It seems like we're all starting to feel a little bit under the weather. I don't know if it's because we've been doing a lot or if it's just a climate change, either way Sammi got us medicine today and I just hope we get better soon. Meg and Fei seem to be fine, so hopefully they don't get whatever we have. It's not the swine though haha, don't worry. I think the last time I posted I stopped before explaining the tour of Parliament and Westminster...so I'll start there.
Day 9:
It's a bummer we can't take pictures inside of any of the places we are getting tours of because it's really just not the same being told about it when you can get the full experience seeing it. That's been our feeling on things, so even though most of the tours you have to pay, we find them to be completely worth it.
We did Westminster Abbey first which is my favorite thing in London. I came to visit two years ago for a weekend and Westminster was one of the only things I really got to do but I knew it was the best choice. Jon Louey & his girlfriend Suzanne came with us, so did a girl we met at UCL named Laura. So it was a bigger group than the four of us are used to but I'm so
glad we're hanging out with other people. Anyway so Westminster Abbey was constructed by Edward the Confessor. He pretty much seems to have gotten England moving on this historical-location stuff because he is responsible for a lot of buildings. Sometimes on these tours I get him confused with William the Conqueror, and seeing as how there are too many people with the same name who are repeated on all of these tours, you really can't blame me if I get them confused. Anyway whoever it was got the Abbey up and running and it is the place of burial for every king and queen of the UK since then. It is also a church and it's beautiful. You really can't walk in and out without feeling a little more religious because it's just so mystifying in there.
At a certain point the Abbey started to welcome the burials of non-royalty as well and this is where Charles Dickens, Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin are all buried also. There are plenty of memorials to influential people like Churchill, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare (who refused to be burred in the Abbey) and our very own FDR right at the exit from the Abbey.
Other cool stuff we saw was Britain's oldest door which you COULD take a picture of. I don't know who is in charge of deciding what you can and can't take pictures of but it's always worth a try to snap a picture, even if someone tells you not to do it you can probably still get away with it haha.
We also got to go outside into the gardens which I didn't get to do the last time I went into Westminster Abbey and it was a pretty perfect day which just made it all so much nicer.
After the tour we got our tickets for the tour of Parliament. All I can really say about this is that it is very clear how ridiculous governments are in every country. First of all, the House of Parliament is stunning. It is one of the more appealing buildings we've seen. The Parliament is divided in two, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The House of Lords used to belong to the English royalty. Anyone with a royal title within the UK had a right to a seat in the House of Lords...all 1300 of them. Most declined the seat but a while ago laws were passed that took that regulation out of effect and now there are a little more than 90 of the 700 seats that belong to royalty. All of the rooms connected with the Lords is adorned in gold and red. It looks like a lot of the more royal rooms in the palaces we've seen. Clearly these are the UK's colors to show class. I say this because the House of Commons is all green and ivory. We actually liked it better because they use a lot of wood to and it feels more welcoming. We were taken into the "No" voting booth and she explained that on the other side is the "Aye" voting booth and depending on how you vote you walk to a different side of the room to place your vote in the division. We got to see both the House of Lords and the House of Commons debate rooms and libraries. It was so amazing, I would love to work or intern there. I know Dom at the Enclave gets to do that, I'm pretty jealous.
So here is what the tour took us through:
First our tour guide, Allison, explained to us that the monarch had power until 1640 when King Charles I was overthrown and executed. Since then, the only role of the monarch to Parliament is to open Parliament for business every year and to read a speech, written by the Prime Minister (House of Commons) that describes the legislation being worked on for that year. The only other role of the monarch is that every member of Parliament must swear an oath to the Queen otherwise they cannot vote.
Then we saw the
Royal robbing room, which is literally where the Queen gets dressed for the opening. The theme of the room is King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table which we've noticed more and more plays a remarkably significant role in English history. For us, it's just a movie; here, it's a living legend.
The
Royal Gallery was the next room we went into and learned more about King Charles I and Oliver Cromwell (House of Commons) who pretty much held down the fort when the country had no monarch. There was a copy of the death warrant for King Charles I, signed by members of Parliament including Cromwell, in this room.
The
Prince's Chamber lobby came next which is really just a waiting place before you go into the Chamber of the Lords. This is where the opening of Parliament happens as well as the place where the Lords meet for session. There is a throne in the middle of the room for the Queen. When Charles I stormed into a session of Parliament, members of the House of Commons revolted against his authority claiming even the King could not just barge in on a meeting of Parliament. This led not only to the end of the monarchy and the death of Charles I it also was the force behind a tradition that happens before the opening of Parliament. Before the Queen can actually start the ceremony she needs to have members of both houses present. Since the Lords and the Commons have different rooms, it is customary for a member of Parliament's staff to walk to the other side of the House of Parliament, knock on the door into the House of Commons and ask permission to enter. This signifies the importance of the monarchy requesting the presence of an audience with the House of Commons as King Charles I never did. From there, the Prime Minister and other members of the House of Commons walk to the House of Lords where the ceremony begins.
After that we walked to another room which must not have been that important because I can barely read what I wrote down, including the name of the room. Moving on...
The
Corridor of Paintings is literally what you imagine it to be. There are lots of paintings of important historical moments and the very last one on the right was that of King Charles I walking in on a session of Parliament. In the background you can see Oliver Cromwell with a hand on his chin just looking oddly at the king.
Through the corridor you enter the
Central Lobby. In this room was just an homage to Ireland, England and Scotland- the nations that make up the United Kingdom. I'm assuming on a normal day hundreds of people use this lobby to run around between sections of Parliament. It was massive.
Since the Central Lobby is really the division point between the Houses of Lords/Commons, we finally moved away from the gold and red of the Lords to the green and ivory of the Commons-- which we really liked better anyway. The
Members Lobby came right after the Central Lobby. It had brown wood ceilings, tan walls and statues of the more famous Prime Ministers like Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.
I already mentioned the
Voting Lobbies. The Parliament votes by divisions which means they physically split between voting yes or voting no and depending on which way you vote means you go to a different room with the rest of the people voting the same way as you.
Then we went to the
division of the House in which the speaker's chair is in the same position in the room as the Queen's throne is in the House of Lords. And because the House of Parliament is built like a rectangular, if the space is cleared of people and the doors to the two rooms are left open the Prime Minister and the Queen could actually be able to see each other from opposite ends of the building...which is HUGE.
So the tour was amazing and I wish I would have thought to take notes on rooms and stuff when we did Buckingham Palace and the Royal Mews to give you the same info. Anyway if you read this, I'm proud of you...if you didn't, I don't blame you because this is always so much more interesting when you're standing there looking at it yourself!
David, Keith, Nini and Clare are studying abroad in Nice, France this semester and we've been trying to coordinate good times to visit each other forever. They were here Friday through Monday, except the girls left Sunday afternoon.
We wanted to make sure we got to do everything with them in London but during nice weather do we decided to wait out the rain by staying in doors as much as possible. Since they were also exhausted from traveling we came back to our flat, got ready and took them out to dinner at The Rocket. We got there at 5 or 6 and we stayed until 2AM. It was fun showing them a taste of what our college town is like and we were so glad they enjoyed the cheap food and drinks! Emily and Brain came down to hang out from the enclave and so did Jon Louey and Suzanne from LSE. Basically, AU took over the Rocket that night but it's starting to seem like AU has pretty much taken over the entire city.
I love sleeping, we all do, which explains why none of us woke up for our alarms and nearly missed changing of the guards because we were so tired. We DID get there in time so they got to experience the craziness of Buckingham Palace coupled with changing of the guard all before Noon. When the ceremony ended we walked to Westminster Abbey and Big Ben/House of Parliament but we figured they didn't have enough time in London to try to do a tour of either building but we know enough about that stuff to give them a quick summary anyway.
They had a great time on the London Eye and you can get pictures from Sammi or Nini's facebooks, but Keith had already gone to the Eye before and the rest of us are waiting to do that with Taryn when she comes next weekend. So we gave the Movium a shot and it was amazing. Inside are tons of costumes and props from really cool movies like all of the Harry Potters, Star Wars, The Bourne Trilogy, The Borrowers, Sherlock Holmes, Gladiator, etc etc. My favorite thing in the entire Movium was Hermione Granger's Time-turner from Harry Potter. I am really surprised at myself for not trying to take that home with me.
Timing worked out perfectly because the four of us finished the same time that the four on the Eye did so we met up and moved onto the next leg of the touristy. Again, because Thrash had done the touristy-London thing I stayed back with him while the other 6 did a tour of the Tower of London. While they told us later that it was awesome, Thrash and I had our own adventure. First we got lost, and that's mainly because I was in charge of directions. THEN we found a secret market that I don't know if I'll ever be able to find again. And finally, we made it to our destination...the Clink Prison Museum.
Yes, you guessed it...it's an old prison, called the Clink (which also coined the term "the clink"), that's been turned into an interactive museum. There was a lot of writing in the descriptions, and it was tiny. But the mannequins and the torture tools were so ridiculous that I really couldn't complain since it was only like 3 pounds to get in. Well, the pictures speak for themselves I think and it was perfect because I was with Keith haha.
After we were all done with our tours, we met up on the other side of the Tower Bridge to eat fish and chips at the world's best fish & chips place ever. It's kinda our spot now. And Thrash got to see the Tower Bridge go up and down! It's how boats get through.
For the second day in a row we all slept past our alarms and woke up a little too late for what we had originally planned to do. So we took them to the British Museum so they could see the Rosetta Stone. What we didn't know was that there was an exhibit of ancient Egypt so there were Sphinx heads everywhere....hello Phi Sigma Sigma central.
Moving on, Day 3= Emily Beyer's birthday-eve so we got dressed up pretty and met up with everyone at Ping Pong, a place that serves dim sum. It was real classy. And Meg actually ate stuff there! She's really starting to take risks when it comes to all this food nonsense.
Afterward, Fei and I just realized how mad we were at our parents for not signing us up for riding lessons sooner. It was so sweet. Too bad we couldn't take pictures when we were riding so I didn't get one of us with our horses but I did take some pictures on the sidesteps.
So of course I walked right over.
Harry Potter obviously changed my life. It made me re-believe that having magical powers was, once again, possible. Since the times of Matilda and Sabrina the teenage witch I've wanted nothing more than to be able to move things with my hands or evaporate from one place to the next. This is because I'm an utterly lazy person. Regardless, we nearly peed our pants when we heard we could get a guided tour of the London that Inspired Harry Potter! Unfortunately my camera must have been on the wrong setting that night because a lot of the pictures look weird.
He told us that JK Rowling name the famous goblin who opened up the magical bank was named Gringot because there is an old word for gold that is "ingot" and what do goblins do? they growl! so "gr"-ingots=Gringots. Why goblins? Well, JK says that what magical creature would be better suited to work in a bank than these miserable yet clever creatures. Good call.
Next we went to the Lyceum Theater which was where he all of a sudden started to talk about vampires. We were all a little confused about it because we were pretty sure this was the Harry Potter tour and we were getting nervous we were on a Twilight tour or something. Anyway that's when he told us what was important was actually on the BACK of the theater.
Like Dumbledore. There is a huge obsession with King Arthur in England as I've said before and apparently JK is into it just as much as the Royal family is. Dumbledore is based off of Merlin which is why he is the principle wizard out of all of them in HP. Albus means white and Dumbldore means "bumble bee" so Albus Dumbledore= white bumblebee and in many passages of the book she will refer to Dumbledore as walking down the corridors humming to himself.
We followed our tour guide to the Coal Hole, a pub nearby. He started to tell us about the concept of the Invisibility Cloak. Rowling never mentions name of the person she stole the idea from in any of her books but apparently he was the cruelest man in the world. Our guide made a joke that this man would sit down next to people and they would say "what do you want" and he would reply "how can you see me, i'm wearing an invisibility cloak only members of the order of (something) can see me" and the man said to him, "no, i can see you". And the crazy old man with the invisibility cloak once asked, "then why don't people ever talk to me?" So maybe he was crazy, maybe he really had the cloak, or maybe people just ignored him so much that he thought he had it. But as legend continues, one day a man was sitting in THIS pub doodling on paper, centuries ago. The man looked up to see this guy (so sorry I forget his name) staring at him. The first man goes back to his doodle. A few minutes later the invisibility cloak guy gets up, walks to the table the first man was sitting at and puts a piece of paper, face down, on his table. The invisibility cloak guys proceeds to leave the pub. The first man was so irked by this (remember he was the world's cruelest man, no one liked to deal with him) that it took him a few minutes before he had the nerve to turn the paper over and see what was written on it. When he finally turned the paper over, he saw that the man had doodled exactly the same image that he himself had been doodling while he was at the pub. Did he have the invisibility cloak? Was he sitting right next to this man as he doodled, copying down the sketch to prove he really did have it? No one knows, but JK threw this idea into her novels.
Cross a few streets to the Metropolitan Police Department. Here it is, the phone booth that takes you into the Ministry of Magic. THIS is the phone booth that inspired her. Dial 6-2-4-4-2 (M-A-G-I-C) and you get right in.
Too bad it was a busy night because we couldn't get close enough to take a picture of the name of the actual pub (people thought we were crazy tourists snapping pictures of the building) but here on the corner of this block is the place that inspired the Leaky Cauldron. I'll have to go back in the day time to see what it's actually like although it did seem pretty appropriate and we definitely could feel how she took this and turned it into the Leaky Cauldron.
Diagon alley. here is the place on Cecil Court that JK spent hours at coming up with the concept of Diagon alley which is a play on "diagonally" the direction she walked to get there or something like that. Similarly, Knockturn alley= nocturnally (something to do with her being there at night, or I'm making that up I'm not totally sure). Anyway it ABSOLUTELY looks like Diagon Alley even though this isn't where it was filmed. The whole time the tour guide reminded us that this was a tour of the London that INSPIRED HP not the places the actual filming happened. This tour was much better anyway because, as he said, film locations never look real when you visit them so you only get disappointed! He explained to us her reason for picking owls over any other animal as the choice pet and showed as that one of these stores is an antique store where inside the window display is an owl. Interesting.
Also, here you can buy HP money!! I have to back track a little because before the insight of Diagon Alley we went to this side alley that was called the Cash Exchange and I was so attentive to the information that I didn't even get any pictures of what was supposed to be important. Apparently, Rowling never mentions where she got the concept of the invisibility cloak as I said earlier. But, she does mention where she got the concept of the philosophers "sorcerers" stone...a man name Nicolas Flamel. Flamel was born in the 1330's but no one knows the actual date of his birth...or death...or even if he is dead. It is literally the most fascinating story I've ever heard. Apparently in a dream one night an angel told Flamel he would find a very important and valuable book one day but he would not be able to read it. The dream made no sense to Flamel so on he went with his life. Until one day, at a book store, he found a book that was in Old Hebrew he purchased without any idea how to read it. He traveled around trying to find someone to crack the code for him and the first person he found able to translate for him died. Eventually, he figured it out and this book led him to the philosophers stone. It is said that when he "died" he ordered that he be buried with his wife and he put a curse on their grave site that anyone who ever dares to open their tombs would be cursed forever. Well years after he died someone hysterically told the story that he met Nicolas Flamel, and this caused panic and someone decided to check the graves. When they opened the graves...they were empty. The "secret" to the stone is that whoever has it has the power of youth and wealth. So Flamel and his wife have been sighted for the last 7 centuries as recently as 1990's enjoying themselves in different parts of the world. This story is the inspiration to HP & the Sorcerers Stone & Hermione (obviously) is the one to make the connection. But now I just think it's the coolest story ever and I want to know the truuuuuuuuuuuuth!
It seems like we're all starting to feel a little bit under the weather. I don't know if it's because we've been doing a lot or if it's just a climate change, either way Sammi got us medicine today and I just hope we get better soon. Meg and Fei seem to be fine, so hopefully they don't get whatever we have. It's not the swine though haha, don't worry. I think the last time I posted I stopped before explaining the tour of Parliament and Westminster...so I'll start there.
glad we're hanging out with other people. Anyway so Westminster Abbey was constructed by Edward the Confessor. He pretty much seems to have gotten England moving on this historical-location stuff because he is responsible for a lot of buildings. Sometimes on these tours I get him confused with William the Conqueror, and seeing as how there are too many people with the same name who are repeated on all of these tours, you really can't blame me if I get them confused. Anyway whoever it was got the Abbey up and running and it is the place of burial for every king and queen of the UK since then. It is also a church and it's beautiful. You really can't walk in and out without feeling a little more religious because it's just so mystifying in there.
Other cool stuff we saw was Britain's oldest door which you COULD take a picture of. I don't know who is in charge of deciding what you can and can't take pictures of but it's always worth a try to snap a picture, even if someone tells you not to do it you can probably still get away with it haha.
We also got to go outside into the gardens which I didn't get to do the last time I went into Westminster Abbey and it was a pretty perfect day which just made it all so much nicer.
