"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.
Conor came to Bedford on the 30th and was about as excited as I had been to see Josie and James and be with fun people again (he was with family that he likes but has a hard time spending too much time wit and his teenage cousin doesn't seem to like him, which didn't help). We sat around, talked, and went to see the new Sherlock Holmes, which was pretty much amazing. I kept seeing bits and pieces from the books, and had to keep myself from expostulating on them during the movie.
On Saturday, we went to Wokingham, where one of James' school friends was having people over to his house, via London.
!!!
I've been on the underground! They don't actually say "mind the gap" on it, though. They do on the overground trains, but not all the time.
We didn't have to be at Ben's house until "sometime after 4", so I took a bus tour (really expensive, but worth it) while everyone else, who had already taken at least one bus tour, went and watched arthur christmas.
I would have taken nicer pictures if the bus would have stopped, and I would have taken more if I hadn't run out of battery.
This is next to Buckingham Palace. The gold thing next to the biggest tree is what I was aiming for, but the bus was moving.
Westminster Abbey, I believe.
St. Stephen's Tower and Big Ben with the House of Commons, and everyone else on the bus taking pictures in the foreground.
No fellow photographers in this one.
Actually, this was just the first of many Bens that I met on New Years Eve.
I think that's more of Westminster.
The House of Lords, I think. And what appear to be portable arena speakers, probably for new years eve.
I have no idea what this is; I just like the red and white on the building.
Looking down the Thames at the London Bridge (I think; you can't really see it and I couldn't really hear the guide) and the London Eye (the ferris wheel on the right), with old London on the left and new London on the right.
I think this is the War Museum, located in Bethlehem Hospital (aka Bedlam, the insane asylum).
If the picture above didn't show Bedlam, then this one does. This might be related to some gardens, though.
Big lion on the riverbank
I think this is westminster again.
House of Commons and House of Lords, left to right.
I don't know who the statue in the front is, but the one in the background is Abraham Lincoln. This is across from parliament, and a lot of prime ministers, generals, and world leader-ish people are in it, like Nelson Mandela (senior quoter; I forget the quote, though) and Winston Churchill.
The buses were everywhere. I wasn't walking enough to be in danger of getting hit by one, though.
A war memorial. I forget which one.
Lord Horatio Nelson, atop his massive pillar in Trafalgar Square. As I was told at least twice, he's actually looking towards where his ship is still docked in Portsmouth.
Nelson's ship, just smaller and in a bottle. I didn't know what it was when I took the picture; it was explained on one of the many times we passed it later.
Trafalgar Square. As alluded above, we went by it at least four times. The screens are for the fireworks, and the national gallery is in the background.
I was amused to see something calling itself a "Texas Embassy", even if it was just a restaurant.
Incidentally, the Oceanic House, current home of the Texas Embassy, is the former home of the White Star Line. This is where you bought tickets for the Titanic.
I don't know what the spire is, but that's the national gallery and the back end of trafalgar square. Again.
Trafalgar Square's very clean fountain. I think you can normally go right up to it, even.
I mainly took this picture for the serious statue with the fairly serious bird on his head. If you look at the base of the statue, Terry Pratchett readers will see a familiar name. Who knew that anyone actually had the name Havelock?
A church smack in the middle of London, possibly St. Martin's (M-something, I think), definitely the parish church for a branch of the military. The pitting is from the Blitz.
The statue in the middle of the street is a dragon and marks the entrance to the City of London. The queen actually can't go in without being accompanied by the Mayor of London, and she can't wear her jewels. She also has to defer to the Mayor and walk behind him instead of beside or in front of him, as she would normally do as a head of state.
Not a church, but the most ornate civil court building ever. The guy who designed it wanted to build cathedrals, but this was as close as he got.
St. Paul's Cathedral. Burned down three or four times, didn't fall down during the Blitz in spite of Hitler's express command to destroy it. The people's church of London.
Tower Bridge. We actually drove over it, but the batteries in my camera kept giving out, the horrible things.
HMS Belfast, I think. Also the Tower Bridge.
What I wanted very much to see, but either didn't drive past or didn't hear in time to take a picture or had already run out of battery, follows:
Original Twinings store (saw it, still had battery, bus was moving too fast)
Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (saw off in distance as we crossed a bridge; no battery)
Tower Bridge (I was ON it!)
Plague/Great Fire monuments (bus went too fast, and no battery)
Women of (one of the World Wars) monument (short notice, fast bus)
Sherlock Holmes museum (bus didn't drive past it. And okay, I did pick up this little obsession after watching the first Robert Downey Jr. movie, but it's been fuelled by the books! Wanting to see the museum has nothing to do with the fact that I just saw the second movie and loved it; I saw the second movie almost equally because I loved the first one and because I love the books. If it's full of deerstalker hats, I will be sorely disappointed and will actually go to the effort of writing nasty reviews. I might even demand my money back. Nowhere in the first collection, last collection, and the first three novels does Conan Doyle even mention a deerstalker.)
Once it got dark, I got kind of bored and nervous about missing my stop. I hate asking for directions in big cities because I'm afraid the fairly friendly-looking person on the street will actually be a nefarious criminal and will peg me as a helpless tourist, which in fact I am, so I always go into shops and ask salespeople discreetly.
I found my stop without difficulty, however, and knocked around Victoria station (although NOT Victoria Coach station, as I discovered the next afternoon, trying to find it in the dark and the rain) until I got a text from my movie-going friends that I should meet them at the tube stop where our train connected to Wokingham. That was an adventure, although riding the underground by myself felt pretty cool. It was just that the station was consumed by holiday chaos, and it took us some time to figure out which exit had an overground train station.
After a very long wait and a longer train ride, we got to Wokingham (pronounced, by the way, as WOKE-ing'm, with no relation to ham or stir-fry skillets), where James' friend Ben Ireland met us at the station. He's one of many Bens (alluded to under the picture of St. Stephen's Tower without all the photographers), all of whom go by their last names. We met Ben Watkins, his best friend since early childhood (the farthest apart they've ever lived was on opposite sides of a fairly small town when they went to university) later, and we never met Ben Taylor.
It was a pretty casual new years eve. We hung out with mostly guys, since I guess all the girls were unavailable and had all fallen out with each other shortly before anyway (bullet dodged!), and ate garlic bread and chilli (for everyone but me) and what had been thought to be a margarita pizza (plain cheese, but if you ask for cheese pizza here, you get weird looks. I picked up on the margarita thing pretty quickly) but was in fact a holiday chestnut pizza. It was pretty good. We stayed up late, cheered when someone's watch phone said 00:00, and eventually straggled to our respective sleeping places.
Year complete.
It's weird, writing this up four days into the new year.
I started off my day by printing the e-ticket for the football match, which I got in october. After something of a debacle with the people handing out the real tickets, due to our large and unwieldy group of nine (it took about three counts for them to get all of us), we got our real tickets and split up into normally sized groups. I stuck with Jessi, since I know her, and she stuck with Felicity, who tends to act like she knows what she's doing. It was her idea to storm the castle, by the way. I made a new friend in Lauren from australia, who stuck with us for the rest of the day.
We took the bus to the Stadium of Light, the brand new pretty football stadium that sunderland just built. We all got excited and Jessi took a lot of pictures. I took one, too.
Outside the stadium.
When we couldn't find the turnstiles listed on our tickets, Jessi performed her first insult of the day by accident. She has this habit, which is starting to get on my nerves (1. w-curve. I should be getting fed up with everything pretty soon, not just the university itself. 2. We are not the most compatible of people. It could be way worse, but it could definitely be better. I refer you to the end of the edinburgh post. This is not a repeat of the rant.) of saying "for God's sakes!" in this really angry tone when she's confused, frustrated, or just angry, and even when she's in a good mood. In any case, the numbering system for the turnstiles is pretty weird. She vocalised this by asking if they couldn't count here, "for God's sakes!" when we were standing right behind a stadium worker.
Oops. He laughed it off, but it wasn't the best foot to start off on.
Getting in was exciting, followed by being disappointing. We were over an hour early, due to intelligence that the stadium would be bedlam, but no one was there. Our search for food led us to "food kiosks" that sold no chips (in the french fry sense of the word) at all. We reflected that perhaps we ought to have gotten food beforehand. I would just like to say that gesa stadium's concessions are way better than the stadium of light's. I suspect that it's becuase of the fact that SoL is still recovering from being hideously expensive, but I feel that chips would be a good start.
We waited forever for the match to start, and I forget how we amused ourselves. Our seats were up in nowhere, but we still had a pretty good view of the field.
As a group, which included Flo and Lisa and a few other germans as well as some people that some people know, you know, we lost interest pretty quickly. Flo and Jürgen, who sat on opposite ends of the "lauren felicity jessi me" group, kept yelling over us in german. Jessi later explained that they'd been commenting on how much better they were at football than the teams. Unsurprising, somehow. Felicity instituted a pretend drinking game to keep herself busy: drink every time people clap when we don't know why, every time someone falls, and twice when random people come onto the field. She lost count pretty quickly.
Way up in nowhere seats.
Mascots. I think they're the black cats or something.
Players coming out onto the field
The asian (not sure whether japanese or korean) who kept being in the way.
Getting ready to kick off...
And kicked off.
As halftime approached, we made plans to outside to the food vendors we saw, eat, and come back in. We made extra sure we had our tickets, and asked a stadium worker if we could go outside and come back in.
No.
Okay... we tried another guy.
No.
Hmm. We tried the guy at the door.
No.
Jessi tried another tactic: reasoning. She's not very good at accepting defeat. Unfortunately, she started off on a very, very bad foot. It was more of an elbow as far as feet go. She asked if we couldn't go outside, say to get food or something, and then come back in? I mean, what if someone forgot something in their car?
If I learned one thing from concessions work, it's that herds of children with change are the worst. But I also learned that most of a stadium's income is concessions. Gesa stadium doesn't allow outside food for this reason. I'm actually not sure if you're allowed to go out and come back in, now that I think about it.
We knew, as soon as she mentioned food, that the answer would be no, even if it could have been yes. Which it couldn't have been; they use a turnstile that scans ticket barcodes, so they can't really just flip a switch, I'm thinking.
We returned to the game rather peevishly. Something exciting happened while we were in the entryway to our seating area, but the score was still 0-0 when we got in. When the game went into overtime, we all decided to head out, even if there was no way we'd beat any crowds at all.
Crowds.
More crowds.
We actually ended up walking all the way back to clanny, hungry and cold, but happily planning dinner and Durham, which would involve being all bundled up in winter clothes and real gloves and scarves and hats and warm socks. Oh, yeah. It was going to be friggin' sweet. And warm.
Durham's Lumiere festival (click here for much better pictures) was awesome. The group ended up being Lauren, Felicity, Adam, Jessi, and me. We took a cab, deciding against a return booking because we weren't sure when we'd want to head back (depending on how awesome or terrible it was), but we were pretty confident about our ability to not spend too much money on fare.
When we got there, we decided that maybe we should have, you know, looked more closely at the website before getting there. We had no idea where to go or what there was to see; we'd kind of expected to just follow people around until we saw all the cool stuff.
Following people. Lots of them.
Giant blue glowing thing!
That statue is there all the time. It was there when Jessi and I went to Durham, at least.
Snowglobe!
We had acquired a pamphlet with a map of all the cool stuff, and were headed for the rainbow bridge and lit-up cathedral when we were informed repeatedly that we couldn't go the way we were heading; we would need to turn around and go over the bridge from hell, which we had already crossed and deemed not fun. I say repeatedly because we stopped where we were standing when he first said that we couldn't go, which was just past where he was standing, and tried to deliberate. Taking our complete and total lack of motion for insurrection, he told us that we couldn't go that way for our safety five or six times in about a minute. And he wasn't just talking to the people behind us, he was looking straight at us. As a rule, I felt bad for the event security/police (not sure if one, other, or both), who had to stand there all night and repeat themselves to over-excited and occasionally belligerent crowds over and over and over, but this guy was less than informative. Okay, first in our minds was the huge, mob-like crowd on that bridge. That was not fun, and I, at least, got a lot of elbows to the shoulder. So, we looped around. Upon reaching the entrance of the rainbow bridge, which had acquired something of a mythical status in our minds (this thing was turning into the friggin' bifröst), we were informed by a portly security/police man that the whole thing was one-way.
Oh. That would have been good to know. Jessi performed her third insult of the day by saying "Are you f***ing kidding me?" loudly and angrily as soon as he said that we couldn't go across (in her defence, we had been walking for a while). He replied that he was not "f***ing kidding" (which made me feel kind of bad for him; poor guy had probably been dealing with this sort of thing for two days already), which did not bode well for our trip across. Way to endear yourself to the security guard so that he doesn't think that we're going to sneak around him.
The entrance to the bifröst was guarded by two security/police men; one of them was the portly one that Jessi insulted. The skinny one kept vanishing. It is perhaps for this reason that we decided that we could sneak past him, no problem; we also saw several people doing the same thing. We stood in a little huddle for a few minutes, waiting for the right time. Finally, Jessi made her move. He saw her, and made a little "Oi!" noise, but she was actually running by this point, and he probably decided that one person was better than leaving the entrance and having all of us get across. We all got across anyway, as soon as his back was turned all the way. My camera didn't really capture all the awesome, but it was awesome.
This was the brochure picture. It didn't quite look like this, but it was still awesome.
So pretty...
So close...
Even closer!
On the bridge! We win!
The awesome was increased by Felicity's immense sense of self-satisfaction at our successful rebellion; this was increased every time she noticed that we were going against the crowd.
We saw a bunch of human figures (made out of some kind of white stuff) suspended above the street, and took pictures of them in between being kept out of various attractions, like the "ring of FIRE! thing that we glimpsed (jessi made it past one guard but was repulsed by a second while the rest of us were stopped by the first), and the lit-up cathedral.
First
This guy was sitting down.
I think this one was floating down on his back.
Lady.
Sitting on top of a building
Flying
Zooming down the street, if he'd been moving.
We also saw this lovely addition to the festival.
This one was my favourite.
The cathedral was really, really cool. Unfortunately, my camera didn't take any good pictures (the earlier link for much better pictures has some really nice ones).
I cranked the light fill all the way up. The cathedral is not usually red.
Jessi got in her fourth insult by saying that the guy in the white hat was ruining her picture, but he heard and turned around. It's kind of true; the white really stands out in the picture.
After the show, we decided not to go through the cathedral because of the really impressive queue. We ended up going back around through the cathedral yard to stand in line because the rings of fire were that way.
There was a cool display, which Jessi declared to be "just like Harry Potter!" and it was pretty magical. They had suspended candles that were in white shirts all through the nave, and there was a guy making eerie, monk-y music all by himself with a lot of microphones and a guitar.
The pictures make them look even more mysterious and floaty.
It was really cool sitting in the middle of this. Even with hundreds of people crowding around, it was oddly peaceful and quiet.
From below
I don't know why they used shirts.
One man monk choir
After taking a while to sit, rest our feet, take pictures, and admire the lights, we set out for the rings of fire.
We found them.
We hadn't seen this before. It was in the courtyard of the cathedral.
A fire fountain?
Fire! It was everywhere.
We decided to look for what appeared to be a lit-up dance floor, but ended up going to a completely different display. On the way, we saw this:
We felt that this should stay up all the time.
The display where we ended was cool too, and there's a picture on someone else's camera of me looking incorporeal. Mine was out of memory.
After this, we were hungry, so we looked for a pub with little luck. We saw this on the way, and figured that we should have seen this one before the everything will be alright one.
"the future will be confusing"
This was accompanied by a mixed-up alphabet. We don't know why.
We also saw this pretty waterfall thing on the way to food:
I've heard it described as the waterfall fountain. It's off a bridge, I think.
The one we did find with seats available only had toasties (like grilled sandwiches, I think), and they didn't have those, either. We moved on to a takeaway pizza place, where we all got the same pizza (margarita, or cheese) by accident. After this, we decided to look for a van cab (since they're the only ones that will seat five). Jessi wanted to call the one we took to get to Durham, but we figured we could find one that was only a few pounds more expensive. We ended up paying a lot more than we should haveThis was a cause of bitterness that I will gloss over, because the night was really awesome and we really did have a lot of fun.
After all, we crossed the bifröst! Without permission! And we stormed a castle yesterday. We're unstoppable.
