London!!!

Wow. I’m tired. So tired, I accidentally told my host mom it took me 8 days to get back from London today instead of 8 hours… (got the words jour and heure confused somehow…)

Having said that, however, I loved my weekend in London. It was pretty much exactly what I was hoping for in the weekend, which is always nice. My trip began pretty early Friday morning, catching a morning train to Paris (and thence to catch another one to London). As I had four hours between my trains, however, I decided to meet up with one of my Wellesley friend’s mom (who also happens to be a Wellesley alumna) for lunch. She picked me up at the train station, took me to a nice restaurant closeish to the Louvre (with AMAZING hot chocolate), and then we wandered through the Tuleries Garden and took a picture of me in front of the Louvre pyramid, before dropping me off at a different train station to catch my Paris-London train. Fortunately, both trains of Friday were uneventful (I did sit next to a nice elderly English man who had been visiting his son in France, and we chatted off and on for the train ride from Paris to London, and at the end, he gave me his book that he had just finished… that was interesting). After walking around Waterloo Station in London, I managed to find Hector and Ann, the two family friends I was meeting for dinner. We then went out to a Turkish restaurant for dinner, and then as I was fairly tired, decided I would begin exploring London the next day.

Saturday, the real London fun started. Hector took me around to most of the main sights of London, all in one day. We started with the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben (quite pretty and intricate looking), Westminster Abbey (OH MY GOSH!!!!! I’ll get back to describing this one – it’ll take a while), passed by Trafalgar Square and the Horse Guards on our way to Buckingham Palace, and crossed Tower Bridge on our way to the Tower of London. OK – now for more specifics. Westminster Abbey was probably my favorite of the places I visited. It was unreal to actually see all those famous English monarchs I had studied, and to walk through a church that has so much importance, what with all those buried there and all the coronations that have taken place in that church. It’s a surprisingly big church, but at the same time, there are SO MANY PEOPLE buried in just that one church. And not only the monarchs – I could have stayed in poet’s corner for a very long time, where Chaucer is buried, and where Tennyson, Austen, Dickens, Lord Byron, Kipling, and many, many more are memorialized if not buried. To be surrounded by so many great people… Wow. Intense. No visit to London is complete without visiting Westminster Abbey in my opinion. I’d most definitely go again, the next time I’m in London, but probably wouldn’t get the audio guide, and would just wander around instead. The church just evokes a sense of awe. I felt pretty drained after that visit, but as it was barely noon, there was plenty more to see. Most of the other sites I just walked by and snapped a picture or two, but I did go inside the Tower of London, which was another impressive visit. The Tower has always been associated with torture and the like, but not much of the building was actually used for torture. There were places for people to live (such as the Queen’s House, and the Medieval Palace), and the central building, the White Tower, was much more an armory than a torture building. Mostly, if people went there, they were there as a prisoner, and torture was very rarely used. The Tower wasn’t exactly what I had pictured – it’s not a tower so much as a very foreboding-looking complex of brick buildings. The White Tower is surrounded by a rather thick wall, which has other towers on it. It was in these other towers, I think, where the prisoners were held. And though they were in the outer wall, there was no way they were getting out unless someone took them out. There’s also a fair amount of green space inside – not sure if the prisoners got recreation or not, or it was just there for the people who worked at the Tower to enjoy. Another interesting part about the Tower – the ravens. Evidently, King Charles II (who was reinstated to lead the monarchy after Oliver Cromwell decapitated King Charles I) had a premonition that if the ravens were to ever leave London, and specifically the Tower, the monarchy would fail. So even though said ravens were obstructing the view of Charles II’s astronomer, the ravens stayed. Today, their wings are clipped so as to prevent them from flying away and destroying the monarchy, but the birds are pretty well taken care of. And, since the days of Charles II, there has always been at least one raven on the grounds of the Tower. I can’t remember when it was (possibly the fire of London in the late 1600s) that only one raven made it through the crisis, but as one lived, the raven population has been able to remain extant. And thus, Queen Elizabeth II is secure on her throne, so the legend goes. Also, the Crown Jewels are on display in the Tower, and that was definitely a treat to see. Sadly, no pictures are allowed, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that they were quite spectacular, and looked VERY expensive. After the Tower, Hector and I went to chill for a little before going out for the night. We didn’t go out to a pub, the common way to spend an evening in London, but something entirely different, rather… Saturday night was the finale of this show Eurovision, and one of Hector’s friends was throwing a party in honor of it. Eurovision is basically the European version of American Idol, and each country has an entry in the competition. Generally, the singers sing in their native language, which is pretty cool. The other trick to the party, though, is that everyone was supposed to dress up as one of the European countries competing in the final. I decided not to try to dress up, so soon after I got there I was draped in an English (not British/UK) flag and given a football (soccer in the US) whistle, and I could claim to be cheering for England. :) Some of the costumes were crazy, and it was pretty interesting to see how everyone had dressed up. There was everything from a German beermaid (she even had a stein from Munich’s Oktoberfest), a flamenco dancer, a Greek goddess, French maids, Napoleon Bonaparte, a bulls-runner from Pamploma, Cardinal Richelieu… My favorite costume, I think, was the man wearing a monkey suit, holding a block of cheese, and waving a white flag. He was the Cheese-eating Surrender Monkey – from France, of course. I found it quite amusing, but I doubt my host family would. :) I heard some of the competitors’ songs, found it all fairly ridiculous (especially as the singers really do think they’re good, and they’re not…), but had a lot of fun chatting with the other party guests, though I was the youngest by at least 8 years, I think. And I only had one person ask me if Hector (who is 15 years older than me) and I were together. I hadn’t thought of that possibility, and it kind of made me chuckle. I caught a cab back to Hector’s apartment before the finale had finished – all the walking around London earlier in the day, along with the ridiculousness inherent in the show, didn’t induce me to stay to see who won the contest (Serbia, if you’re curious).

Sunday, I took the morning to wander around London a little. I walked through Hyde Park, and made my way to Speaker’s Corner. Walking through Hyde Park, though, I was just waiting to see one of Jane Austen’s characters galloping across the grass. Though I pretty much only have the BBC movies to go of off, the park looked like the picture I have of the English countryside. It was quite fun, despite the fact that it was raining steadily. Sadly, though, no Mr. Darcy came to rescue me from the rain and take me to his amazing English mansion property. :) Upon reaching Speaker’s Corner (I’ve forgotten the history now, but today anyone is welcome to set up in Speaker’s Corner and speak, or rant, about whatever they want), I listened to just a little of what the speakers had to say. There was a Christian evangelist, an Islamic evangelist, and a man who seemed to be advocating intelligence and common sense, and I wasn’t terribly interested in sticking around to hear any of them. I then made my way by Marble Arch, originally built to decorate Buckingham Palace. When the palace was renovated, there wasn’t room for it, so it was moved to Hyde Park. Marble Arch is the second arch outside of Rome I’ve seen based on the Arch of Constantine, the first being in Dresden. I just think it’s cool to have seen the original, and then two other arches based off of it, in cities as far as Rome, Dresden, and London. And it makes me feel kind of well-traveled… After Marble Arch, I walked along Oxford Street, one of the main shopping streets of London, and ended up in Piccadilly Circus, which was kind of small. Somehow I was expecting a big something or another at Piccadilly Circus, but I think it’s more just the middle of the shopping district, which is still cool. I then met up with Hector for English-style Sunday brunch (yummy Yorkshire pudding… which isn’t dessert – it’s a lot of meat, veggies, and fries (excuse me – chips), which is just fine by me), and we then walked by the Globe Theatre. Sadly, Othello was being performed inside at the time, and there was another play right after Othello, so I couldn’t see the inside of the theatre – that’ll have to be for my next trip to London. :) After the Globe, we took a trip down the Thames River to Greenwich to see the Prime Meridian. The Prime Meridian was also closed by the time we got to the Royal Observatory, but though I couldn’t stand on top of the line, I could take a picture through the gate. It was still interesting, though, to be so close to the point from which all time zones are based. And the hill on which the Royal Observatory is located offers a pretty good view of the London cityscape. We roamed around Greenwich for a little, walked by the Queen’s House there, and saw the Conservatory. We then took the boat back to Waterloo, and went back to Richmond and Hector’s apartment – uneventful, but I got a few last good looks at Big Ben and the London Eye (one of the biggest Ferris wheels I’ve seen, but also has a very interesting design) before heading out to the suburbs (of sorts).

Monday was relatively uneventful. I caught my train in London with no problems, and attempted to take a picture of the entrance to the Chunnel as I entered – the tunnel that runs under the English Channel, which for reasons unknown is a source of some amusement to me. The train goes really fast, though, so I didn’t get an excellent picture, but that’s OK. I still got to go through the Chunnel – twice. :) When I arrived at Paris, I made I tiny mistake in judgement. I thought I could understand the streets of Paris, but was a little mistaken. After wandering in pretty much a complete circle for 30 minutes that got me no where, I managed to find the Metro, and arrived at the other train station with 15 minutes until my train for Strasbourg left. No harm done in the end – I just had to pay twice as much for lunch on the train as I would have paid, had I had time to buy lunch in the train station. On the train to Strasbourg, I sat next to an art student who goes to school near Strasbourg, and though we didn’t talk a lot, we still had pleasant conversation when we did. As the Paris-Strasbourg train makes a stop in Nancy, I had one of the other passengers take a picture of me with the sign for the city. I like this picture better than the ones I took in my trip to Nancy, which made me happy, even if it was quite silly.

Then, it was the end of the train ride, and I was back in Strasbourg. As I walked back to the tram stop to go home, I realized, not for the first time, that the end of my time in Strasbourg is fast approaching, and, again not for the first time, I got a little tear in my eye. As I told my boss for the summer, my job at Interlochen really is one of the things that has me excited to return to the States. I miss friends and family, true, but it’s not going to be easy to leave Strasbourg, and leave my host family. Not sure how I’m going to take that…

Two more weeks, still. It’s never a good idea to wish your life away, and two weeks is plenty of time to prepare myself to say goodbye to this city that I’ve grown rather fond of.