Our professors were a little late, so for about a half hour, we wandered the area around the Tower, took about a million pictures, and seriously considered buying copious amounts of hot chocolate.
Our professors finally arrived, and in we went to the Tower of London, one of the most iconic locations in the city.
I especially loved the wonderfully life-like steel mesh statues of animals that were scattered all over the Tower. Apparently, many exotic animals were once kept in the Tower, including lions, snakes, baboons, and a polar bear that was tied to a rope and allowed to fish in the Thames!
Of course, the Tower is a fortress and from medieval times was a royal stronghold. Rachel made friends with this lovely fellow:
Her fiance informed me today that we need to be careful to not get her interested in these guys, even if they are carrying battle axes. He doesn't need that competition I guess.
Of course, the Tower is infamous for the many executions and other deaths that occurred there.
This glass pillow is a memorial to those beheaded at the Tower.
The Torture Chamber was claustrophobicly small and creepy, especially since they had a speaker that played ominous creaking sounds as you walked around. This is the famous replica of the rack. Not a pleasant description.
But back to something more pleasant than people being tortured or killed for ghastly reasons.
I loved these buildings. There was just something so charming about the dark brick, white wood, and blue door contrast.
We took a picture with a beefeater, one of the guards at the Tower.
Unfortunately, no one I was with understood my Doctor Who reference to the batteries in the ravens needing to be checked. Disappointing.
We of course saw the Crown Jewels, which were stunning, but you couldn't take pictures inside. Which meant I didn't get a Moriarty "honey-you-should-see-me-in-a-crown"-moment picture. Sorry, fellow Sherlock fans. It would have been awesome.
We ended our Tower tour by looking through the White Tower, the most recognizable portion of the Tower.
We were all getting tired and hungry by this point, and on the very top floor of the exhibit was this fun dragon, crafted out of pieces shaped from everything that has been stored in the tower, including armor, paperwork, muskets, pistols, gunpowder, and gold.
A plaque on the dragon read "My name is Keeper," so obviously I turned to Rachel to point out this interesting and fun fact and said "Look, his name is Keeper." Rach replied by loudly saying "Hi Keeper!" to the dragon, then turning to ask me "does it talk? Is that why we need to know its name?" Needless to say, I was doubled over in laughter. As I said, we were all getting a little loopy by this point.
After stopping for lunch and some hot chocolate (finally, my hands were freezing), we headed out on our first walk, exploring the area of the city that the old Londinium wall used to stand in Roman times. After some slight confusion and a few instances of getting lost, we made our way through London's nooks and crannies. What fascinated me the most was how there were so many layers of history in each section. You would turn a corner and see a church built in medieval times, or part of the Roman wall that was still standing, but turn around and you see glass plated skyscrapers made this century.
We also stopped at Spitalfield Market during our walk; the square was marked by this goat statue. The market itself was so cool, and we definitely spent some time wandering among the stalls, looking at all the unusual merchandise.
We finally made our exhausted way back to our flats (by that time, someone figured we had been walking around for about seven hours straight). However, after a few hours of rest, we decided to go check out Picadilly Circus and some of the theatres (more on that at a later time). While out, we stopped by Waterstones, the bookshop, and what is my favorite part of the day: I finally started to collect a set of the Harry Potter books with the original British children's covers, just as they were first printed.
The shop only had the third, forth, and sixth books with these covers in paperback, but it just gives me an excuse to visit another bookshop to get the other four!
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