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