The Tower, St.Paul's and the Globe

Almost made a full week without rain, but it was a bit drizzly this morning. Nothing to cause us much distress though.

We had our first experience of peak hour travel on the tube this morning, since we wanted to get to the Tower of London in time for their 9am opening. At Lambeth North station we watched in awe as dozens of people crammed themselves into an already overpacked train. We, well we chose to wait for the next train which was shown as arriving three minutes later and was marginally less overpacked.

In any case, we arrived at the Tower soon after 9am and stayed there until almost 1:30pm.

Again, wow. We started off with the Crown Jewels, which were amazing even to a suburban-socialist-republican like Phil. Unfortunately no photography allowed, so we can't show you how truly beautiful it all is. Phil loved the St. Edward's Crown (the one used for the coronation of QEII), while Petra was smitten by the Anointing Spoon, of all things.

After having a coffee to recover from all that wealth and ostentation, we then wandered through the walls and towers pretty much at random. The armoury displays were very nice...

...and some of the towers had some excellent short historical videos and explanations of great historical events that are supposed to have happened there. Many towers had graffiti carved into the stone by famous prisoners...

Then there was Tower Green, where people such as two of Henry VIII's wives and Lady Jane Grey (Queen for about 9 days) were executed.

Eventually we ran out of Tower to look at, so we walked down to The Monument (which commemorates the Great Fire of London in 1666) and St. Paul's Cathedral. 

Petra was a bit footsore, so Phil Looked around inside St. Paul's while she recovered. A truly amazing building with lots of monuments to some very famous people. The Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson are both interred in the crypt, but Phil though the drama of their magnificent tombs was somewhat cheapened by the souvenir shop, toilets and (can you believe it) noisy cafe not 50 feet away.

From St. Paul's we walked across the Millennium Bridge (pedestrian only) to the south bank and visited the Globe Theatre, a reconstruction of the theatre where many of Shakespeare's plays were first performed. Unfortunately we were too late to tour the theatre itself, but we went through the museum and watched a demonstration of dressing an actor (or in this case a hapless tourist plucked from the audience) in Ophelia's costume from one of the productions of Hamlet. It was an authentic Elizabethan-period costume, and quite interesting to see how it all held together before buttons, zippers and velcro.

After walking back to our rooms for a bit of a rest, we walked up to another nearby pub and had an excellent Thai meal...just for something different...