London, Part One

I'll come right out and say it: London was my favorite place I visited all semester. I even liked it better than Paris (blasphemy, I know!). London was both charming and fabulously cosmopolitan, and I fell utterly in love with it. The only thing I didn't like was having to pay for everything in British pounds The exchange rate is currently about 1.6-1.7 dollars to a pound, so everything is almost twice as expensive. A single ride on The Tube cost about 4.5 pounds, which is more than $7! Fortunately I stayed with Zoelle, a very good friend of mine from GW, who was studying abroad at University College London (seeing her also probably contributed to why I liked London so much!).

I took the Eurostar train from Paris to London on a Saturday morning, arriving in London just before 10am local time (London is one hour behind Paris). That day I hit most of the big attractions in London, starting with the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. On our way their, I spotted this sign, and, of course, had to take a picture of it:

I also saw Cleveland Avenue a bit later.

The weather had been rainy and remained gray most of the day, but it was a bit warm for the time of year, which was lovely. Seeing the guards in their ridiculous bearskin hats marching up and down the street was a nice little taste of English pomp and circumstance, even if we couldn't get anywhere near close to the gates to see the actual changing of the guard itself. 

Although I must say, it was a bit disappointing after having been in the likes of Versailles and St. Peter's.

About ten minutes' walk from Buckingham Palace is a convenient cluster of things I wanted to see, starting with the British Parliament building and Big Ben (which is actually not the name of the tower, but the name of the bell inside of it):

Across the street from Parliament is Westminster Abbey:

English monarchs have been crowned here since 1066, although the abbey itself was first founded on this spot sometime around 600AD. At least 16 royal weddings have taken place here, although there was quite a large gap in between the sixth (1382) and the seventh (1919). The most recent was, of course, Will and Kate. There are also a number of tombs inside, including that of Mary Tudor, Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I, Edward the Confessor, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Laurence Olivier. I was particularly moved by Isaac Newton's tomb.

The whole abbey was spectacular. I spent about an hour inside and could've easily spent two. The amount of history that saturates the whole structure with all of the people buried there and and all of the events that have taken place there is just incredible. Also, Jeremy Irons narrates the English audioguide, which just made everything perfect. Alas, no pictures allowed, although I did get one out near the cloisters of the abbey:

Britain's oldest door.

A pink taxi out in front of the abbey!

Around this time Zoelle had to head back to the university for a rehearsal with her singing group, so I wandered around by myself for a bit. I got a tiny bit lost on the streets behind the abbey, and LOOK WHAT I FOUND:

AND GUESS WHAT STREET IT'S ON:

This day just kept getting better and better.

Finally I wandered back around past the Houses of Parliament:

Cool.

And walked through this adorable little park right along the Thames.

I headed past Big Ben to the bridge next to Parliament, which has a spectacular view of the London Eye:

I then backtracked to Whitehall, the street that runs by Parliament up to Trafalgar Square. Right off of Whitehall near Trafalgar Square is Downing Street (the Prime Minister lives at number 10), the entrance to which looks like this:

I spent a few hours then at the nearby Churchill War Rooms and Museum. These are the actual underground war rooms and bunkers where Churchill and his colleagues and staff secretly plotted British military strategy during World War II. They were sealed after the war for some time, and weren't reopened for several decades. Everything down there is pretty much as they left it at the end of the war. Part of the space has been converted fairly recently into a museum covering Churchill's life, which, it turns out, was extraordinary. They have some incredible stuff in there. Especially powerful was a screen showing Churchill's funeral procession, with a glass case right next to it with the actual flag that covered his casket in that same video. The history major in me was heaven. 

After nerding out by myself for a few hours I met up with Zoelle once more just outside the National Gallery, which sits right on Trafalgar Square. We didn't have a whole lot of time to wander around the museum, but I did spot a handful of paintings that I'd studied in my art history class back in Paris, which was pretty neat.

Zoelle and I then retraced my steps from earlier that afternoon, then headed across the Thames to the London Eye.

The line for the Eye can be notoriously long--but we waited about ten minutes to buy our tickets, were subjected to the obligatory "4D" preshow film about the Eye, and then literally walked onto our little pod. 

Surprisingly, even though the Eye takes you 443 feet in the air (almost exactly as high as St. Peter's dome), I never felt fear at the height. I think it was because you're encapsulated in a transparent pod the whole time, so I never really felt exposed, and was thus never afraid of falling. Besides, I was pretty distracted by the view. London is GORGEOUS at night.

Rome, Part Four

On our last day in Rome, Sara and I spent the morning and early afternoon at the Vatican. We saw St. Peter's and even climbed all the way to the top of the dome, but did not, unfortunately, have time to go into the Vatican Museum and see the Sistine Chapel as the line to get in was several hours long.

Waiting in line for the basilica...

The facade of the church itself. It's so huge and so crammed in with the rest of the museum and papal palaces and other buildings you can't even see how huge it is until you get inside.

Looking out over St. Peter's Square from the front steps of the basilica.

St. Peter's is the largest church in the world. The very middle of the nave is actually roped off to protect that section of floor, which has a number of plaques embedded in it that say where other churches would end of they were laid out inside St. Peter's. From the entrance to the altar it's a walk about the length of two football fields. But the odd thing is that while walking inside is completely overwhelming, I didn't understand fully how BIG St. Peter's really was until I started walking up the nave, and had to walk, and walk, and WALK to get down near the altar (which was roped off for some special event that day so we couldn't get right up next to it, unfortunately. Just about every square inch of the inside is decorated to the point of gross opulence:

This is the altar, which is located directly under the dome of the church. The giant bronze structure is not part of the altar itself, but is a baldacchino canopy over it done by Bernini (as was just about every other fountain and sculpture in Rome...). It is SEVEN STORIES TALL, but under the dome, which is about 430 feet high, it looks quite small. 

The coffered barrel vault over the nave.

This was as close as I could get to the altar.

You can't really see it, but there's a dove in the middle of that circle of light (representing the Holy Spirit).

The dome. The Latin inscription around the base reads "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church...I will give you the keys to the kindgom of Heaven."

A statue of St. Peter near the altar. One of his feet has been mostly worn away due to centuries of pilgrims kissing it (which means, of course, that you couldn't pay me enough to put my mouth near it).

Two of the chapels along the side of the nave. There are two statues in between each of the arches like these here. They were designed to look from below as if they are the same size, so the one on the top is several feet taller than the one closer to the bottom.

As much of the nave as will fit in my camera's lens area.

One of two vessels of holy water near the entrance. Everything is huge in St. Peter's, even these fellows, who are each over six feet tall.

This purple spot on the floor at the beginning of the nave marks the spot where Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day, 800AD (even thought the basilica that exists today did not exist back in that time).

Michelangelo's Pieta. One of his many Pietas, actually. A statue or a painting is called a Pieta when it depicts Mary holding and grieving for her son after he has been taken down from the cross. This Mary is beautiful and appears to be about the same age or even a bit younger than Jesus. It resides in the first chapel off to the right in the basilica. In 1972 a deranged man named Lazlo Toth walked into the basilica and took a hammer to the sculpture, which is why today is rests behind bulletproof glass. It's also the only sculpture that Michelangelo ever signed (on the sash across Mary's chest).

The Holy Door, which has been around since 1950 and is only opened on Jubilee Years.

We then left the basilica itself and waited about an hour in line to take an elevator up to the roof of the church:

And then entered the dome, where you can climb all the way up to the top.

This is not for the faint of heart. Or those with exceptionally wide waistbands. I'm in darn good shape and even I was winded at times. There's lots of ramps and stairs and all of it is incredibly narrow. The freaky part though is when you go up high enough to start hitting the curve of the dome, and the passageway you're in starts to do this:

This is what it looks like when I'm holding my camera straight. This is actually very difficult to walk through; it really messes with your head. Not to mention the fact that you know that once you get up into the curve of the dome there's only the material of the dome itself underneath you and then nothing but air for about 400 feet. Which is quite freaky.

Its no secret that I don't like heights (see: the incident where I couldn't make it to the top of the Eiffel Tower), and for the first few minutes we were up there I couldn't even go to the edge of the railing. That's all there is, by the way: a railing that comes up to maybe the middle of my torso. Not the most secure place, especially as crowded as it was up there, but eventually I got used to it enough to get up to the edge and get some good pictures:

Can you make out the line of people that stretches across the top half of the curve of St. Peter's Square? That's the line we waited in to get into the basilica. It follows the curve down to the left where you go through a metal detector before being able to walk up to the church.

There is a law in Rome that states that no building can be built higher than St. Peter's, so Rome has no modern skyline.

The Vatican Museum and the Papal Apartments. The rectangular building in the bottom right corner is the Sistine Chapel.

A zoomed-in shot of the main area Sara and I were in the day before this. The big white building that sticks up on the left is the museum with the monument to Victor Emmanuel II, and the area with the trees in the back is the Forum, Palatine Hill, and the area surrounding the Colosseum.

Part of the Vatican Gardens behind St. Peter's. They're not open to the public and you can only tour them if you book it in advance.