jachin.rupe.name
Ho Hum, De Dum

I was able to sleep a little bit more on Saturday morning, but I was still out of bed by 7. The three of us went down to Starbucks again to get on the internet. Starbucks was closed. It did not open until 8am. I assumed Starbucks would have some international rule about opening early. I guess not. So we hung out in a small park until it opened.

We walked over to Buckingham Palace, and took some pictures in front of the palace. Then we walked down to a double decker bus tour. It works where you buy a ticket for a day and you can get on and off as much as you like. Heather and I had already seen a few of the things on the tour so we rode the bus all the way to Regent’s Park. It was very nice. There were a lot of flowers blooming. They had all these named plots that looked like they had rose bushes in them that were named like race horses. It was too early for the roses, but I’ll bet it is amazing with they are in bloom.

Regent's Park Flowers

After going through the park we walked down to the BBC building where we got back on the bus and rode it over to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Before going inside we stopped at Paul’s for lunch. Elysia said it has no relation to St. Paul’s Cathedral, it’s just a restaurant chain. I had some sort of sandwich in a baguette, it was good.

Then we went into the cathedral. I was very impressed (I have not seen a lot of big church’s before though). They had these cool audio tours on iPods that seemed well produced. We ended up climbing all the way to the golden balcony. It was a crazy amount of steps and very narrow at times, but the view from the top was amazing. A lot of famous people were entombed there including Lord Nelson and John Donne who also preached at the church. He wrote one of my favorite poems “For whom the Bell Tolls”.

On top of St Paul's

After St. Paul’s we got back on the bus and rode over to The Tower of London. We just made it in time to get the last tour of the day from a Beefeater guard. He did a good job of making it entertaining. More history has taken place there then almost anywhere I have ever been. The crown jewels were also mind blowing. While we were there we also walked through “The White Tower” and “The Bloody Tower”. We wanted to see the torture chamber too, but it closed before we got a chance. We walked along the Thames up to the tower bridge, then headed up to Brick Road for some Indian food.

The White Tower

Brick Road is a neighborhood with lots and lots of indian restaurants, folks stand outside and offer you deals to get you to eat at their place. We were a little early for the dinner rush. Not sure if that helped us get a better deal, we were hungry though so I we didn’t barter much and ended up stopping at the third place someone talked to us at. The food was good. The one exciting/strange thing that happened was what must have been a bachelor party showed up as we were starting our main course. They looked pretty excited and one of the guys was wearing a banana suit.

Once dinner was over we walked to an Underground station and headed back to Vandon House where they were holding our luggage, picked it up and then got back on the Underground to Kings Cross. There we got on our train to Ely.

Once we got to Ely Eliot and Kristine picked us up. Eliot was still there. Hurray!

They drove us to their house in Beck Row and we went to bed.

I was looking forward to a long nights sleep, which I needed. Good’ol jet lag kicked in and I was up at 5:00am. Which would have been about 11pm at home, so I have no idea what went on there. I was hoping to get caught up later that night.

I went down to a coffee shop at 6am, got on the internet and finished up some work I had left over from the day before. Then breakfast at the hotel. Then we headed out walking.

We went down Parliament Street on the way to “The National Gallery”. The National Gallery was probably the thing in London I was looking forward to the most and I was not disappointed. Before going in we stopped for a photo op with the lions at the base the of Lord Nelson statue in front the of museum, then went inside. It was awesome. One of the best art museums I have ever been in. I probably could have spent 3 days there. The highlight for me was a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. It was the first thing I’ve ever seen of his and it was phenomenal. Alas we could not spend the next 3 days going to The National Gallery, we had lots more to see.

Horse Guards

Jachin and the Lion

Heather and the Lion

In the afternoon we headed over to the British Museum, which was also very impressive. I’d never seen anything like it before. They have so much stuff, including the Rosetta Stone. The building itself was a pretty impressive piece of architecture too. The main gallery is this huge circular room with a glass celling, and the outside walls are these giant classic facades with massive columns and everything.

In fact we were sitting in the main gallery when we decided it was time to go to the bathroom before we left. We had noticed a green sign of a figure running in both the British Museum and the National Gallery that always seem to point to where the the bathrooms were. I saw this pointing down some stairs near where we were sitting and noted how clever the british were, making a sign that depicted running to the bathroom. Then we proceeded to follow those signs looking for the bathroom. We went down some stairs, down a hallway, through a heavy looking door with a crash bar with big letters on it encouraging me to “Push Here to Open”. So I did. Heather tried to stop us at this point, saying something about how it looked wrong. I pointed out that we knew the signs were for the Bathroom and the door was telling us to go through it. So we went through. Then I started to notice the bare pipes and unfinished floors, and I started to wonder if we had made a wrong turn. I went back down the hallway, and the “Push Here to Open” door had locked behind us. At this point (after a short discussion) we realized what the sign really meant. It was for emergency exits. Apparently they don’t believe in calmly exiting buildings in Britain during emergencies and want everyone to run for the doors. So we wandered around the basement and yard for a few minutes, no one stopped us until we had found our way out when a guard noticed us and asked us what we were doing. After he let us go we went back into the museum through the main door and following the “guy and girls standing next to each other” signs to the bathrooms.

The wrong part of the British Museum

Next we got on “the tube” and headed up to Notting Hill and the Portabella Market. It was a beautiful day. The sun had come out and it turned out to be a very nice neighborhood for walking around in and the market had a lot going on. Heather wanted to go there because of some movie I hadn’t seen, I was a little hesitant but it turned out to be really nice.

While we were up “on the hill”, we went off the main drag to try to find some houses that looked like the houses in the movie, and we found this pub, and my leg was starting to hurt, so stopped for some beer. The guys running the place were pretty cool, they let us sample a few of the different kinds of beer. When we were sitting outside the owner of the bar was making some sort of arrangement to put a bunch of art for the bar from this guy he knew who pulled up in a BMW. He kept pulling frame after frame of these antique maps and communist posters and who knows what else. They’d lay them out, talk about them. The wind would blow them over. He would pull more pictures out of his car. They asked Heather to help them make some sort of judgement. Kinda strange, but it kept us entertained.

Jachin Having a Beer on Notting Hill

Heather Having a Beer on Notting Hill

After that we finished climbing to the top of Notting Hill and down to Kensington Palace and Gardens. Which was also beautiful. I would have really enjoyed it, but my knee was really upset at me for some reason. We had to keep stoping so I could rest it.

We made it back to the hotel, I took some Ibuprofen and we went to the local pub the receptionist recommended. I had some sort of fancy version of fish and chips called “King Cod” and Heather had some sort of fancy chicken. It was good, but expensive. I was warned about that. Oh well, it was really good food, even if we did have to pay for it.

Then we went back to the hotel to wait for Elyisa to show up. She was taking the Chunnel from Paris. It was April 1st so we wanted to pull some sort of a prank. The best thing I could think of was going into her room and short sheeting her bed (we already had the key for her room because we had checked in for her). We tried that, but the sheets weren’t right for that. Heather also tried the “there was a mix up and the only room we have is this one, and there is only this one small bed the for the three of us to sleep in”. Elysia said she would have bought it if we had bothered to put all our stuff in her room, which in retrospect might have made the joke work. Oh well, we probably were too tired to be trying to pull off any sort of awesome prank.

We went down to Albert’s for a quick drink to celebrate Elysia’s arrival. Sadly the city of Westminster had pretty strict bar close rules. We didn’t see a bar that was open past 11pm on weeknights and all the ones by us close even earlier on weekends. It was just as well what with all the waking up before the crack of dawn and all the walking everywhere I was pretty much beat by 10pm.

We did get to talk to this one guy at Albert’s though who talked just like Wallace from “Wallace and Grommet”. He was pretty cool.

Then it was back to the hotel to hang our for a bit and bed time.