Party in the UK: Taryn!

Taryn was here, Taryn was here!! It was the best time ever especially her last day when Emily could play with the three of us :)

Day 1!
First we picked Tar and Jon Baker up at the airport in London and brought T back to our flat. Then off we went! To:

Hyde Park:

Where we did a tour of Kensington Palace:

It really is pretty big.

And inside of Kensington Palace were a couple of exhibits. First, Princess Diana's Royal Dress Collection:

This one was my favorite

Compared to what they used to wear in the old days:

The other exhibit was on Debutante balls! They stopped officially holding the ceremonies sometime in the 1950s I think. But, the exhibit taught us how to tie bow-ties, how to Waltz, walk in a straight line with correct posture, and some other ridiculous things. All of which we attempted. We were pretty good at all of them except we all failed miserably at the bow-tie thing. Luckily, we're girls.

That night we took Taryn to Central London to see everything lit up. We also did the London Eye which was fantastic.

Big Ben from Ground Level and from the London Eye! We kept walking down Southbank and stopped to eat at Gabe's Wharf before coming back to our flat and going to The Rocket to show Tar what college bars are like :)

Day 2!

Meg and Tar did Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Changing of the Guards etc togetther in the morning. Later, we met up with them at Tower Hill to walk across the Tower Bridge and eat out our favorite fish & chips stop.

We started the the Tower of London with our tour guide, Marcel. He's my favorite of all tour guides we've had yet. Here we heard about the torture and imprisonment that used to happen in the Tower of London. After a couple of ghost stories, we headed off to to the Ancient Roman Wall, St. Catherine's Dock, etc etc.

We kept hearing crazy stories of the Plague, and even saw the spot where they buried the 90,000 victims (to the left). Also, did you know that the word Spital became HOspital after someone decided to add "holy" in front of it?

But the reason we initially wanted to do this was because it's called the Jack the Ripper tour. Meg and I love Jack the Ripper (the history of it, not the guy) because we saw an episode of Criminal Minds before coming to London about a copy-cat and we've been interested by him since. Jack the Ripper was not his real name, he was actually called the White Chapel Murder....this is the White Chapel. Churches used to be prime places to pick up prostitutes (alliteration much?) and Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes just around the corner from here. Did we go there? Yes we did. We stood on the cobblestones where he murdered his last victim. And did they ever find him? No, they never did. Because forensics sucked in the 1800s.

And to keep with the theme of misery....we went to Les Mis! Which was wonderfully done and we were super impressed. PS. Taryn is wearing my clothes. Nothing has changed, even in Europe.

So, Les Mis, dinner,

O'Neills!

And yes, I dressed Taryn. Like I said, this aspect of our relationship will never change :)

Taryn on her first double-decker bus!! I'm pretty sure she hates this picture but I'll leave that for future Nirvana to deal with.

Day 3!

Chelsea Stadium where we took a lot of extremely odd pictures. They have a photo wall going down the perimeter of the entrance where you can pose with images of the players. Um, they should really consider making those down at Buckingham with the royal fam.

I should mention Day 3 was also Halloween. Meg hates Halloween so we just wore witch hats and went out to Zoo Bar in Leicester Square.

So much for maturing during college...