**Click HERE to look at pictures from our first time in London**
Both: Hey, everyone!
Jen: It's Jen and Greg with an update on our travels.
Greg: This update is going to be about our first trek into...London.
Jen: (laughing) We liked it so much, we went back a second time and then a third!
Greg: Yeah, it really was a place we kind of went in and out of while we were in the UK. Before we get too much into it, a shout out to the Senftleber family because they pointed out we failed on a few of our updates to say specifically how long we were in various places. So, thank you, and to fill in - we were in Paris for 8 days and this update about London, we were there for 2 days before we went to Edinburgh.
Jen: Yep.
Greg: Let's talk about the London Underground.
Jen: Yeah. It's pretty easy to understand once you figure out what lines you're going on and what direction you're going. They have maps on the walls that make it super easy to figure out what stops. And Google Maps tells you what stop to get off at and which lines to take so...
Greg: At first, it's a little overwhelming, but once it snaps into place in your brain, you're like, this is super easy to understand.
Jen: Yeah, and the announcements on the trains as well. If you're paying attention, they tell you where to go. You just have to be quick because they don't stay at those stations very long most of the time. Get on, get off, and you're good to go.
Greg: (using announcer voice) Mind the gap between the train and the platform.
Jen: (laughing)
Greg: You will hear that so many times.
Jen: Ohhh. Yeah.
Greg: So, I guess we can now go a little bit chronologically. We arrived in London, and the very first thing that we did was tea time at Royal Albert Hall.
Jen: Yeah, before we went to London, I probably spent an entire day researching best tea times in London. I guess this whole thing was kind of surprising to me because I don't really drink tea. I don't like the flavor of it, but I felt like this was a very “English” thing to do and I wanted to be able to experience it while we were there.
Greg: I think that the Royal Albert Hall as a venue was a great place to have tea. The building is very nice. Also, their decaffeinated tea was an English breakfast tea. That's what I chose. I thought it was very tasty. You had a different tea though. You had a...
Jen: It was a mixed berry tea. So not too heavy on the traditional tea flavor, more fruity. It was pretty delicious. I drank the whole pot.
Greg: Yeah, I thought your tea was a very good tea. They also gave us cake.
Jen: Yes. But we took that to go and their little "to go" box was like a little box that folded into the shape of Royal Albert Hall. So I thought that was a nice little touch.
Greg: Yeah. After tea time, we walked back to the hotel. The hotel we stayed at, we do recommend. It's the Ampersand.
Jen: So we stayed in South Kensington and I’ve decided that if I ever moved to England, I'll move to South Kensington.
Greg: It was a nice neighborhood. We ended up feeling very comfortable there each time we went to London. So other than tea and the hotel we stayed, the big things that we did were the Tower of London—
Jen: Yep.
Greg: —and Westminster Abbey. Well, let's start with the Tower of London because we did that the first full day that we had in London.
Jen: Yeah, so we got a tour for the Tower of London and we got there first thing in the morning. So we were there when the gates opened —
Greg: Mmmhmm.
Jen: —in a queue with a lot of other people.
Greg: Interestingly, one of those people saw my ski cap I wore ‘cause it was particularly windy and a little chilly and my ears get very cold.
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: And it's an LSU ski cap. This guy sees it, strikes up a conversation. He and his wife were from Ruston. So, small world, right?
Jen: Yeah. He and Greg proceeded to talk about North Louisiana high school football.
Greg: Yes.
Jen: So…
Greg: In any case, on the topic of small world, we experienced that at the Tower of London twice. First with the couple who were from Ruston —
Jen: Right?
Greg: —and then with a, a young boy, probably nine, 10 years old.
Jen: So this story kind of goes back to the Palace of Versailles. We were walking around the gardens there, and we could hear this whistling.
Greg: Non-stop.
Jen: (laughs) Non-stop whistling. He wasn't whistling a tune, just random whistles. And then we see him run by chasing a golf cart. So we're standing at the Tower of London and there's that whistling again.
Greg: Yeah, so when we got out of the Crown Jewels, there's this path you walk to go down to the next thing the audio guide leads you towards. And there's this whistling that won't stop. And I literally look at Jennifer and I'm like, “Did the kid from Versailles follow us here?” And I start swinging my head around and I see this kid whistling and I'm like, “I think this is the kid from Versailles.” So yeah, Jennifer, she sees the kid and she's like, “That is the kid from Versailles.”
Jen: (laughing) Yeah, so he was following us. He didn't chase anything this time. Just whistles.
Greg: No, we're making it out—He was well behaved…
Jen: Yeah, for sure.
Greg: —for the most part. It wasn't like he was a bad kid. He just likes to whistle and his whistling is loud and piercing.
Jen: Yeah. So if you're a college baseball fan and follow the SEC,—
Greg: (laughing)
Jen: —he’s a lot like the Vanderbilt whistler. (laughs)
Greg: (laughs) I mean, in a way he was. Um, yeah. So the tower of London, though overall, I think what they call the White Tower, that main section was the, I think the oldest part. That's the original Tower of London. And inside is a display of so much arms and armor and clothing and...
Jen: Stuff.
Greg: …antiquities. Yes. It was really neat to go through.
Jen: Yeah, it was cool. There was one part where they said that William Wallace was actually brought there at one point. We saw the gate that he was brought through.
Greg: Yeah. What did they call that gate, the Traitor’s Gate?
Jen: Yeah. Yeah. I think so.
Greg: The Crown Jewels are in the—
Jen: Yeah.
Greg: —Tower of London.
Jen: Yeah. So the Crown Jewels, you're not supposed to take pictures.
Greg: They put you on a moving—
Jen: Yeah.
Greg: —sidewalk kind of thing.
Jen: Yeah. I mean, it was the real thing, not like replicas or anything like that. It was neat.
Greg: Yeah. Some of the pieces would have fit right in, in Versailles—
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: —with their opulence.
Jen: They say it was, like, the biggest diamond in the world is there.
Greg: It was. Yeah. The Crown Jewels, I'm sure people already know, and they can look it up if they don't, it’s—
Jen: They're controversial—
Greg: Yes.
Jen: —to say the least, but they were still neat to see.
Greg: Yeah, I think so. The last piece worth mentioning of Tower of London, I think would be the Beefeaters and their tours.
Jen: Oh yeah. So the guards there, called the Beefeaters, the guys in the red jackets and the black pants. Some of them actually live on the premises. But they do tours and they're free tours. And they're very entertaining. We caught pieces of one because by the time one started, we were getting ready to leave and he was very entertaining. He was from Scotland, so he only brought out his Scottish accent during certain parts, mostly the one talking about William Wallace.
Greg: So the next day, we started with the Changing of the Guard. We took the tube over to St. James Station and ended up following a crowd instead of going the way we were supposed to and walked right by Buckingham Palace.
Jen: (laughing) Yeah and Greg was kind of in front of me and he said, “Look, there's the palace.” I thought he said, “There's the path”, because we were going to have to follow this path through the park and he went, “No…it's the palace.” and I look over and I'm like, “Oh…yeah, there it is!”
Greg: We were there before the ceremony was supposed to start well over an hour, maybe even an hour and a half, and it was already two to three people deep all along the fencing, the gating of the palace. And the, uh, the island in the middle is—
Jen: —Victoria’s Memorial, I think.
Greg: Right. That was already several dozen people filling it up.
So I think when you read, and this was not during summer, and it was not like a special weekend thing. It was the least amount of people was when we went, probably. And it was already that full. Almost an hour and a half out. So if, if anybody decides to go do Changing of the Guard and you want to be up at the gate, I suggest you get there at least two hours early.
Jen: Yeah ‘cause we had kind of done our homework ‘cause we knew it was going to be crowded and neither one of us wanted to be in a mass of people. So we found a video on YouTube and they showed how early they had to get there and what it looked like once it got close to starting. And I wasn't really interested in being smushed against a gate, getting there that early.
And I knew if I wasn't in the first three rows, I probably wasn't going to be able to see because I'm short. So we decided to go another route and do the parade of the Changing of the Guard. So we went further down the street and that wound up being a much better decision for us.
Greg: Yeah. So, you know, look up how the Changing of the Guard works, but it starts with what they call the Horse Parade somewhere in Hyde Park leaving their barracks and marching a path. And then there is, like, the Old Guard and the New Guard each starting from their spots so if you go up to what they call Friary Court, there's the musical escort of whatever those troops are. And if you're standing on, you know, at the right intersection on the proper side, they literally walk so close you could touch them. And so that's what we experienced.
Jen: Mmmhmm.
Greg: When the first guard group came through, and if you wait less than 10 minutes, the other side, the Horse Parade comes through.
Jen: Yeah, from the opposite direction.
Greg: From the opposite direction. So, that's what we saw, which is very cool.
Jen: Yeah, we didn't really have any crowds next to us. We had, I mean, probably like one, two people deep, but we were right against the fence.
Greg: There's so much more space along that road.
Jen: Yeah. So then after that, after the horses went by, we followed them to their parade ground. We thought it was going to be a bigger pomp and circumstance kind of thing with them. So the horses were really just kind of standing at guard on the, on the parade grounds.
Greg: Yeah, it was still cool.
Jen: Yeah!
Greg: We went around that through a building to come out on another side of the street that we needed to be on to walk towards Westminster Abbey. We also walked a little past where we needed to be and saw Big Ben and the Eye of London.
Jen: Along that street is also 10 Downing Street. So that's where the prime minister of England lives. So we saw that.
Greg: Mmmhmm. We went a little bit further to not the same direction, but we kind of swung around and saw Trafalgar Square. I think it's called?
Jen: Yeah.
Greg: But Westminster Abbey, we got in a little bit earlier than our tickets because it was very sparse. There wasn't a whole lot of people, so they just didn't care what your time was, they let you go. And we walked right through security, got right in within a couple of minutes.
Jen: But the sparsity of the line outside that we went through was not what was happening inside. (laughs)
Greg: 100 percent correct. And, I will say, if anybody ever asks me, if you can't get to Westminster Abbey during a non-peak time, during a non-peak season, just look at it from outside and do it another day. Because inside, we were literally moving two steps every couple of minutes. You are jammed with people directly in front. And directly behind, no one is happy, everyone is uncomfortable, and you just keep trodding along.
Jen: Yeah, and sometimes you don't realize what you're looking at. I mean, you look around and you're like, “What's that? Oh, that's somebody's tomb.” Or, you know, “That's King James III.” It's really weird, but part of the reason I think it was kind of clogged up was they were also having a service inside—
Greg: Mmmhmm.
Jen: —while we were there. We could hear it over the speaker and I said, “Oh, they must just be playing some audio on these TVs,” and then we round the corner after about 10 minutes of waiting and, no, they were having an actual mass or service.
Greg: All of the stuff at the bottom is very popular because there's numerous tombs and memorials of some of the most famous people from English history, the two most popular, probably being Elizabeth and Mary Stuart.
Jen: Not the most recent Queen Elizabeth.
Greg: No, Elizabeth I. If you don't know about the drama related to Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, a.k.a. Mary Queen of Scots, look it up. Read about it. It's, it's an interesting story, and those two women are entombed side-by-side in Westminster Abbey.
Jen: Yeah, because these are fancy tombs.
Greg: Yes.
Jen: Um, with engravings and carvings and…
Greg: Yes, but in Westminster, there's also Richard II, not Richard III. Henrys…like II, III, IV.
Jen: (laughs) There's a lot of people. And I mean, they're just everywhere. Like I said, you look to your right up at the top, there's somebody. And you look on the ground somewhere over there and somebody else.
Greg: Mmmhmm. There was also Poets’ Corner.
Jen: Yeah, so Poets’ Corner was actually more of a memorial. People aren't necessarily in tomb there just for famous authors poets from Britain. Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the Canterbury Tales, is actually entombed there. So we saw his tomb and then just the memorial - Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters, all those kind of people…
Greg: Mmmhmm.
Jen: C.S. Lewis…
Greg: Yeah and in Poets’ Corner is the entrance up to the Diamond Jubilee Gallery, which is something that they started doing not long ago.
Jen: So the part of Westminster Abbey that the gallery was in was finished in time for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, which marked the 60th anniversary of her ascension to Queen.
Greg: Also because not everyone purchases that, it was far fewer people. There were some really great items like a book handwritten all calligraphy to of all of the land grants that the Abbey had received. They also had a charter that now they can look at and say this charter is actually a forgery or they weren't sure if maybe it was an attempt at a replacement for the original, but it was a document that was made well after the Abbey was founded, but the document itself was nearly a thousand years old…as a forgery—
Jen: Yeah.
Greg: —which made it really cool, even though it's not the original charter.
Jen: So I'm going to mention this. Greg's going to frown at me. But there's also the marriage license of Prince William—
Greg: (groans in background)
Jen: —and Princess Catherine.
Greg: I take solace in the fact no one gave a crap about that marriage license.
Jen: (laughing) Yeah, so there weren't that many people there. But right next to it, there was this huge portrait of the Queen, in celebration of her Diamond Jubilee, and I think that was probably one of the prettiest pieces of royal art that we saw.
Greg: Yeah. That painting, which at the time I think would have been poignant, I'm confident that when the artist created it, they knew it would outlive the Queen. And so, the Queen now being passed, you look at it, and it takes on a different meaning. And the impact is different because she's no longer around.
Jen: Yeah, I stood there, I'm not gonna lie, got a little tear in my eye.
Greg: A couple of the people who walked by did, actually.
Jen: Yeah.
Greg: Yeah, so, if you are important in the aristocracy of England, they designate a place that you can watch the coronation in Westminster Abbey.
Jen: But not important enough to get a seat at the bottom. You have to stand way up at the top. (laughs)
Greg: Yes.
Jen: They had numbers on the wall in the gallery and that's where people would go to watch the coronation. So your ticket number corresponded to that number and that's where you were allowed to watch. Some views were definitely better than others though.
Greg: Okay. Well, Westminster Abbey, I think is pretty well covered. Really just the next morning hopped on a train to Edinburgh from there.
Jen: Yeah.
Greg: So the next several updates may not necessarily seem chronologically accurate. Because we spent, like, three months in the UK—
Jen: Yeah.
Greg: —and we did numerous places around Scotland. We also went to Ireland. And, like I said, we did go back to London because we wanted to see a lot of those iconic London landmarks, or just outside of London - like Windsor Castle, Stonehenge…
Jen: …the Harry Potter studios. (laughs)
Greg: Yes. I like movie studios. So we're just going to kind of categorize them based on areas, maybe, and not necessarily when we went to which place.
Jen: Yeah. I mean, you guys don't know when we went to each place anyway, so… (laughing)
Greg: (laughs) Fair. So thanks for checking in!
Jen: And we'll see you at the next stop!
