Our first weekend in London was kind of awesome. First, we went down to an open-air market that I think was called the Duke of York market, I could be wrong though. It was really nice, they had some reasonably priced vegetables and fruit along with bread, tea, dried fruit and nuts, sausage, and pie stands. Amanda, James, Ryan and I all got pies to heat up for lunch which were extremely tasty. They also got some sausage for dinner while I got a bunch of veggies to make my awesome soup, which I should really name because it is awesome. When we got back, pies were heated up and eaten with great enthusiasm and then we started out on our great Saturday adventure, a journey to the London Eye and the Tower of London. We decided to try out the buses and so, hoped on one near our residence hall and rode it for a while, a good long while. We rode to the Westminster, which happened to be near the Eye. Tired of riding the bus, we walked over to the Eye and looked in to the building where they sold the tickets and saw before us, an extremely long line. We mulled it over and decided that we should probably put off the number one tourist destination until the middle of the week. There was much head nodding and we set off for the Waterloo station, not wanting to brave the bus anymore. Our next stop was the Tower of London. We bought tickets one by one, James bought a normal ticket, Ryan and Amanda showed him up by getting a student discount but I, not having my student ID with me, was forced to buy a normal priced ticket as well. Right before we went in, we watched a catapult-like-thing-that-probably-wasn’t-a-catapult demonstration where they were launching a water balloon. We went on through the main gate and were met with the formation of a tour, which we joined. The tours there are led by the Yeoman Warders who, we found out, must rise to the rank of lieutenant sergeant after twenty-two years of spotless military service in any branch of the military (except for the navy because of their practice of kidnapping some unsavory fellows from bars) before they apply for the limited job openings. He also said though that once you work there, the warders and their families get to live in the Tower complex, they even have their own pub. The tour was all kinds of fantastic and our tour guide was quite fond of bad puns. After our tour, we walked over to the royal jewels, which had a fuzzy-headed guard outside of it. There were so many maces owned by William and Mary! Something like half of the maces at least. When we got to the really important bits, you had to enter into this humongous vault, I would have taken a picture had photography been allowed. It wasn’t that immensely interesting but now I can say I’ve done it. After that, we walked a little before deciding we wanted to go into the White Tower and proceeded to go in a complete circle looking for the entrance but we did get to see the Raven houses. The White Tower is basically a weapons and armaments museum, there were suits of amour belonging to the different kings and a Norman bathroom. On one of the top floors there was this interactive section, mainly for kids but there were a lot of adults there too. It was here, at two different stations, that I was cut in front of by two different children, one more blatant than the other. There was one station where you could pull the string of a bow and try to pull it far enough to “hit” a target. I was standing in line, at the ADULT-SIZED bow, about to step up when this, I’m going to guess ten or twelve-year old girl ran up in front of me (I was reaching out to grip the bow string, and started pulling it. I just stood there, kind of shocked and confused, looked around and saw her mother just standing there, watching her. This happened again, same girl, to I think Ryan, at another station. We decided after the White Tower that it was time to leave even though we hadn’t seen everything but it was still incredible and totally worth the price.

Sunday we got up for a brunch of Dim Sum in London’s Chinatown with our Professor. We split up into two tables however, the first table ended up being at the beginning of the carts’ route while we at the second table was at the end. It really good as always. I used my previous dim sum experience to start things off with some sesame balls and also got my meat-eating table mates some of the taro root things. I got, among other things, some vegetables wrapped in noodles, sooooo good, I kept wanting some during the day. They also had this desert that I think was alternating layers of jell-o and agar agar in different flavors. You should try that mom. After that we were kind of left to wander away on our own. We chose to try going to the National Gallery but ended up going into the National Portrait Gallery instead, apparently the National Gallery is only a door over. They had a great array of different portraits from all sorts of different times periods. The best part was definitely finding a portrait of Catherine Douglas, Duchess of Queensberry who bears quite the resemblance to Alice, a girl in our seminar. It’s definitely smaller than the National Gallery in Washington but it was nice and I played “Name that Tudor” in the Tudor gallery.