"There's no Place Like London!"

Title from "Sweeney Todd." Notice a trend yet?

So, first full day in London. 18.2.2009

We had a fantastic breakfast of corn flakes and toast, then headed out to the British Museum to kill time. This place is made of awesome. We didn't see a whole lot, but it was free. And it had the Rosetta Stone. omg. I know I'm a huge geek but it was epic. Yaaaay silly linguistical things! I did see a Celtic cross necklace that I liked at the gift shop, but I didn't buy it. Sadness.

From the museum we went near Hyde Park to meet a tour group by the Wellington Arch. There’s this company call New Europe that runs free tours in big cities in Europe, one of which happened to be London. Yay, free things! From the Wellington Arch we walked to Buckingham Palace. Our tour guide was really funny and told us how security there is not all that fantastic; she had three different stories about how random people wound up inside, including two Germans who camped there overnight by accident, instead of in one of the surrounding parks. Heh, oops.

From Buckingham Palace we walked to two other royal homes. Of course I have no idea what they were called, but one is where Prince Charles and his family live currently and the other is where Princess Diana lived. We walked down Pall Mall Road to a house where a woman named Nell Gwynne lived. She was a mistress of a prime minister way back when (one of many, I think), and she held their baby over a balcony one day, threatening to drop him unless the PM gave him a title. So the kid wound up being duke of something or other, a title that still exists today. That was pretty funny. As we continued down Pall Mall Road we passed a memorial for Waterloo. Then we came to Trafalgar Square. There were lots of pigeons. Lots of them. The National Gallery is there. There’s a huge statue with a lion in each of the corners, except they’re not quite lions. They’re supposed to be, but the guy who carved them had never seen a real lion before. As a result, the heads are lion-like (because he’d seen pictures), but the bodies look like his cocker spaniel. There’s your useless trivia for the day.

Onward! To some kind of archway thing? The weirdest thing about it is that there’s a nose on one of the columns. Just chilling there like, “Hey, I’m a nose.”

It's that odd-colored spot right above the person's hair.

No one knows how or why it got there. After that we saw the place where they’re playing beach volleyball in next year’s Olympics.

Uh… yeah.

We could also see the back of the houses on Downing Street. You can’t go down it anymore because Margaret Thatcher decided that was a security risk. Sadness. Onward to something involving Churchill and planning for war. There is supposed to be a network of tunnels underneath it that lead all around London. Whee, tunnels.

From there: Westminster Abbey and Parliament! I have a million and a half pictures of both, and Big Ben. They’re both so big that it was absolutely impossible to get an entire building in one photo. Westminster Abbey was super expensive to go into, boo. Something like 14 pounds I think? The tour ended there.

Courtney and I went back to our hostel, grabbed lunch, and headed out to find Leicester Square to get tickets to a show. A well-meaning Brit gave us convoluted directions on how to walk there, which didn’t turn out too well. We found a discount ticket seller and just stopped there. And walked away with ticket to LES MISERABLES. I was beside myself. Also found out something bizarre (that probably means nothing to anyone reading this). Courtney was looking at a brochure for Hairspray (which we couldn’t get cheap tickets to because it’s so popular; the cheapest were like 77 pounds!) and I looked over her shoulder and exclaimed “Michael Ball is in Hairspray?!” and the ticket guy kind of smiled and said, “Yeah, but you wouldn’t recognize him.” Michael Ball is an amazing singer who played Marius in Les Mis and has done lots of other things. I didn’t really understand what the guy was implying, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered. So the next time we rode the bus by the theater Hairspray was in, I took a good look at the signs. Turns out he’s playing the crazy mother (John Travolta’s character in the movie). I absolutely cannot imagine that. At all. Even though I don’t really like the musical, I kind of wish we’d been able to see it, just so I could see him. Ah, well. I’ll pay money to see shows, but 77 pounds was a huge no-no.

MOVING ON. Walked to Picadilly Square. We were trying to get to Westminster Abbey for the 5pm Evensong service, but we wound up going the wrong way down a street. So instead we turned back and went into the National Gallery. Spent a good hour there, then went to the one place in London that every tourist absolutely HAS to go to: King’s Cross Station. More specifically, Platform 9 and ¾!! We stopped off at McDonald’s first so Courtney could get coffee. In the meantime I called Sean just to double check that we were going to the right place. The conversation went as follows:

“What’s the name of the station where Platform 9 ¾ is? Is it King’s Cross?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Because I’m standing right outside it and my friend and I are going to go take pictures.”

**Cricket chirp**

I thought he’d hung up on me. Instead he just stopped talking, then asked if the conversation was over yet. I love my brother. So we walked around the station for a few minutes trying to find the platform and not quite wanting to ask anyone about it. I, for one, was grinning like an idiot. We knew it wouldn’t be a real, actual platform, but we still couldn’t see it anywhere. Finally I asked someone who worked there. I was surprised that he was totally unfazed by the question. Not even an eye roll or anything. But we found it, and it was totally just a random wall that they had stuck a sign on and bolted half a luggage cart to. But that does not make it any less epic in any way. Because dude, it’s Platform 9 ¾!! No words can describe the epicness. So we took our silly pictures and went back to the hostel for the night.

All in all, it was a great day. We were both exhausted by the end of it, in a combination of getting up early, being busy all day, and walking everywhere. But it was pretty sweet.

Sliiiideshowww