London!

Welcome to London!!! I know that this post is long overdue! It's going to be super long so be prepared to read! Like I said the other day Julia and I realized on Thursday that we were going to have a long weekend this week so within 2 hours we planned our trip to London! We booked our train and hostel first, and then when were in London we figured out how we were going to get back to Aberdeen! We also made a list of places and things we'd like to do in London and we were extremely lucky to get to do everything on our list! Also it was supposed to rain for 10 days straight in London starting on Thursday, but it didn't rain at all!!!! So it was really awesome!

Unknown to many people the city of London is actually only a square mile. The rest is Westminster.

Whenever you enter or leave London you will see a statue of a dragon. Dragons are the symbol of London and they are meant to protect the city from any evil that might enter it.

If you thought I was kidding the other day when I said that it was dangerous for foreigners to cross the road in the UK here is your proof!!! London is a tourist area and therefore they tell you which way to look when you cross the street!

Here it is in the opposite direction! Haha! Thank you London!

Here is one of many pictures I took of Big Ben! I'm not sure why, but it's a very photogentic building! So don't be surprised if you see a couple more of it!

Yep, here I am! In front of Big Ben!

Wintson Churchill. This is known as the cleanest statue in London. This is because Churchill requested that his statue have electricity on his head! That way when pigeons landed on it they would get shocked and fly off. Therefore, not pooping all over it! I knew he was a genius... Also another tidbit about Churchill is that he is the only person to ever be invited to stand on the royal balcony at Buckingham Palace besides someone that was in the royal family.

Westminster Abbey! I actually did not know what this was when we were first walking towards it. For those that are like me and don't know what it is... it's the royal church. It's where a lot of kings and queens have been married and buried. It is full of crypts. It is extremely beautiful! You're not allowed to take any pictures of the inside of it :( which I really wish I could have. In one part of it the ceiling is considered a wonder of the world. It was gorgeous! But here are some zoomed in pictures of the outside so that you can get a feel for all the detail that went into this building!

This is the inside of the arch from the picture above. The stained glass in this church was sooo pretty!! It was very very nice, and I'd recommend seeing it if you ever go to London! It's right next to Big Ben and Parliment.

Here is a little bit more of a zoomed in shot. I progressively zoomed in so that you could see the details of each part of it.

This is the Tower of London. Where a lot of people were kept prisoner, and it is the current location of the Crown Jewels.

This is the part of the Tower of London that holds the crown jewels. When you first walk in there is a chamber full of tall wooden of seats, and each one is craved with the names and ruling dates of all of the past kings and queens of England. The next room is a video of the current queen's cornation. Then as you continue along they have the coronation sword and gown that the queen wore. Then you go down a slow moving conveyer belt, and you can see the past crowns worn by different monarchs. After the crowns you go into another room that holds golden buffet plates and goblets that are used for the after coronation party. They were extremely beautiful! They also have the gold bapatizing "pool" that all royal children are bapatized in.

Another view of the Tower of London.

One with me in it!

There is the Tower Bridge. Which is NOT the London Bridge like most people think. Although it is extradonarily beautiful!

The pictures really don't do it justice. It's super cool to see.

Me on our tour bus! We went with the Big Bus company tours, and I really enjoyed them! They had people stationed at almost all of their stops so that you never got lost or didn't know where a pick up location was, and their Changing of the Guards tour was really really good! But I'll get to that later. Their bus drivers were really interesting as you saw in my post the other day! And they were really fun and informative.

Here is a picture of Big Ben and Parliment from the bus.

This is one of four giant lions that guard a statue! I really liked the lions, and I took a few pictures of them as well!

Here is in my opinion the most beautiful building in London. St. Paul's Cathedral. This church was built by a man named Wren, and this man also designed 52 other churches in London. Just about everywhere you turned you saw a church made by Wren! St. Pauls is definetely known as his masterpiece though. I really wish that I could show you pictures from the inside, because it's really unbelievable. Once you walk into St. Pauls and you look up at the ceiling you just kind of stand there and look up for a really really long time in awe, because all of the pictures on the ceiling are breathtakingly beautiful. They aren't only colorful, but gold surrounds it. It's also a large church! You can walk up to the top of it 1000 stairs, and you get an amazing view of London! Which if you scroll down you will see!

This is just another view from the outside.

And one more just for good measure!

This is me RIGHT after I made the 1000 stair climb to the stop! PHEW! Not the most flattering picture of me ever... but oh well!

Julia and I on top of St. Pauls

The view! My favorite! We were up there right around sunset. The stairs leading up to this view are not for the weak! Because once you start climbing you really have no where to go but up! At times it gets really narrow, and really short. I had to bend down a couple of times because my head was hitting the top of it! Also there are lovely staircases that are see through. By the time I made it down I was pretty dizzy, because the last 300-400 stairs are in a spiral! I know that sounds rough, but there are different levels that you can stop at, and look at the church from different views, and they have benches that you can sit down and look around on. I would definetely recommend it!

This is St. Pauls from the ground looking up. If you look at that little gold piece above you can juuust about see the entrance I climbed out of to stand at.

Here is a zoomed in verison. I was above the dome part. If you look you can see the exit! PHEW! My legs are still feeling the burn from that one!

Big Ben and the London Eye (in the red) all lit up at night!

I love this picture!!!

Actually I really like all of the following pictures! Julia and I almost went home early on Saturday night, because we had had a long day and we were super tired (this is after we climbed St. Pauls, and walked around in a museum) but I was like... hrmm want to get some night pictures? And she was like... ok :) So we went around London getting awesome pictures!

Here is another great picture of the London Eye!

Now this is where our journey really paid off. When we were in Westminster taking the photographs of Big Ben it was quite a hike to Buckingham Palace, and we were very very very close to not going at all. But I really wanted to see it at night. We debated for a long time, and then we finally decided to go. We ended up walking all the way around it, and at first we didn't think it was lit up at all (Westminster Abbey wasn't) so we were pretty sad, and almost turned around... but I saw a bright light in the distance, so I was like... well let's just go up a little ways more, and YAY! We found it! Completely lit up with virtually NO one else around! So we got sweet pictures with no one else in them! And had we not gone that night we wouldn't have gotten any pictures of Buckingham Palace, because when we went to the next day it was at the time of the Changing of the Guards, and people were EVERYWHERE! So if you ever go to London and you want good pictures of Buckingham Palace I would suggest either going really early in the morning or around 8 o clock at night or later.

Another picture of just the palace.

One of the statue in front of the palace.

This is me in front of the gate. I wish that you could see how pretty the door is in this picture. It's iron doors with gold on the top, and the crest is very pretty. Also on top it has the England Lion and the Scotland Unicorn. Oh small tidbit here, Queen Victoria was supposively given a unicorn horn during her reign as Queen, and it is still considered a royal treasure (according to the Harry Potter tour I went on).

One more picture! I have a few more... I just didn't add them in here yet. Facebook is being difficult with me, and it won't let me mass add pictures into an album, so hopefully I'll be able to get them all onto FB eventually.

In front of the National Museum in the morning before my tour of the changing of the guards.

Yes another one by the lion!

This is a picture of the current queen's mother and father. This was during my tour of the changing of the guard. If you ever have a chance to do this I would ABSOLUTELY recommend doing the tour! You learn so much, and you see sooo much more than you would by just standing at Buckingham Palace, but I'll talk about that more in a moment.

This is the horse guard going by on the road on their way to the changing of the guards.

Now this building is where Prince Charles used to live when the Queen Mother was still alive. If any foriegn king, queen, prime minister, or president came to visit London this is where they would stay. It looks small by this picture, but it's actually huge. This is also where the old guard come out of to march to Buckingham Palace.

There are a few policeman on horse in the area. This nice man was going up and down the road telling everyone to watch their belongings because pickpockets love to come to the changing of the guard and still stuff from tourists while they are engrossed in watching and taking pictures. And if you saw how many people were by the gates of Buckingham Palace you'd understand how easy it would be to do!

Here are the guards coming out. My guide really got us lined up in great spots to get pictures! I would have NEVER known where to go had I not been with him.

Here are the officers inspecting the soldiers uniforms. These uniforms can cost up to 12 thousand pounds each, and soldiers are in charge of keeping their uniforms in good shape. Some spend up to 8 hours a day cleaning their uniform! All of the guards are actually under 25 years old, and are usually the sons or grandsons of past members of the guards. My guide said that usually you had to have some kind of connection to get into the guards. There are also different types of guards. You'll see that some have different uniforms then the ones in front of us.

More inspections.

This is the band coming out.

Now we ran down the street so that we could see them parading towards us. This was the policeman shooing people out of the road.

Here comes the band first.

Turning the corner towards Buckingham Palace.

There they go down the road.

The guards are following them.

They are turning the corner too.

Notice how they are all in step?

The police followed them down the street keeping people out of it. Now as they walked down the street my group ran alongside of them, and we cut through a park and made it in time to get pictures of the new guards lining up to come out.

Here is their band. Notice how it's a different color.

There goes the band in the opposite direction of the other band. They are both heading to Buckingham Palace.

This is the current guard taking over.

There they go.

A close up

This is Buckingham Palace. I was trying to take a picture so that you could tell how many people were around, but ironically there were so many people I couldn't get a good picture of it!

In this picture you can see some people, but it doesn't even do justice to how many people were there.

You can kind of see the people on the gate in this one. People were literally pressed up against the gate, and were pushing each other around for pictures. You could see people jumping up with their cameras to try to get a decent picture. Like I said the tour guide was definetely worth it! The best part was that we didn't even have to pay for it because it was including in our bus pass! So for 25 pounds we got to ride the hop on and off bus for 2 days, 3 walking tours which included changing of the guards, the beatles walk, and a haunted london tour, and a river cruise. So it was totally worth it! We actually didn't go on the Beatles walk or their haunted walk because we wanted to go on a Harry Potter walking tour, and it conflicted with both the tours. But on that note...

Welcome to Gringotts! This is the building that was used in the movie for the bank! Our Harry Potter tour was really interesting. It talked about a lot more than Harry Potter. It talked about the Knights of Legend, and how the King of France thought they were too powerful. On October Friday the 13th he had them rounded up, and tortured or killed most of them. This is why Friday the 13th is still considered unlucky. Also he told us a legend of Nicholas Flamel who mentioned in the first Harry Potter book. It was quite interesting, and a lot of fun... but as a big fan of Harry Potter I had kind of hoped that we would see more of the areas that were in the movies then we did. But we paid 5 pounds for this tour, and it was really fun for what it was. Of course it was aimed more towards children, and I was really trying to bite my tongue to keep from answering the questions he asked. But I did have to correct him a couple of times... Espeically when he talked about Emily Watson... and I was like... errr you mean Emma Watson? Hahaha.

This was just a cool shot. Next weekend is the Chinese New Year, and the Chinese people in London are already starting to decorate! So I took a quick picture! Julia was lucky, a chinese woman walked in front of her right when she was taking the picture. We both thought it was funny. Talk about great timing!

Another one of our pilgrimages throughout the city. Boy was it hard to find this stupid Hard Rock Cafe. But I have pictures of ones from Sydney, Mrytle Beach, Orlando, Nashville, New York City, etc... so I HAD to get a picture from the one in London!!! Turns out it was probably the crappiest little Hard Rock I've ever seen. It was just a regular restraunt. And we went to a LOT of trouble to get to it too. We got lost and were stumbling around trying to find it. We walked in the completely wrong direction, until we decided to walk back to the rail station. We were on our way to leave when we walked into an english couple that I felt comfortable asking directions. Apparently we weren't far at all, so we went to walk and the darn sidewalk ran out. So we kind of played frogger to try to get to the other side of the road, and when I saw it I was like aww rats. But oh well! I have a picture of it now as well to add to my conquests!

Yes. Yes I did make Julia stop in the middle of the subway to take a picture. Haha!

This is during my ghost walk! We went with London Walks again, and this tour was fabulous! This is London Bridge the 5th. Or it's the 5th London Bridge to stand in this spot, because alas all the other have fallen down!

This is my tour guide! He was an old dramatic Britishman and he was just perfect on the ghost tour! He made it so exciting, and he got really into it! He told us all kinds of cool stories, and it was probably one of my favorite tours. I'll share two stories with you that I thought were really awesome!

The first one isn't a ghost story at all, but we walked past a coffee shop. This was right next to where the main business area of London is, and I guess businessmen went to this shop a lot. Apparently in the morning they didn't want to have to get out of their seats to deliver papers to other businessmen so they would give the papers to the waiters to deliver, and they would give them a little bit of money To Insure Prompt Service, or tips! So this is where the concept of tipping waiters came from!

Okay the second one! Now this one really kind of creeps me out! If you remember early I talked about Wren and the 52 churches that he designed throughout London... well after he died his pupil was hired to build 5 more churches throughout London. However, he only ever got to complete 4. Anyone in each of the four churches he did get to build he made a sacrifice of innocent blood in the church (he killed a young boy or girl) and buried them in the base of the church. If you get a map out, and make a point on where each other his churches stood, and the point where he had planned for the fifth one to stand and drew the lines in you would realize that it was a pentagram! So what the guy had in mind or what would have happened had the pentagram been completed... I guess we'll never know! But super creepy!

Again the tour was only 5 pounds! Totally worth it!

Ironically we came across this building during the ghost tour and not the Harry Potter tour... but welcome to Diagon Alley! This is where Diagon Alley was filmed in the Harry Potter movies. I know it's pretty hard to tell, but it's still awesome!

This building is interesting because of who haunts it! Apparently right before she died Princess Diana was sponsoring a foundraiser in this building, and it was very close to starting right before she died. However, with her death the charity was ended. On the night when it was supposed to begin guards heard music and laughter down in the basement (where all the work had been done) and they went down to invesitgate. One guard went down and one guard watched on a video tape. The guard that went down to investigate smelled perfume, and heard the laughter and when he openned the door it was completely dark and no one was in the room. When the guard went upstairs the other guard asked him what happened to the woman that walked past him. The guard had seen a woman with a sparkingly dress and blonde hair walk out of the room, but it wasn't on the video tape when they rewinded it. A couple days later the man saw a picture of Princess Diana and she was wearing the same dress that he had seen the woman in the room wearing.

They say after that that she's been seen a couple other times too!

And that was my trip to London!