A Rainy Day in Londontown

Real quick on non-blog related things:  I am SUPER RIDICULOUSLY PROUD of my Scholastic Bowl team!!!! We won regionals last night by the skin of our teeth {literally, we were relying on a team we had just beat that was seeded last in the regional to beat a team we had lost to in an earlier round just to stay in the running}! Then two tiebreaker matches, which my kiddos destroyed, and then finally our championship round against a team we'd never played who we remembered as being very good the previous year. And we won. And I wanted to cry, because this team is made up of kids who are super-involved and yet so incredibly dedicated and really played their hearts out...and now I sound sappy and cliche, but that's okay. Because they did something amazing and deserve to be proud of themselves.

Ahem...okay, so now, let's move on to London again. Our second day in London was, as the title suggests, rainy. Thank goodness we had bought umbrellas in Munich. Our first stop--our main destination, really--was the Tower of London. 

I love the Tower of London. There's so much history there! I mean, the Tower was established in 1066 by William the Conquerer, and some of the oldest parts of the walls date back to the Romans! It has had so many uses, too:  a prison, a military training ground, a zoo! And don't forget that the crown jewels are there, too. Even though it was raining, there was plenty to do indoors. We went through the exhibit about the menagerie and the different types of animals kept there. We got to look at all kinds of armor, for men and horses. A neat interactive spot showed you just how difficult it was to shoot a longbow and what an exact science it actually was--they make it look so easy in the movies!

Obviously, we went to see the crown jewels, which are, in a word, resplendent. The sheer amount of things kept there is astonishing, too. Dishes and jewelry and scepters and swords. Insane! 

Really the most mind-boggling thing about the Tower of London is its age. 1066--five hundred years before the settlement of St. Augustine, six hundred years before Jamestown and Santa Fe. Obviously, the Native settlements are much older, but the early Americans were very nomadic, always moving around. To be continuously in one spot for 950 years...that's impressive. One can't go there and not feel very small and rather insignificant in the whole scheme of things. 

After visiting the gift shop {of course} and eating at a Starbucks nearby, we went on a tour of the "big sights":  Big Ben {hee hee}, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, Buckingham Palace. Necessary stops, of course. 

Then we ventured via the Underground to Piccadilly Circus so we could visit yet another impressive department store:  Fortnum & Mason. 

The Fortnum & Mason pictures are from my first trip to London, five years ago.

Oh glory. The sheer fanciness of this place...my humble words will never do it justice. I mean, the Queen shops here! The Queen! The shop is like a dream come true if you are looking for tea or stationary or jam or giant carafes of perfume. There is a tea room on the top floor, but it was very busy, so we settled {settled, ha!} for a scoop in their ice cream parlor. And I finally got to have a real tea. There's nothing like it in the world.

Thus ended our second day in London. Only one more to go, which is sad for me. There is a montage in the movie Austenland of places in London serenaded by the chorus of this song. I can't find the footage from the movie, but just the song will work. I think it pretty much sums up my feelings about London.

~Stay Gold!