London, Day 3

On Day 3 Yang had other things to do, so I thought I'd give London another visit. This time I was on my own in UK, and it was really cool to be able to move in all three directions without having to worry about friend's wishes. I think I walked through every major neighborhood in teh city center on that day. I woke up early on that (maybe too early) because I wanted to see the historic Changing of the Guard at the Buckingham Palace which started at around or right after 11am. Basically I got on the train in Cambridge extra early -- at around 8am, but there was some development on the railroad and the train ride that should have taken me 50 minutes turned out to be 2 hours long. However, I got to experience the full rush hour life on the train. I enjoy watching people, and this time it was no exception. I tried to find what makes Britons different from Americans. Most people were reading newspapers, and very few were talking on teh cell phones. In the US it is more likely to find people constantly talking on the phone. Other than that I didn't see much of a difference. I also happened to notice that many of the passengers were patient, whereas in teh U.S. I'd expect them to be highly impatient.
The train that I took was from Cambridge to King's Cross Station in London. There are two lines connecting Cmabridge to London, and Yang told me that King's Cross is a better one because there are so many metro (subway) lines at that station

I was not late for the Changing of the Guard, and there were many people waiting at the front of Buckingham Palace. I could find a good spot on teh steps of the Victoria fountain in front of the palace, but it was kind of far.
I did not find the changing of the guard any more intersting than tourigng the city. I think this event is overrated. Too many people, and the guards in red uniform just walk past you with drums and trumpets blaring. they have nice fur hats though that extend about 80cm above their heads. After the ceremony ended, I happened to pass by another lcoation where I saw the same guards joking with each other, taking hats off, sort of being informal and boarding the white busses. It felt funny because I saw them being highly formal at the Changing of the Guard.
One fun fact about the Queen's residence -- whenever she is at the palace, the Royal Standard flag hovers above that residence. If she is not home, then the Union Jack (UK official flag) is raised.

My camera ran out of power during the changing of the guard, so i was really desperate to find replacement batteries. this was the only time I was uncomfortable during the day. I had extra batteries, but i thought I had replenished tem, but it turned out that they lasted all day.

My next stop was Westminster Abbey. This time the crowds were not that bad and I was able to use my MIT ID to get a student discount. They do know what MIT is in UK!!! That is awesome! So, make sure you take advantage of student discounts! When i was standing in the line (it moved pretty fast), I came across two girls from the U.S. I knew they were from America because 1) one of them wore the Cal sweatshirt (Cal in cursive means UC Berkeley), and 2) they were talking pretty loud. Since I like watching people, I am going to talk a little about what makes Americans so easy to recognize. Americans are typically impatient, and they are also loud most of the time. Whereas many English people and Britons respect privacy and quiet, Americans talk loud whenever, in other words, they are usually inconsiderate about others around them. I saw some kids just running through the Abbey shouting, and i knew that they were Americans because their parents were not that strict about their behavior, and because they did not seem to care much about respecting the silence. There were way too many American tourists. I like to think that more than 50% or even 75% of tourists in UK come from the United States. perhaps because UK is an english-speaking country, and also it is the closest country in Europe to the U.S. in terms of distance.

Westminster Abbey is a place where Kings have been buried. Nearly every monarch is buried there. Queen Elizabeth I and her half-sister Queen Mary I were buried next to each other in one of the tombs. this is a little strange considering the fact that Elizabeth and Mary exhibited dislike of each other, and the fact that Mary was Roman Catholic and Elizabeth -- Protestant. Mary did rule before Elizabeth and she converted English religion to Roman Catholicism, but Elizabeth I would later reverse her policies. I also saw the throne that is used every time England crowned a new King or Queen. The coronation has happened in Westminster Abbey since 1066. This is a very long time, and it is great to be in the place with so much history.
Besides the members of teh royal family who were buried in different tombs and transcrepts there were scores of famous people also buried in the Abbey. those include Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Dickens, Maxwell, Darwin, Kipling, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Tombstones were everywhere adorning the floor of the Abbey. I walked on the tombstone of King Henry VIII, but he was actualy buried at Windsor Castle, not in Westminster Abbey. There were many sculptures and statues commemorating different aristocrats and famous poets and scientists. I'd say definitely visit Westminster Abbey! Despite its crowds, its a place worth to visit!
Taking pictures is disallowed inside the Abbey, but I was able to find a place where pictures were allowed, so I took some beautiful photos of the Abbey's courtyard with the Abbey's spires in the background. See my photos (look on page 2, bc page 1 is cluttered with too many pics of the Changing of the Guard)

After the abbey I decided to tour London's streets, so I headed down Whitehall, past Downing Street, trafalgar Square, and then down the Strand. Since I wanted to see most of the city in one day, I took advantage of my Day's travelcard. It allowed me to ride the train from Cambridge to London and back, as well as complete access to the London's Tube system and bus network. It is a pretty sweet deal. basically you can hop onto any of the double-decker busses and ride them for as long as you want. The Day Travelcard is valid for the whole day, which is pretty cool. Also, one strange thing I noticed -- The round trip ticket from Cambridge to London's King's Cross station is priced the same as one-way trip. I had expected the price to be double of the one-way ticket. At first I thought that there was a mistake... but Yang later told me that the pricing of British transportation system is very weird, and I am OK with that as long as its not too expensive. The day travelcard is like 4.80 pounds, whereas a single ride on the Tube is like 1.30 pounds. Not a bad deal, right? ANd it allows you a lot of freedom in moving around.

So I suddenly got this desire to see the Eurostar high-speed TGV train that connects Paris and Brussels with London via English Channel. Had I had more time, I'd definitely taken that train to Paris and toured the French capital and cultural capital of the world in one day. It would be so highly convenient in the way that I would not have needed to travel from Paris International airport which is outside the city to the center of Paris. The rail is a better choice because it conencts center of London with center of Paris (Waterloo - Gare du Nord). However, I didnt have time or money to do that, so i just went to Waterloo to check the trains out. I took a double-decker bus from The Strand across Thames to the Waterloo Station. It is the only International train terminal in london, and the terminal to paris is pretty heavily secured -- the trains are inside the glass tube, so the closest I could get to Eurostar train was from the outside and I took the picture through the glass wall (not a great picture, but its good enough for me).

Having seen enough of Waterloo, I took the double-decker bus back to The city and The Strand to where I started. Strand became the Fleet Street -- a name famous for law offices and news agencies. Reuters is based there, and so is BBC headquarters (though the later is on Cannon street, closer to the City of London). Let me talk more about what London as a whole is like. basically, London and the City of London are two different places. London includes the City of London and otehr neighborhoods such as City of Westminster. The City of Westminster is where royal family used to (and still does) live, and where the Prime Minister lives and works, and where the Parliament meets (in the Westminster Palace, which houses Houses of Parliament, right beside the Big Ben). The City of London is the city's historical and financial core. It is known as the British Wall Street and it has stock exchange, The Bank of England, various other Exchanges, and many banks, financial and insurance firms are based there. It has many of the modern buildings and scyscrapers. Two skyscrapers are worth checking out -- one is the Swiss Re building which is basically a rounded cone, sort of looks like a glass rocket (designed by Norman Foster). The other is the headquarters of Lloyd's, which is one of the largest insurance firms in England. The building itself looks like the guts of a factory -- it is basically made out of metal pipes that are visible in both exterior and interior.
If you walk down The Strand to Fleet Street, if you'll pass by a dragon statue in the middle of the street you'll know that you stepped through the boundary between City of Westminster and City of London. There is also a small Church standing right in the middle of teh Street (St. Mary-le-Strand). Cars move around on both sides of the church, and it's as small as the island in the middle of Times Square in NYC. The Strand is a really pretty street. Somewhere either on Strand or on the Fleet Street there is a Chamber of the Courts, which is sort of like British version of The Supreme Court. that's why there are so many law offices around it, and there is also a place called "The Inns of the Court". The Inns of the court is tucked beside the row of buildings lining up the Fleet Street. There is no formal entrance or a sign to it -- you just have to know where to go. The Inns of Courts is an area hidden from the Fleet Street, and overlooking the thames River. It is a collection of inns where Barristers (English lawyers) work, and where law students live and work and study. I read in the guide that every law student in the country has to live and work at the Inns of Court at some point during his education before he can officially become a barrister. Pretty cool? I had no idea what the inns looked like, so i just wandered around aimlessly in the crevices between buildings and came across a nice rounded church. The church was completely surrounded by other buildings, and it was not tall enough, so other buildings sort of overshadowed it. It's a really cool thing -- the church packed into teh dense network of buildings. The buildings are really pretty too, they look what a regular inn would look like (sort of like old dorms at Harvard). When I enetred the inns of the court, I felt like it was really quiet as compared to very noisy Fleet Street. I felt at peace. It's a nice getaway from the loud City.

Walking down the Fleet Street you would get to St. Paul Cathedral. It is the largest cathedral in London and was built by Sir Christopher Wren who had built so many buildings in London (and the main Library in Trinity College, Cambridge). The tour guide claims that it took Wren nearly 25 years to build St. Paul's Cathedral. The building itself is in the Baroque style and it's dome is visible from far away. Though the church itself is not on the river, it is visible from nearly everywhere on the South bank of Thames and from every Bridge from Westminster to beyond the City of London. It looks like many of the Capitol buildings in the U.S. cities. I had timed my visit to St. Paul's so that I'd bypass the admission fee (like 5 GBP, or $10, thats pretty steep). If you enter the cathedral after 5PM, you can tour it free of charge, and if you are religious enough, you can actually take a service inside.

I still had plenty of time to see the rest of London, so I went to the river and hung around on the Millennium bridge. (The bridge is rumored to have been swaying once it opened on the first day due to its resonance matching the resonance of teh wind, so it had to be stabilized). It is a pedestrian bridge conecting St. Paul's Cathedral square to Tate Modern museum (which is essentially an old rectangular brown warehouse-type building that once housed the main power plant of London. From there I could see the Tower of London far away, and I felt like I wanted to walk to it. The next Bridge on my trip toward the Tower of London is London bridge which basically separates the modern part of the City from the older neighborhood. This is where I walked to the river and down to the pedestrian walkway. The rest of the time I walked along the North bank of Thames all the way to the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. It's a very nice walk, sort of like walk in NYC along Hudson coast. You have buildings soaring to teh left of you (really close) and Thames on the right. From the Tower of Londom I got on Tower Bridge (its the one that has two towers and a suspension bridge between them (the bridge can open up for tall ships)). Once I got to the other side of Thames, I just walked all the way to Westminster Bridge along the South bank of Thames. The sun was setting down, so it was a nice view on the City of London backdrop. You could see St Paul's Cathedral and the City's skyscrapers. Oh and I did pass by The SHakespeare's Globe. It's nothing special, just a round white about 2-3 story structure that has wooden truss. It's not even the real Globe -- teh Real Globe burned down a while ago, and was replaced by teh current one (on a slightly different location, and closer to the riverfront). I had a not-so-expensive dinner under Waterloo Bridge (there is a theatre district, soft of like city Opera and Ballet right by the Bridge). Since I was there in the evening, the place was quite busy and a lot of people were outside either chilling or having dinner. After I finished the dinner I visited one of the theatres to use a bathroom. The lobby was packed. When I got out of bathroom 5 minutes later, the lobby was deserted. There were not many people outside either. Everyone just evaporated into the thin space.
The sun was setting down when I decided to try the London Eye -- the Millennium Eye that is supposedly the highest and largest observation wheel in the world. I have known that the lines were really long -- when Yang and I were in London on the day of my arrival to UK, the line was really long and slow moving. This time there was absolutely NO line. This is why I decided to hop on board. Also the timing could not have been more perfect -- the sun setting down at 9PM. It was B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L!!! It was quite expensive, and I would have benefitted from bringing a friend to take pictures of me, but it was worth it. There were about 6 people in my cabin -- the cabin supposedly can hold 15 or more people. The whole trip around took about half an hour. The wheel rotates really slow, so you don't feel like you are moving at all. The cabin is basically a glass sphere, so you can look in all directions. I could see all the landmarks and places I've been to that day and earlier. You can see pretty far from atop of the wheel. I definitely recommend doing the same thing I did -- hopping on the Eye on some weekday evening. Weekends could be a different story. The London Eye is HUGE! London Eye is right on teh other side of Thames River as the Westminster Palace, so it was nice seeing Big Ben and roofs of the palace from above. Oh, one fun fact about Houses of parliament -- if there is a flag above the Palace, then the house of Commons is in session. I heard that the Prime Minister gives a speech to teh House of Commons every Wednesday, so I'd imagine this is when the visitors would most like to go inside. Even if the PM is not inside, the lines are pretty slow-moving and long. When I tried to get in, they told me to wait for 2 hours. I shrugged my shoulders and did not stay because there are far more exciting places in London worth visiting rather than waitin in the line for some boring debate.

I feel like I walked the entire city in 2 days (there's nothing cool behind the Tower Bridge, and behind Westminster (Houses of Parliament). All the landmarks and cool buildings are in between.

Photos Part I | Part II