Greenwich...Good Times ^-^

Alright! Here I am! Beautiful wonderful perfect me!!! We are on our way to Greenwich (and yes this was the 24th of January. Please do not say anything). So shortly after this picture was taken I realized that my camera's battery was dead....so yes...all pictures in this post were nicely taken by Rebecca. THANKS BECCA-BEE!!!


Big Ben...XDD so cool! This was taken from the bus, I went and saw it in person later!

The London Eye, I have been told that yes it is cool, but that it is overpriced and that unless you go on it when there are no clouds it's not really worth it. And since it's very rarely sunny in London...we've just stayed away. But supposedly if you go into St. Paul's Cathedral it costs less and there is an amazing view from the top!

This is a picture of the Naval College from across the Thames, we stopped to view it before we went to it. It was a pretty sight, I kept bugging Rebecca to take more pictures, but she assured me she had taken a good one so I had to shush up and listen to our guide T.T

A really cool apartment building I saw and forced Rebecca to take a picture of...


The Millennium Dome....I have been told it's supposed to look like a crown and the only Londoner I have spoken thought it was a disaster.

This tree reminded me of Cassandra's tree after dad had gone to town on it XDD. I forced Rebecca to take lots of pictures of it!

Here it is again! WHEEE!!!! BUTCHERED TREE!!!

This is main street of Greenwich, it was a nice very quaint place.


A church....

The Naval College....


The Naval college....
The outside of the chapel of the Naval College

NELSON! The man who died and was stuffed in a barrel of rum instead of being thrown overboard as that is what his request was.

The ceiling of the chapel...

The altar piece...

The super cool pulpit!!! I SO WANT TO GET UP ON ONE OF THESE SOME DAY!!!!


Altar again...


PULPIT!!!!

Super awesome organ.....
The Queen's House which is actually a gallery now...no cameras allowed inside T.T

This is the road (which used to be the main road) which when straight through the middle of the house O.o...o.O huh? Je ne comprend pas!

Now this is what I call a park...right behind the Queen's House....if this was in America you know that no one would be allowed to play footie right behind such a historic building. XDDD

Touring London with Celebrities!

The Faraday House (as you all can read) this is where all my classes take place formally. I don't know who the car belongs to, but it's kind of cute so I didn't call the bobbies to have it towed. I know that it doesn't look like much but once inside it is very nice and inviting. Like today I went in and got tea and scones for free from the Student Lounge it was very nice. I took them upstairs with me to my drama class- where someone mistook me for the professor.... *looks into mirror and wonders at society* Alright so I was wearing a nice put together outfit (black pants, charcoal three-quarter sleeve top) and I actually had a notebook *gasp* but other than that I have horribly bleached hair and look like I'm twenty (which I am). I don't think I look like a professor. But other than that...I guess it was vaguely flattering- very vaguely. Andrew is trying to convince me that I have a very good British accent, I think that he just wants me to try it on an English person and see them kick my butt. No thank you. But this blog post is not about all my inane class experiences! It is about the tour I took last Thursday (1/21/10). It started here at the Faraday House and then we went outside to Russell Square.

Russell Square is actually right next to my apartment so I get to see this beautiful scenery whenever I want to, but I took this picture to let you know that when I start pining for green I do have some nearby. So we cut straight through here heading towards the University of London.

We were all in a big group so we were noticeable tourists anyways, I thought what the hell, why not? Let's take a picture of all the really pretty double decker buses for all the jolly folk back in the USA. I'm sure they'll be able to appreciate it- and I have to say they're pretty cool looking, though when one is bearing down on you as you're crossing the road they are pretty darn intimidating. Crossing roads here is hard enough (having to look for traffic in the direction you usually never look) without having a double decker roaring down the road at top speed with the driver grinning manically at you! Mom please just ignore that last sentence and trust me when I say the streets here are much, much, much safer than in NYC. I have yet to feel like vehicular assault is about to be done upon my person.

So we sort of just zipped through the University of London with no real tour- Rebecca and I wondered if the tour guide was actually going to talk to us at all or just chat with the guy from Faraday House. This is a building that was across the street from ULU (University London Union), I was entranced by its color and architecture. I know I am not an architect, nor do I even know what good art is, but the buildings here in London fascinate me and I love them. So you will be seeing many, many random buildings that I have no idea what they hare but something inside me screams "PRETTY" when I see them so I take a snapshot.

This is the Senate Library (University of London Library) it was used as the Ministry of Truth in the filming of an adaptation of George Orwell's book 1984. The building is monstrous and looks rather like a prison if you ask me, but as our guide Edward (yes, I did make a Twilight crack to my roommate after I heard that- I could not help myself) told us, it is what is inside that matters. Edward graduated from Cambridge as an English major, which he told us was the most useless degree ever- don't do it. I shuffled behind Rebecca and pretended I was smart. But it turns out that he was just one of those typical Londoners (not born and bred, he's lived here 5 years) who has a very dry sense of humor and likes to poke fun at everything. As the man from Faraday House told me "He's being sarcastic" I wanted to reply "No? Really? I had nooooooo idea!" Honestly I have been warped by sarcasm, dry humor and mean comments since I was a baby, just because I don't react to your quips doesn't mean I don't get them, it means I'm not infantile. But according to Forbes (ETS prof) I am infantile....so we might need to hash this out a bit more (no he didn't call me infantile, I am exaggerating as usual).

Another bit of pretty buildings. I just love this style, it's so nice, so just nice. I could look at them all day. We need more of this stuff in the US.

Welcome the British Museum! No I have not had the chance to get in yet, but Rebecca and I are planning an excursion to it hopefully soon. Edward of course waited for us with his hands in his pockets and we snapped very touristy pictures and laughed and giggled amongst ourselves. Then he called our attention back to us and explained that admission to the museum was free! His explanation for it being free was that England had pretty much stolen everything inside of it and stopped up their ears and pretended to not be able to hear when other countries demanded their artifacts back. Thus, the least they can do is to make the museum free- except for the temporary exhibitions which cost money. But that's ok.

I snapped another picture of the building because come on, let's admit it, this thing is COOL. It's huge and vast and will take days on end to explore. I actually took a third picture, but there are two male morons looking like dunces so I couldn't post it. It would have shamed me.

Lots of pretty buildings.....the park is Bloomsbury Square, open to the public and quite nice.

I thought it was kind of cool....ooooo Sicilian Avenue! How exotic! Then I walked down it and was like....eh....normal and not very inspiring....

VOILA! Ooooo!!! Spiffy architecture AND an important building! This is Lincoln's Inn, no you cannot stay the night here. This is one of four places where you must have a place at to be able to be a barrister (there is a difference between a barrister and a lawyer). It is not open to the public though. But isn't it gorgeous?

These are the gates to Lincoln's Inn, very nice, very pretty... and down the road across from them is the Royal College of Surgeons which has the really cool medical museum in it which I need to go to that I haven't yet, but come on people, second week here. I need a little time to get situated!

If I am correct I believe this is the Royal Courts of Justice, I'm not quite sure.

Pretty building.....

YES! It is a horse's butt....I didn't have time to get around and get a picture of the front of the statue and I can't remember what it was for, but that's ok. It's on Fleet St. which was where all the newspapers used to be printed, but then the newspapers moved away and it became the financial/lawyer/barrister district. I didn't get a picture of it, but the clock the inspired the clock for the Harry Potter films is hanging above me. They took it down, recreated it and then put it back up. Pretty sweet...
Another cool looking building. Fleet St was also the place where the fictitious barber Sweeney Todd killed his customers and his neighbor cooked them up into pies. So a fun place to be!

This is inside Inner and Middle Temple which are two of the four Inns that barristers can be a part of in order to be barristers. But this one is open to the public it was amazing inside, there was barely any noise at all, the sounds of the city were almost completely blocked out.

This is Edward, I didn't have enough guts to actually ask for a picture so I took a few really bad ones on the sly and decided this one was halfway decent and I could post it. Edward might look familiar to fans of the TV show Bones because he was a character in the first two episodes of the fourth season when they went to London. It was really cool to find that out, he was a good character on that show. He's a really funny guy, even though he wasn't able to answer my question about off hand glassblowing studios, my mom had to help me with that.

This is the temple that the Inner and Middle Temples get their name from. This is the temple that the Templar Knights built as one of many temples on the way to the Holy Lands where they would hold money for rich people who were making the pilgrimage. Thus the Templar Knights created banking. Edward informed us multiple times over the course of the tour that the book The Di Vinci Code sucked majorly and should never have been allowed to be published. But because of this the Temple started giving lectures about the building and what is in it (in order to stop people from trying to pry up the floor looking for the Holy Grail) they were able to raise money to help with upkeep and restoration.

This is a picture of the statue which is the symbol of the Templar Knights which was two knights on horseback. This was the symbol that King Phillip of France used to help prove to the Pope (who was in debt with the Templar Knights) that the Templar Knights were bad and should be killed. He used the symbol to show that the Templar Knights were all homosexuals and we know how the Church feels about homosexuals. I agree with Edward on this one: How childish. But in France the majority of the Templar Knights were are rounded up on Friday the 13th which has made that day an unlucky day in most countries barring France (insert mean French joke).

Ahhhh, at last! The River Thames! Isn't it beautiful!? That is the Blackfriars Bridge. Edward then told us about the river and how one summer the sewage in it all cooked over and created this horrendous stink that finally force Parliament to put in two huge sewer pipes to redirect waste from the river.

Cool looking building

I think this is one of the Temple buildings, I just took a picture because it was pretty.

This is the Millennium Bridge also known as the Wobbly Bridge. When it was first opened a massive amount of Londoners all came to the opening to walk across it. Well it wasn't designed well so it started to sway back and forth and buckled, people panicked, screamed and got sick. So when the architect of the bridge was asked why he couldn't build a simple bridge he replied that the bridge was perfectly fine, but what threw it off was not the design, but the way Londoner's walk which is a rather stupid reason.

The Millennium Bridge is also the bridge that gets ripped apart by Death Eaters in the beginning of the sixth Harry Potter movie. But that white building with the brown roof that you see there is the recreation of the Globe Theater. It's actually not in the exact location where the Globe Theater originally was but it is in the general area. The funny story he told us about the Globe Theater is that in it there are tiles where people who donated lots of money to the project have their names engraved in them. One of the tiles is John Cleese and if you look hard enough you will find another tile with Michael Pallin on it. Now if you know anything about Monty Python you know that his name is supposed to be spelled Michael Palin, but John Cleese paid and extra 10,000 pounds I believe to have them change it to Pallin.

These are the stairs leading to St. Paul's Cathedral which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren who is buried within it.

The impressive visage....

More pictures....


The very front of the Cathedral

One of the very last authentic pubs in London made in the old style. This is one of the very few that survived the Great Fire.
Some other church that I walked by on my way back to Faraday........lemme see if I can find its name. Nope, way too many churches in London, if I wander by it again I'll check it out. Well that's all for now! Hope you enjoyed it!