I did not realize it was possible to do so much in so few days. My group got to London mid-Friday, and left Sunday, and we were busy the whole time!
On Friday, we checked into our hostel before going on adventures. I thought that was a swell adventure, for I had never stayed in a hostel before. Their color-scheme was bright green and neutral colors, and for anyone who knows me, neon green is my jam! I was staying in a room with 7 other girls (from our group - there were no strangers in the room, luckily), and we were sharing a bathroom with a room with 6 other members of our group. It wasn't as cushy as we were used to at Somerville, but I thought that just added to the fun. Of course, I was lucky in that I slept well both nights, while everyone I talked to said they slept horribly at least one of the nights. Average morale was not running high, let me tell you.
Anyways, picture this: it's Friday, we've just got to London, and we're wide-eyed and bushy-tailed (this is before everyone slept horribly). The adventure begins! Our first stop is St. Paul's Cathedral. I'm not big on churches and cathedrals and other religious institutions, but this was actually a blast! We got to climb up to the top of the building (528 steps, so not too bad), where the view was magnificent.
The theme for the day appeared to be heights, because our other excursion for the day was the London Eye. For my uneducated readers (just kidding, I also didn't know what the
London Eye was), this is the largest Ferris wheel in Europe, and is world famous for a bunch of reasons that I won't bore you with. Basically, it's a giant rotating wheel next to the river, with big see-through pods that you walk into. It's supposed to never stop, so when you get on you have to be quick (though they did stop it a few times, evidently because people were slow). I was ridiculously excited for this (once I learned what it was), because I'm a sucker for heights. It takes about half an hour for the wheel to go around once (at which point you have to leave), and I was positively giddy for that entire half hour. It was so cool! You could see all over the city (though my eyesight is absolutely terrible, so it just looked blurry to me), and it was honestly just really fun to go up higher than humans are meant to go. I didn't actually feel like we were all that high up though, likely because the pods are fully enclosed.
Saturday was a different story; instead of going up, we went down. Well, first we went to another religious building: Westminster Abbey. It was just a church. There's not much else to say. The one cool thing about it was that a bunch of famous dead people were buried/memorialized there: Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Tom Hardy, Jennie Lind, William Herschel, and Rudyard Kipling, to name a few. Remember William Herschel? The guy that discovered Pluto? I went to his house in Bath. I just think it's really cool that I saw where he lived when he was alive, and where he went when he died. The other name that really stood out to me was Jennie Lind. It sounded familiar when I read it on the stone, but I couldn't place it for the longest time. It finally occurred to me that that is the name of the famous opera singer. Her character was in The Greatest Showman, which just happens to be my favorite musical of all time. I won't go on a tangent about why it is fabulous here, but I was quite pleased that I remembered where I had heard her name before.
In the abbey, you could go underground to more memorials and gravestones and such, but after that excursion, we went above ground to Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard. A few friends and I actually ran, to make it in time, and we got pretty good viewing spots because of this. The guards didn't do anything particularly special, other than walking around and switching spots with each other. I quite appreciated their elaborate uniforms though - they are just as impressive in person as they are in pictures. The best part of that whole affair was the band. They were playing marching music during the actual changing of the guard, but beforehand they were playing the Star Wars theme song! I was not expecting that in the least.
After Westminster, we were given some free time to explore London (provided we stayed with a group). Unfortunately, my group wanted to see Abbey Road, so that's where I went. I had no interest in seeing it, considering it is literally just a crosswalk (and it doesn't even look like the one on the cover of the Beatles record, since they repainted it). So lame. I concede that if you were into the Beatles, or pop culture or anything like that it would have been less lame, but that's not me. At least we took the tube, which seems like a very London thing to do. That was quite the adventure. I was constantly lost, but eventually we figured it out. It was practically a 3 hour trip to go see a road. I can't fathom how that would be worth it, but it kept my group happy, so there's that.
The last adventure of the day was the Churchill War Rooms. That was really cool. It was
basically a mole tunnel compound for humans. Churchill and his advisors used it during World War II. Tons of people lived and worked underground, which was evidently awful, considering the lack of fresh air or sunlight, and the cramped, smelly, smoky (cigarettes...) atmosphere. It was pretty nice for us tourists, since the tunnels were brightly lit, clean, and non-smoking, but back in Churchill's days, it would have been very different.
There was a whole giant museum down there, which included some of the military uniforms Churchill wore (he was in the military before he went into politics). I was quite surprised at how small the uniform was - I guess that because Churchill was such a historically important person, he must have had a physically imposing presence. That was dumb; I mean, look at Napoleon... I learned more about Churchill than I thought there would be to learn about a single person. Apparently, he was
quite the princess. He bathed twice a day, and when he took a nap everyone would be alerted by a knock, and would have to stay quiet until he awoke; he did not like to sleep in anything less than complete silence. I wondered how that worked, what with there being a whole war going on and such.
There was also a map room down there, with wax figures posed like real humans would
have been, back in the day. On right, Jeannie is emulating the wax man who about to place a pin in the map. I understand what the curators were trying to do - really show us how peopled would have lived bak then - but it was honestly creepy. Waxen people are just strange.