London and an Air of Finality

We safely arrived at the bus station in London, and took a short walk to the metro station so we could get to our hostel. We were tired and ready to turn in. Alas, the tube is four pounds. Four pounds!! To ride the freakin' metro!!!! So we dejectedly but determinedly marched back out into the night air and walked to our hostel. And walked. And walked. It was quite a long walk. Maybe an hourish? But I saw a blue police box (albeit smaller than the TARDIS) along the way, so it was totally worth it. And we continued to walk around London from then on...and London's not exactly small. Our hostel was very large, but very worth it, because it was very cheap, and had a very large breakfast. And also very cheap hot dinners. And also on the other side of a very cool, very blacklighty tunnel. And to top it all off, we were in a four bed female dorm. Quite a way to go out.

London held a lot of excitement, because it was the last of the three major cities you have to see (the other two being Paris and Rome), and of course because we knew we'd be heading home soon. And yet, as the day approached, my apprehension grew. Had we really done that much? Had we really been gone long enough? Was I really ready to go back to normal life? Months of counting down the weeks, and then the days, and now I just wasn't sure how I felt about anything. Meanwhile, having set aside both of our cameras in favour of Daniel's which we had liberated for our purposes (Elizabeth's was taking blurry pictures and mine was a battery guzzler), we ventured out to document one last city. But then, as it turned out, Daniel's camera only held 100 pictures at a time, so if we forgot to load the pictures each night, we found ourselves in a pickle the next day. We just couldn't manage, one whole, sufficient camera.

The picture below is not London Bridge. This one above is London Bridge. Completely unspectacular. But there you have it. The bridge that has been falling down for a very very long time.
This is the tower bridge. It is mistakenly believed to be the London Bridge, but it is not. Although it resides in London, it is not named after it. It is more impressive though, I think. Although the blue thingys are pretty weird, especially up close.
We did go to the Tower of London. It's really expensive, but you do get to see the crown jewels and all that. Spiffy cool. Unfortunately, they did of course have cannons. Spiffy Christmasy looking ones, but still. Don't they know yet to keep these out of reach of children? Or queens, as the case may be?
The changing of the guard. Pretty cool. It's such a huge production. It's kind of funny how the British laugh at how patriotic we are, and then they have huge pompous affairs like this. Hmmm...do I detect the stink of hy-POCK-rissy? I do like their furry hats though.
Hmm. I guess there was one guard who didn't want to change. Little minx.
"Don't blink. Blink and you're dead. Don't turn your back. Don't look away. And don't blink." Seriously. Who wants to sit in front of a creepy statue like this after seeing Doctor Who? Who wants to sit in front of a statue like this full stop? Whose awful murderous fish dream are we being subjected here? Who thought the idea of being murdered in your sleep by a finned fiend was statue-worthy?
Big Ben, and the clock. The clock itself is, in fact, not Big Ben. No, Big Ben is the pendulum inside. So now you can be smug and condescending when others make that error, even though you probably made the same error a few days ago. And the circle of life continues.
We wanted to see a play in the West End, and Hairspray was showing. Actually, there were lots of plays that looked interesting, but we settled on this one. They have this deal where on the night of the play, they'll sell really cheap tickets for the very front row. True, you're looking up a little, and you can't really see their feet, but aside from that it's a great view, and you're right up close and personal. And it's fun to think that the people right behind you payed about four times as much as you did. After seeing enough plays and such where Americans attempted British accents, I guiltily loved every moment of their American accent attempts. And not just any accent...they were attempted the east coast accent. Some of them ended up with southern accents. Poor Link Larkin was struggling to find any sort of American accent. And he wasn't as pretty as Zac Efron either. Bless his heart. It was all very entertaining. Oh, and the play was good too. :-)=

This is only a sample of what we did there of course. We filled our days up as well as we could. We took in Sunday services at St. Paul's Cathedral (heard a wonderful boys' choir) and Westminster Abbey, which is brilliant because then you can see the inside without paying exorbitant amounts! And you get a church service out of it to boot, which we didn't get much of while backpacking around. We walked around the Thames, had afternoon tea at this cool and well hidden little place, saw the Globe Theatre...one of our favourite things was the House of Commons. It sounds like it would be really boring, but I could have stayed longer. Everything they talked about was so pertinent to what's going on in the world right now, and they're so animated and opinionated. And yet everything follows very exact protocols. To the point of being rather silly. They always, for instance, address the "speaker" who presides over the discussion. So even if they're quite clearly directly responding somone's statement, and even if they're face said person, they still address the speaker. It was great fun, and completely fascinating. On our last evening in London, after a stop at a toy store, we met up with a friend of ours from the Egypt/Jordan/Israel tour. We had dinner and chatted for a while, swapping travel stories. It was great fun, and good to see him again. He has some very interesting travel stories, and I'm sure we could have been entertained much longer than any of us really had time for. As we headed back to the hostel, it seemed to continue to not sink in that we were leaving the following morning. Oh, toy store, I hear you asking? Well, as you may know, we tried to find unique things in the different countries to buy, rather than just generic tourist crap. Something in the window of this toy store caught my eye...a model Dalek! And, thought I, what could be more unique to England than Doctor Who memorabilia? So I got my very own diecast Dalek and TARDIS. Huzzah!

On January 14th, we got up and took the tube (finally the cheapest and most feasible option) to the airport. It got a bit held up, but at least the update announcements were in English, if a bit infrequent. We finally got the airport and found that all the flights were delayed because of terrible foggy conditions. Once we finally checked in, we found a spot to sit and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Really, we waited for hours. We were a little worried about catching our connecting flights, but there wasn't really much we could do about it. At one point, while they were boarding an earlier flight, we did go and ask if we could catch that flight instead of our later one, but they said we couldn't if we had already checked our luggage. Which we had. So we waited again. Finally they started boarding our flight, so we went to get on...and found out that the guy who checked us in had changed our flight to the earlier one without telling us. Um...OoPs...doesn't begin to cover it. So we went to collect our luggage (had to go through customs again...psh) and waited in line to change our flight to something else entirely. Again. I'm sure the fact that pretty much everyone had to change their flights that day was making the attendants quite accommodating. By the time we got through the seemingly endless line, the guy immediately rescheduled our flight to a late night flight directly to New York, rather than transferring in Germany as our previous flight had done. And all this with not added fees. Which made the change not only acceptable, but preferable. On top of all this, the flight we had been tranferred to was extremely empty, so everyone had their own row, with personal screens where you could watch a TV show, a movie, or play games like Sudoku. And the food was pretty good too. We arrived in New York, and found a spot to lie down for a few hours. Of course, just to be obnoxious, one of the stores which had been closed up kept buzzing all night. So I couldn't sleep. But whatever. I'm not exactly sure how a store buzzes, but it probably conspired with the alarm system. And finally...drum roll please...we boarded our last and final flight! For home! Waiting for the airplane to park was torturous. And then we walked off the plane, down the hall and escalator, and were greeted by Mother-dear, Daniel, and Sara. Talked to Daddy on the phone. Talked to Cassie on the phone. But here's the exciting part...I got home, ran inside, and smother-cuddled my kitty!!!! I cried when I saw her. There now, don't you all feel loved? I missed the cat. :-)= But there there, I missed you all too!

Well, that about covers it. Huzzazzle! Consider my Europe blog complete, except for two more closing thoughts posts that I should post soonish.

Did ew know...?
TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, not Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style.
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