They Have a Milkman

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After a restful night's sleep, we woke up at 9:30am London time, and planned on heading out to explore. Poor Mariel woke up feeling ill and ended up staying at her uncle's house for the day to rest up. It's a good thing she did, because Lauren and I ended up staying out in the city for a while 8 hours--8 hours of straight walking.

First, we visited St. Paul's s cathedral which was amazing. We bought a day pass, and wondered up hundreds upon hundreds of stairs, up into "The Whispering Dome" and the stone gallery where we had a fabulous view of London. In the Whispering Dome, it is said that the architecture is so perfected that you can whisper onto a wall and the person on the other side of the entire dome can hear you. Lauren and I looked like fools, whispering into a wall with no prevail. There was mass going on as well as plenty of stinky tourists which I bet didn't make our whispers go through so clearly.

After St. Pauls we headed toward the Millenium Bridge. But before we made it to the bridge, naturally we became side tracked. An old building with black and gold gates caught our eye. "College of Arms" it said of the front, "visitors welcomed". Well, being visitors in this new city, Lauren and I walked up to this lovely old building to explore (though only one car was parked out front...suspicious). A stuffy old English woman awaited us inside with no sort of smile on her face. Polietely trying to figure out what we had just walked into, Lauren asked "Is this a museum?" -- "No." "Is this a school?" -- "No."...We quickly hurried out, still with no clue as to what this building was! It's a mystery...

After crossing the bridge, we went into the Tate Modern Art Museum. It's a free museum full of Picasso, Monet, Miró, Dalí, Diego Rivera, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, Henri Rousseau...and so much more. It was AMAZING. Loved it.

We then realized we hadn't really eaten for 5 hours, so wanted to get a lovely English lunch somewhere along the South Shore of the River Temes. We found this noodle house, and it was perfect timing because it had just barely began sprinkling.

After we had and were rejuvenated, we walked around the Globe Theatre, and realized we had left our maps at the lunch place. Lovely.

So we were mapless, again, in London. It worked out well though.

The river walk we did was beautiful and right around the London Eye, there are all these funny street performers. They ranged from a "Michael Jackson" to a huge snow monster thing, to mimes and hip hop dancers. It was a riot.

We found ourselves at the Westminster Abbey which was AMAZING!! The tours had been closed for the day, but we wondered around the grounds and found some little road that led behind the abbey itself. The man told us we could go into this little area which included a grassy area, and some very, very old brick buildings. We found this "secret" little passage below an ivy covered wall and followed the sounds we heard. Suddenly we were within the back corodors of the old Westminster Abbey--we were in the Priets' and nuns' area. We wondered, took pictures, and escaped successfully after seeing some beautiful secret garden and passageways

The travel home was a trek. We got distracted in one of London's best shopping stores--The Top Shop--and then found ourselves waiting in long lines for the Tube. Eventually, we made it home safely, though very VERY hot (the tube has absolutely no circulation of air so by the end of the day it feels at least 100 degrees in there).

In the night, we went to downtown london with Mariel's cousin's Alex and Adie. It was kind of boring, because they didn't want to pay too much to get into the "good" clubs, but we all still managed to have fun. Especially on the bus (The bus driver hated Mariel, and we ended up getting the same bus driver TWICE in the same night...what are the odds?")

Sleep was very nice and very needed!

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