England Highlights-Day 4-5: London

I will continue with my England highlights blogroll as I now have a free moment to do so.  :)  I'm actually kind of getting bored with this as I'm sure most of you (if you do indeed exist) are, too, so I'll keep it brief.  Pictures seem to be so much better than words anyway, right?

So our fourth and fifth day in England were spent touring London without Ellie.  Jesse and Kelly kindly offered to watch Ellie for TWO DAYS so that Joey and I could tour London.  We were definitely able to see a lot more without her besides the fact that it was a nice break, so for that we are thankful!  

Here's a nice shot of the train terminal in London.  Many people take this train from miles away to come to London for work and pleasure:

This is just a good picture that in many ways sums up what you see in London.  A double decker bus for public transportation, a phone booth, a narrow street and old buildings.  (That is a horribly overly simplified thought that can probably be applied to many other countries in the world, but I haven't been to many other countries so I'm sticking to that statement....for now.)

The first thing we did was check into our hotel and drop off our luggage.  Then we walked over to Trafalgar Square: 

Lord Nelson:

Then we continued our walk, making our way to Westminster Abbey.  On our way we walked through this street and were asked why it was painted red.  We must have looked like locals! :)  We still have no idea what the answer is, though!  It must be something political. 

We then made it to Westminster Abbey:

We were not allowed to take pictures inside. :(  It was beautiful!  What I didn't know about the Abbey was that it is FULL of graves.  That's really it.  The graves of many of the kings and queens as well as other famous people like some authors and poets.  We took an audio tour which was pretty neat.  This is a picture of the Lady Chapel from the outside.  It was beautiful!

On the way to the British Museum we passed by the Houses of Parliament with the intention of going by Buckingham Palace on the way to the hotel in the evening.  My one regret is that we didn't make it there! :( 

 This is Big Ben with The London Eye in the background:

Then it was off to the British Museum.  

By this point my feet were about to fall off, so I sat on the benches while Joey looked around. 

Our last stop was Harrod's department store via train.

I was completely exhausted by this point, so we hardly spent any time here.  We basically bought some chocolate and tea then looked in the lady's department and went back to the hotel.  It was really pretty in the dept. store:

On our walk back from the train stop to the hotel, we saw this building that I thought was cool.  No other significance:

Here is our pretty hotel room:

There was a tea set with tea in the room (and we didn't even use it!):

This is Michelle Obama, her kids, and security.  Well ok we're not completely sure, but we know they were in London the same time we were and Michelle took her daughter to the Lion King, and Joey saw this motorcade behind the theatre that was showing the Lion King.  

Our second day in London was a little altered due to the fact that the underground train system was on strike!  So we took a bus to our first stop, the Tower of London:

This may have been my favorite part because inside, they have an exhibit displaying the crown jewels!  They had crowns that the Kings and Queens had worn and the other jewels they were adorned with.  It was beautiful!  Really amazing! No pics obviously.  :(

Here is the Tower Bridge which can be seen from the London Tower.

And this guy just looks cool (he's a beefeater at the Tower):

We then had a 20 minute walk to the Globe!  We actually saw Romeo and Juliet in the Globe.  They try to make the plays close to how they were originally done as possible.  That was fun, though slightly uncomfortable as they didn't have back rests and the play was 3 hours long! What's amazing is that the people in the front are standing!  They stood the entire time!

On our way back to the bus we stopped by St. Paul's Cathedral, though due to time constraints and costs we didn't go inside:

Because of the strike, traffic was horrible!  We waited at the bus stop for at least 20 minutes and finally decided to walk back to the hotel to get our bags.  Then we waited at the hotel bus stop for another 10 minutes and decided to walk the 30 minutes to the main train station!  We were completely exhausted by the time we were on the train, but it was well worth the trip.  This is one last picture of London .  These are the very popular coffee shops we saw everywhere in England (Costa and Cafe Nero):