London!

Okay, here it goes. A recap of my weekend, broken down by days, complete with pictures. Oh goodness, hang on tight!

Friday:
We pile into coaches as it's raining (should have seen it as a sign) and drive to London. We have a break at Mimms, the nicest truck stop in all of England, so says our President. It reminded me of the skymalls that Southwind occasionally stopped at. After eating my (free!) bagged lunch, I get back on the coach. Most of you know that in a moving vehicle, I can fall asleep at just about any time. So that's what I did. I slept for three hours. We arrived in the city and rode around a bit in the buses. We saw the major sights and drove through the major districts of the city. At about 2 pm, we go to check into our hotel.
This was our hotel room:
Pretty nice. The attached bathroom was actually quite large but had no ventilation, so the steam quickly built up. Anyways.

View from our hotel room:
Not so spectacular, but hey. Notice something? It's raining. Yeah, a trend of the weekend has developed! Ha.

We throw our bags down and hit the closest Underground stop. Being college students and wishing to do anything but homework, three friends and I had divided up what we wanted to do each day. We all buy Oyster cards (best deal ever!) and navigate the system to get us to Kensington Gardens.

Oh wow. It's beautiful. The gatehouse was designed by Christopher Wren, and there are lots of fountains and ponds with crazy birds. See below!

The beautiful gatehouse:
Swans:
Fountains:
A fountain that had creepy children head underneath it all covered in moss.
Well, we walked an awful lot through the Garden. We were on a mission: find Peter Pan. And after lots of walking, we found him!

The statue was put up by J.M. Barrie in the middle of the night as if it appeared there by magic! It was really neat. The base of the statue is incredibly detailed with all sorts of figures and images from the book (yeah, I'm a lit major!).

After some more walking, we found Prince Albert's memorial and Kensington Palace.
Now, I'm not exactly sure what Prince Albert did to deserve it, but his memorial is spectacular! And truthfully, Kensignton Palace is a little disappointing. It's not magnificant, but it sure is large.

I'm not kidding about the grandeur of Albert's memorial!

And the Palace, with a statue of William III in front, holding down the fort

(it wraps all along the left side of this picture too. I just couldn't get back far enough to get it all in one shot!)

The Palace was the home of Diana, and the gates are still covered in memorobilia. And I learned, upon returning home, that Saturday was the anniversary of her death. It was very moving. All sorts of things were there.
After the Palace, we hopped on the Underground and went to the British Museum. It is free!
The sheer amount of things they have in the museum is daunting, so I picked out what rooms I wanted to see and made a dash for them. We stayed until it closed at 8:30. Here are some of my favorite things:
The original decorations from the Parthenon. To give you some scope - that's my friend Kaitlin taking pictures, and this is half of a wall. They had TWO whole rooms like this, lined with carvings. In the middle were statues.
The Rosetta Stone. How cool is that?!? I have seen the ONE way we were able to understand hieroglyphics.

The fist bump. I mean, there is a huge arm (and only the arm!) in the middle of a room, making a fist. Who wouldn't give a fist back in return?

After they kicked us out of the Museum, we walked around trying to find something to eat. We were slightly picky for awhile. But after about thirty minutes of this, we were cold, extremely wet, and very hungry. We found a thai place that was fairly close to our hotel and sat down to eat. It was wonderful. We went back to the hotel as we were all very tired and footsore and crashed in preparation for Saturday.


Speaking of crashing...I am very tired, so I will put off updating you on Saturday and Sunday until tomorrow.
Until then!