This would have been a much more hilarious title to the last post, but hindsight is 20/20.
Today, we toured London. We did a Hop on Hop off tour, which is exactly what it sounds like, with the extra detail that it involves double decker busses. It was very awesome, and also very busy.
We started off being driven past that same palace we went to yesterday, but soon ended up at the Parliament Buildings, which having seen, I have to say are way better than ours. I thought ours were pretty great, but the English ones are way better. Also they used to be a Palace, which is some pretty weird symbolism, if you ask me.
We also saw various buildings in the area, like 10 Downing St (which you can't get to) Scotland Yard (which isn't there anymore) and some abbey (where we did not pay to go inside (you will soon see that not paying to go inside was a recurring theme today) )
From there, we went down to the pier to take the water cruise that was part of our hop on hop off thing. The tour guide was very good and gave us the story on all the buildings between the Parliament Buildings and the Tower of London, which was a lot of them. He also told us about all the bridges. The most interesting one was the Ladies' Bridge, which was built by women during the Second World War, while all the men were off being shot at. Shockingly enough, it seems to still be standing.
We disembarked at the Tower of London, which contrary to what you might think, is not a tower. In fact, the "tower" bit is four towers connected by walls that was originally intended to be a palace/fortress. We thought about going inside, but there was a really long "queue" so we didn't. Instead, we ate lunch.
Funny side note: Mom keeps trying to order lemonade. Instead, she gets sprite or 7-up. Apparently, that's one of the charming differences between England and Canada. Also, Sanitary Napkins are called towels, although I don't know why ~I~ should know that.
After lunch, we continued our tour, which took us through a bunch of famous, and not so famous buildings. Honestly, it's mostly a blur, but if someone asks me about a specific building, I can probably recall the one fact about it that I remember, and use it to pretend to be an expert. We did see Trafalgar Square, which had a lot of people in it milling about for no apparent reason. I can't imagine that many people wanted to go into the National Galllery. We also saw Picadilly Circus, which was absolutely jam packed with people, but at least there are things around there to do.
Near Hyde Park, we saw the former location of a hanging tree, and learned that the origin of the word "hangover" was from the way people felt after partying all day during a public hanging. (This is from our tour guide, and not the OED, so it could be complete malarky).
After we got back, we went back down to Regent St to wander through the crowds, who were inexplicably out on London on a Saturday night. Actually, there were crowds everywhere we went today, which I must assume was to see us. Perhaps they have been reading this blog.
Anyways, we got back tonight around 10, and then I started blogging, so the pictures don't really all have captions.
Also I made a mistake when I said I would be updating in the middle of your night. I was backwards. So my updates will be in the mid afternoon, typically. In addition, apparently blogger's "Compose" function uses Flash (nice, Google), so I can't easily embed pictures from Picasa Web Albums. So, only slideshows, unless I really feel like copy and pasting a lot.
And now: pictures!
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