Long Live the Queen

Our second day in London consisted of total culture immersion... And I loved it. We began with traditional mushroom and baked beans breakfast before heading to Buckingham Palace to take touristy pictures at the gates and watch the palace gaurds march around the grounds. The Queen was not available for tea, unfortunately.

Next we visited the Victoria and Albert Art Museum. A little bit of background on me - I used to be an art fanatic. As a child I intended to become an artist and, according to art instructors and local schools of the arts, I had a lot of talent. Eventually life changed and art school went away, but I still loved admiring it. I've been to a few art museums and always thoroughly enjoy them. But this was immensely more impressive than any other collection I've ever seen. The sculptures - some dating back to pre-Christ eras - were jaw-droppingly stunning.

The museum boasts hundreds of jewels, including Queen Victoria's crown jewels, and ceramic works from every century. We would have stayed for hours but for the bane of every old English building: lack of air conditioning systems. It was steamy in the 5-floor, stone-wall, marble-floor building.

After this, we visited the Natural History Museum and basked in the glory of a truly, epicly historic site: the setting for Night at the Museum 3. Here, too, heat stroke nearly claimed our young lives. We proceeded to lunch in a little restaurant square where we ate crêpes and fresh breads and salads.

After grabbing coffee at Caffe Nero, we walked down streets lined with cafes and flower shops before boarding another bus that gave us a tour of some other areas of the city we had not seen. As the air cooled and the city quieted down for the evening, we began a nightime bus tour that took us into the modern City of London. This tour showed us the Bank of England, Waterloo Station, the location where the Great Fire of London began, and various other interesting sites. As the night went on, the sun went down and the city lit up. Churches from 600 A.D. stood alongside office buildings with state-of-the-art technology, which is so foreign but so beautiful to me.

A brief walk through the beautifully-lit city along the Thames ended with sore feet (I wore heels...all day) and hundreds of unreal photographs. I hope you enjoy the latter as much as I regretted the former.

From: The Expeditioner