We’ve gotten some touristy hotspots checked off the list, although we’re still planning on taking a hop-on/hop-off bus to get a whole bunch of them covered. Last Friday a group of us went to see the Tower of London and enjoyed a tour by a particularly rambunctious beef-eater/drill sergeant. He liked to quiz us and threaten death if we got our facts wrong. It was charming. We drooled over the crown jewels, particularly the Star of Africa diamond (530 clear carats, holy hell) and puzzled over the Great Punch Bowl (actual name. For the Royal Punch, we presume). There was a little British boy on one of the teensy tinsy spiral staircases in one of the towers who was having a hard time getting down and said to his mom, “the stairs are so roundy! I can’t manage!” which I thought was a pretty impressive sentence for like, a 5-year-old. There are little British kids in their preschool uniforms spouting SAT vocab left and right here, I love them. Finally, the day was finished off by a stop at Subway, for sandwiches, because we still are Americans, after all.
On Sunday we took a trip to Windsor Castle, which is nifty because the Queen actually still vacations there occasionally. We took a bus at 9am (EARLY) and our tour guide decided to make an impromptu stop in some fields where the Magna Carta was first signed. Our bus driver almost passed out when Megan asked him what the Magna Carta was (none of us really knew). We made the executive decision not to trek through some fields to behold a gazebo marking the landmark, and stayed on the bus (sorry to disappoint. Like I said, it was early). A rather sizable plot of land that was a gift from England to America was pointed out to us while we were sitting on the bus. We immediately noticed that this piece of American land in the suburbs of London was covered in trash. When we asked our bus driver why it was littered, he refused to acknowledge the presence of the garbage. Even when we cited specific bits, like beer cans, and trash bags. Thanks, England. When we finally arrived at Windsor Castle we got to enjoy Queen Anne’s dollhouse, in which everything is scaled down twelve times and most things are fully functional. Unfortunately we couldn’t go into the famous chapel, because it was Sunday, and we couldn’t see the state apartments, because they were being cleaned. Maybe we should go back there sometime and see, you know, half of the attractions that were closed when we went. Besides our tour guide alternating between either abandoning us or insisting on over-emphasizing random points (“This is the crooked house. As you can see, it’s crooked. It is not straight.”) it was a sunny, mostly successful day of tourism.
Time for bed now, I have class at 9am tomorrow :( Cheers!
Megan, Ally, Lauren, Alex, Reggie, & I got our doorman/security guard (?)to take a picture of us before going out on...
a night other than Reggie's birthday... The night of heels :(
Wine in our flat!
Aw, what cute tourists. Reggie, Alex, Megan, Me, & Ally in front of the Tower Bridge.
Tower of London!
Once again, the night we got the security guard to take a picture was not my birthday. Don't confuse your readers. Geez.
ReplyDelete