London!
Hey Everyone
Well I went on a last minute trip to London this weekend. We had a day off of class and I decided that I wanted to see the city and to visit a friend who is studying there for a semester. I flew in Thursday night and got to see Parliament light up for the night (which is really cool). There is also this huge Ferris wheel that they call the “London Eye� there that they built for the millennium that is right across the river from Parliament and it was light up cool too. As you all know they drive on the left side of the road over there, which from the bus wasn’t actually as weird as it would seem but I’m sure that was only because I was riding and not driving. It was weird though because the steps to get on the bus were on the other side, and at first I just though oh weird the drivers seat folds up to let us on…then I realized that no the driver is actually on the other side of the bus.
On Friday we walked around most of the major parts of the city. I saw the Parliament building in the daylight this time. We also saw big ben, which is attached to the building (which I never realized). Westminster Abbey is next door so we walked around the church and saw that as well. What I though was cool is that it is built in this style of architecture that no one else it the world has ever used. Apparently way back in the middle ages when the Gothic style of architecture was popular all the other European countries began to move on and change their styles. But England didn’t for a long time, and as a result the developed this really cool and intricate version of the Gothic style. I saw Buckingham Palace, which really isn’t an interesting looking building. I did like the gates in front of it though, because they were black, tipped with gold at the top. The Queen wasn’t there when we were, you can always tell because when she is they put up a flag to let everyone know.
Then we walked through a couple parks and there were daffodils everywhere! They had basically planted fields of daffodils. There had just started to bloom in the last week so I was there at the perfect time! We also saw some pretty blooming trees around a pond and a lot of ducks and swans, including one cute duck that followed us along the fence for a while. The weather was great (that day) and it was really sunny and warm. Then Elena (my friend from school and one of my roommates last semester) took me to the business district where she has an internship this semester. It was more like an American city than the other part. The business district has huge glass buildings and if you weren’t wearing a suit you felt underdressed. The older part of the city reminded me more of the other European cities I have seen with large sturdy stone or brick buildings. There was this one really cool building that housed the Lyods of London, and it was build so that all of the infrastructure was on the outside of the building. The stairs and the ventilation pipes are all on the outside in this stainless steel, so it makes the building look really futuristic, like something that would be in a movie (you should all look it up, apparently there is a similar one is Paris). Then we also went to see the Globe theatre where Shakespeare’s plays used to be performed (although the first one burnt down, so this is the second version), which is much smaller than I expected. It makes sense because that long ago they didn’t need huge theatres, but because it is so famous I expected it to also be large (kind of like the coliseum which is surprisingly smaller than expected from the inside). I really liked that London was split in two by the river. Looking down it is really cool because there are all of these buildings just built right up to the edge of it, and there are also about ten bridges crossing it at several points. We walked across one that is only a foot bridge that was pretty cool, but very high up!
That night we went to a classic English Pub which was cute and cozy and had quite a few middle aged drunk women dancing funny and getting cut off by the barmen. One of the popular drinks in England is apple cider (alcoholic but you can’t really tell) which was good but everything is so expensive there because of the exchange rate!
The next morning we went to see the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, which is supposed to be one of those classic English things that everyone should do while in London. But it really wasn’t that exciting, we saw the guys with the big fuzzy hats, and they actually played music and marched the normal guards in (who were the ones being switched). It probably would have been more interesting if we could see or hear, there were a ton of people there watching and we were pretty far back. Apparently there are Scottish guards and Irish guards, some from all over the UK to protect the Queen. Well we left about halfway through the ceremony and went to see something a bit more exciting…Harrods.
And wow is that something to see! We walked in through the perfume section and into a room filled with designer purses and decorated like ancient Egypt. Every room was decorated so elaborately with flashy ceilings and walls. We also found a sushi bar, and ice cream counter with the most amazing looking concoctions, a gourmet grocery store, a bakery, and an entire room filled with chocolates! We decided that we needed some chocolate, so we each bought two pieces (2.40 pounds for two!) but they were amazing and worth it! My favorite was this coffee creamy one that tasted like coffee maple fudge. Then we went upstairs to take a look around and there were gowns that looked red carpet ready on every mannequin. It was really fun because there were all kinds of designer clothes and weird fashions.
After the Harrods experience we went to Hyde Park and found this great little garden encircled by a hedge to sit in. It’s true that England has a lot of structured gardens, I saw all kinds of cool flower beds planted in circles or squares. It was pretty cold that day, and we had expected it to be like the day before so neither of us had dressed warm enough. Then I wanted to go visit the National Gallery which is a museum with paintings in it, and it is free (like all the museums in London). I got one of those audio things (also free) and walked around for about three hours being nerdy and listening to the explanation behind different paintings. I actually found it interesting, I have been taking an art history class here so that helped me to understand the political context and techniques of the paintings better. It was also very relaxing just wandering around looking at paintings and tuning out the rest of the world. There was one really cool painting by Henry Rousseau which was of a tiger that had been caught in a jungle storm that I really liked. There were only a couple paintings from Spanish artists, but they were some of my favorite to look at because I knew the artists and I could even tell who had painted what before looking at the name! There were also some cool Van Goughs, his sunflowers are there as well as a cool landscape. Monet was there too with some of his water lilies that really are just so pretty. It was kind of weird because it was the first time that I had seen them in person, even though the images are well known in prints. I was actually amazed with the skill that some of these paintings were created with. There were some really interesting seascapes with storms in them and lightning that looked like it was glowing off of the page. There was also a woman who painted a child holding an eel, which was practically transparent! What colors do you use to make something look transparent on paper? (if you want to know the answer you may consider asking Zack because he once did a painting of bubbles where he did the same thing, but it still blows my mind).
The museum is in Trafalgar Square, so I saw that too. It had some pretty cool fountains in it and this statue of lions that everyone likes to sit on and take pictures of. When I left the museum it was raining, so I feel like I got to see the city in its natural state. My friend and I spent a relaxing night in catching up.
London as a city is huge! Way bigger than Barcelona. I liked London because there are a ton of parks and grass, but in the areas with buildings it was a little large and imposing. One funny thing is that they were having a “boot sale� in the parking lot of a school. But this doesn’t mean boots as in shoes, it means boot as in trunk of a car. It was basically a flea market out of the back of people’s cars, but I was quite surprised when I figured that out. Another weird thing that I didn’t expect was not being able to communicate with people. In Barcelona it can be a little difficult because my Spanish isn’t the best, but I can usually get by. In London a lot of the shop keepers were foreign, and they didn’t speak English or Spanish, so I was at a complete loss of how to ask them questions!
Interestingly enough I didn’t miss all of the snow this year, there were huge flakes falling outside of our window Sunday morning! It didn’t really stick, but it went on for a couple of hours. It was actually kind of pretty, especially since I knew I was leaving it later that day. I also had a very cool view from the plane on the way back home. When we were landing in Girona I was looking at the sunset over a blanket of clouds. Only after a few minutes did I realize that some of the clouds were actually mountain tops sticking up above the solid layer of clouds. Then we flew down through the clouds and underneath is was nearly pitch black. It was almost disorienting to go from perfectly light to perfectly dark in only five minutes (the time we were flying through the cloud layer). But that’s how thick the clouds were, that no sunlight from above was seeping down into the earth below. It was very eerie cool.
Next weekend Dublin…Stay tuned.
Kelsey