbey, and then we wandered and saw the sherlock holmes museum. It was okay. I also saw regent's park, which was very pretty and peaceful.
Unfortunately, I can't post my pictures because my computer was stolen. It was stupid of me to leave it without a locker, but I've never had any problems with theft in England. Heck, my wallet, lost in a  huge mall, was turned in with no money taken. I guess I'm just lucky they didn't take the passport that was in the same section of my bag. That section (by the way) was at the very bottom of the pile that my bag becomes when set on its back. This is probably where my sense of false security came from.
If anyone has advice on how to deal with stolen laptops, I receive texts at 208-820-1496. I'm going to file a report with the police in a few moments, if the note on the door hasn't been effective.
Luckily for me, I have all my data on my external, having backed up the day before I left sunderland. It's not all bad. And I do plan to enjoy as much of London as I can. I'll just have to figure out what to do with my pictures, since I still plan on taking more than my SD chip can hold. I might be able to get them onto the internet via the computer to which the hostel has given me 5 free hours of access.