We started our real last day in London like all the other ones: getting onto the disgusting germ breeding ground that is the London Tube. We got off and headed to Buckingham Palace, hoping to see the changing of the guard today. When we got there, there was already a mass horde of people waiting for it to start. Grandma and I figured we'd never get close enough, but Pa went closer to check it out.
"That sign over there says there's no ceremony today," He told us when he came back.
"Then why are all these people standing here?" Grandma asked.
"`Cause they're stupid and can't read a sign," I said. So, with one thing crossed off our agenda, we went back down into the swine flu party and headed to our second destination, the London Museum. It was pretty much what I expected: a museum about London. The best thing there was all the prehistoric animal bones and jewelry from the people who lived in England before the Romans invaded.
After the museum, we walked a few blocks and started looking for St. Paul's Cathedral. It was pretty easy; when we saw a giant marble building, we figured that must be it. It was taller than Westminster Abbey, but spread out over a smaller area. Since it was Sunday, there was a sign saying that you couldn't walk around in there, but lots of people were anyway. It was more extravagant than the Abbey, with gold plated ceilings and elaborate carvings and a huge, fancy altar, but Westminster Abbey is still my favorite.
We only spent a little time there, because we wanted to go to Picadilly Circus to see Harry Potter. Grandma and I thought it would be really fun to see the movie in London. I think Pa didn't see the importance of this, but he was nice and humored us anyway. To my delight, instead of taking the germy Tube, we opted for the slighty less germy double decker bus. We got on and headed for the top level, but just as we reached the top of the stairs, the bus roared to life and jerked forward. Pa was able to make it to a seat in time, but Grandma nearly whacked a girl in the face and I was nearly thrown to the back of the bus. It was then that I remembered an incident almost two years ago, when I was in Washington, D.C. for a leadership conference. We rode buses everywhere, and on the first day, when we were headed to Philadelphia, our bus supervisor, Kojo (a native of Ghana and a graduate of the University of Wooster), gave us a lecture on bus safety and etiquette. "...And if I see any of you, any of you, stand up while the bus is moving," He had finished. "You'll get your sorry little butt hauled back home before you can say 'Philadelphia'." At the time, it had seemed like a pathetic little power trip to me. Now I know he was just trying to keep us from being thrown out the window. I was wondering how on Earth I was going to make it to a seat alive when I also remembered how Kojo would grip the railings above the seats on the bus when he wanted to come back and talk to us (which usually was to tell us to wake up or to say that if the kid in the green shirt took one more picture on the bus he could explain to his parents why they have a $2000 fine to pay). Holding onto the railings for dear life and feeling very much like a bus supervisor, I made my way to an empty seat and sat down, followed shortly by Grandma.
So thank you, Kojo, for saving me from falling on the London bus and humiliating myself.
We all made it to Picadilly Circus alive and well, and we went to the theater we had been to last night to see when Harry Potter was playing (we tried to see it last night, but we had just missed it).
"I guess we have to go back to that arcade place to go the theater," Pa said.
"It's not an arcade. It's a meeting ground for horror and death." I said, which, while a bit of an exaggeration, was not entirely untrue. It's dark and scary and full of weird people in there. It didn't matter though, because we missed the show again. We left and walked down the street, wondering what to do now. As we did, we passed another movie theater, and it had Harry Potter playing in half an hour! We went in and got our tickets, and it turns out that British movie theaters (or at least this one) have assigned seating! We had to pick out where we wanted to sit, and it cost more to sit in the front of the theater than the back. It was all very weird.
A lot of people I know didn't like the movie, but I thought it was pretty good. The only thing was that I had sucked down three quarters of my Pepsi in about 20 minutes, and so for the entire last half of the movie I thought I was going to have to run out and go to the bathroom. I made it, though, just in time to stand in the long line of people from the movie going to the bathroom.
We ate London fish and chips one last time, and then it was time to return the hotel room and pack. It was just about the last thing I wanted to do, since it involved taking everything out and folding it all over again. Bleh.
I think this is going to be my last blog entry. There's not really much left to say. We're getting up at 4:00 a.m. to leave, and we'll be home by 5:00 p.m. I'm a little sad, because I don't know if I'll ever walk down the Royal Mile in Edinburgh again, if I'll ever gaze at Stonehenge again, if I'll ever light a candle in Westminster Abbey again. But maybe's it a little too early to be thinking like that. I'm only thirteen, and unless my plane crashes into the Atlantic Ocean, I've got plenty of opportunites to go back. I said it earlier on, and I think I'll end by saying it again:
Anything's possible, right?
Love,
Kiera
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
London, Day 1
"It's all my fault!" Grandma moaned. "I should've looked closer!"
People are staring, I thought, but I figured voicing this observation would not help anything.
This morning, exactly 24 hours before our flight home, Grandma logged on to the Continental Airlines website to check in to our flight. However, every time she tried to check in, she kept getting a message saying that the website couldn't check us in because the time before our flight was greater than 24 hours. To get to the bottom of this, we hopped on the Tube and rode to Heathrow Airport. The man at the Continental ticket counter brought up our flight information, and quickly found the problem: our flight doesn't leave until 8:40 a.m. on Monday, not Sunday! This meant we had a whole extra day in London. It also meant we needed to beg the hotel staff to let us stay in our room one more night, since we thought we'd be leaving Sunday.
"How could I not have noticed that we left on Monday?" Grandma wailed.
"At least now we have plenty of time for sightseeing," Pa said.
"And plenty of time to find a place to sleep tomorrow night," I added.
We had two major stops today: The Tower of London and Picadilly Circus. We got back on the Tube and rode it up to Tower Hill. Once we forked over the 40 pounds it took to get in and got into the main courtyard, I discovered that the Tower of London is about 10 times more impressive than I had imagined it. It's an enormous fortress, so big that if you put Fraserburgh Castle next to to the Tower, it'd probably look just as silly as my house does beside the giant one next door that takes up nearly a quarter of a block. It's made up of four of five different towers, including White Tower, and the Bloody Tower, which is where many of the prisoners were kept and supposedly where two boys were murdered. Speaking of murder, the Tower of London is also the place where Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey were beheaded, and where Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Ralegh were imprisoned.
We walked around the site and saw all the different towers, the walls where prisoners had carved their names, an exhibit of King Henry VIII's armor, and even six yeomen (Tower guards) marching down the path. But what was most exciting for me was getting to see some of England's Crown Jewels. They're kept locked up in a vault, but the public is allowed to go in and see them. Some of the gems on the Crown Jewels were so big, I could hardly believe they were real! They looked like they had to be those fake plastic gems, but the signs insisted that they were the real thing. The funniest part of seeing the jewels was when we were looking at some of the gold artifacts. There were plates, goblets, crosses used in coronation, and solid gold forks. But the most impressive was a huge gold bowl on a stand. That must be the font they use to anoint the new Queen, I thought.
"Pa wants to know if you saw the giant punch bowl," Grandma whispered.
Punch bowl? Oh.
"I think that's a font," I said. "You know, that they use for baptisms and anointing and stuff."
"Oh." Grandma started to giggle. "They wanna sprinkle a little water on them, eh?"
"Not just any old water! Holy water!"
Grandma turned to Pa. "Kiera thinks it's a font, that you use for baptisms, not a punch bowl. That's probably the closest to being right."
And now I'm going to give Pa credit where credit is due and make fun of him at the same time: Yesterday at Westminster Abbey he asked me what a Eucharist was, so I would not expect him to see a giant gold bowl and think it was a font. But I wasn't really expecting him to think it was a punch bowl, either.
Seeing the Tower of London was well worth the 40 pounds they took from us. And it was well worth the next stop, which was kind of a disappointment.
We hopped back on the Tube and went to our next stop, Piccadilly Circus. I wasn't quite sure what I imagined it would be, but when we stepped out above ground, I found what looked kind of like a British Times Square. It even had its own scary backroad full of hoboes and stores that really should cover up their windows so people like me don't turn a corner and almost have their eyeballs fall out at the sight of the window displays. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing wrong with some nice, harmless (and, in some cases, teethless) hoboes on the streets. It's just the streets they hang out on.
One good thing about walking through through the scary road was that we were walking by an Indian restaurant when the garage door across the street slowly opened. Out came five college kids with drumsticks and garbage cans hung around the next. They started walking down the street, playing a song by banging on their garbage cans. People ran after them taking pictures. The people eating outside sat there and laughed. The owner of the Indian restaurant came out and starting clapping and dancing in the middle of the sidewalk.
If the school band was like that, I would sign up in a heartbeat.
Overall, Picadilly Circus was kind of a letdown, especially when we tried to go see Harry Potter and instead got stuck in a scary, dark arcade thing. To top it all off, when we tried to go back down to the Tube, both the stations were closed! We ended up walking three blocks before we found an open station (I may sound like a baby, but we had done a lot of walking that day). And when we went into the station, it was packed with people, probably because the other stations were shut down. With so many people in such a small space, I could almost see the germs on the railings and seats. For the first time, wearing a swine flu mask didn't seem like a major overreation.
Oh, and in case you worried that we would have to sleep with the hoboes (who I'm sure would be more than happy to share their doorways and park benches with us), we managed to get our room for another night. And for the same price, no less! I just hope the hoboes aren't too disappointed.
Love,
Kiera
People are staring, I thought, but I figured voicing this observation would not help anything.
This morning, exactly 24 hours before our flight home, Grandma logged on to the Continental Airlines website to check in to our flight. However, every time she tried to check in, she kept getting a message saying that the website couldn't check us in because the time before our flight was greater than 24 hours. To get to the bottom of this, we hopped on the Tube and rode to Heathrow Airport. The man at the Continental ticket counter brought up our flight information, and quickly found the problem: our flight doesn't leave until 8:40 a.m. on Monday, not Sunday! This meant we had a whole extra day in London. It also meant we needed to beg the hotel staff to let us stay in our room one more night, since we thought we'd be leaving Sunday.
"How could I not have noticed that we left on Monday?" Grandma wailed.
"At least now we have plenty of time for sightseeing," Pa said.
"And plenty of time to find a place to sleep tomorrow night," I added.
We had two major stops today: The Tower of London and Picadilly Circus. We got back on the Tube and rode it up to Tower Hill. Once we forked over the 40 pounds it took to get in and got into the main courtyard, I discovered that the Tower of London is about 10 times more impressive than I had imagined it. It's an enormous fortress, so big that if you put Fraserburgh Castle next to to the Tower, it'd probably look just as silly as my house does beside the giant one next door that takes up nearly a quarter of a block. It's made up of four of five different towers, including White Tower, and the Bloody Tower, which is where many of the prisoners were kept and supposedly where two boys were murdered. Speaking of murder, the Tower of London is also the place where Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey were beheaded, and where Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Ralegh were imprisoned.
We walked around the site and saw all the different towers, the walls where prisoners had carved their names, an exhibit of King Henry VIII's armor, and even six yeomen (Tower guards) marching down the path. But what was most exciting for me was getting to see some of England's Crown Jewels. They're kept locked up in a vault, but the public is allowed to go in and see them. Some of the gems on the Crown Jewels were so big, I could hardly believe they were real! They looked like they had to be those fake plastic gems, but the signs insisted that they were the real thing. The funniest part of seeing the jewels was when we were looking at some of the gold artifacts. There were plates, goblets, crosses used in coronation, and solid gold forks. But the most impressive was a huge gold bowl on a stand. That must be the font they use to anoint the new Queen, I thought.
"Pa wants to know if you saw the giant punch bowl," Grandma whispered.
Punch bowl? Oh.
"I think that's a font," I said. "You know, that they use for baptisms and anointing and stuff."
"Oh." Grandma started to giggle. "They wanna sprinkle a little water on them, eh?"
"Not just any old water! Holy water!"
Grandma turned to Pa. "Kiera thinks it's a font, that you use for baptisms, not a punch bowl. That's probably the closest to being right."
And now I'm going to give Pa credit where credit is due and make fun of him at the same time: Yesterday at Westminster Abbey he asked me what a Eucharist was, so I would not expect him to see a giant gold bowl and think it was a font. But I wasn't really expecting him to think it was a punch bowl, either.
Seeing the Tower of London was well worth the 40 pounds they took from us. And it was well worth the next stop, which was kind of a disappointment.
We hopped back on the Tube and went to our next stop, Piccadilly Circus. I wasn't quite sure what I imagined it would be, but when we stepped out above ground, I found what looked kind of like a British Times Square. It even had its own scary backroad full of hoboes and stores that really should cover up their windows so people like me don't turn a corner and almost have their eyeballs fall out at the sight of the window displays. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing wrong with some nice, harmless (and, in some cases, teethless) hoboes on the streets. It's just the streets they hang out on.
One good thing about walking through through the scary road was that we were walking by an Indian restaurant when the garage door across the street slowly opened. Out came five college kids with drumsticks and garbage cans hung around the next. They started walking down the street, playing a song by banging on their garbage cans. People ran after them taking pictures. The people eating outside sat there and laughed. The owner of the Indian restaurant came out and starting clapping and dancing in the middle of the sidewalk.
If the school band was like that, I would sign up in a heartbeat.
Overall, Picadilly Circus was kind of a letdown, especially when we tried to go see Harry Potter and instead got stuck in a scary, dark arcade thing. To top it all off, when we tried to go back down to the Tube, both the stations were closed! We ended up walking three blocks before we found an open station (I may sound like a baby, but we had done a lot of walking that day). And when we went into the station, it was packed with people, probably because the other stations were shut down. With so many people in such a small space, I could almost see the germs on the railings and seats. For the first time, wearing a swine flu mask didn't seem like a major overreation.
Oh, and in case you worried that we would have to sleep with the hoboes (who I'm sure would be more than happy to share their doorways and park benches with us), we managed to get our room for another night. And for the same price, no less! I just hope the hoboes aren't too disappointed.
Love,
Kiera
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