Cheese n' Wine

Hello again, peeps. This is Tom from the expensive internet in our hostel in London. Sorry about the crappy little post last night; Joel and I were in a terrifying 3rd world internet cafe, and were a little more concerned with not getting knifed than blogging. There was a sign out front that said 'no foods or drinks are to in the premises.' That about sums it up...

It's our last night! We have to get up ridiculously early tomorrow morning and get on a train from Charing Cross Station to Dover (cue Eric Johnson), and then we're taking a Ferry across the Channel to Calais. Then we'll be taking a Eurail train from Calais to Chartres, were we will of course be seeing one of the oldest and most beautiful Gothic Cathedrals in the world, and then going back to Paris around 7pm and sleeping there.

On a little aside, Joel and I had our first non-bread/baguette-based meal for the first time in quite a while today. We went to a little hole-in-the-wall called 'The Stockpot,' and had pasta. It was delicious.

So we went back to Westminster Abbey today, and manned up and paid the 12 quid we didn't have to pay when we went the first time and took Communion. It was incredibly worth it. They have the chair every king/queen gets crowned in (the coronation chair, surprisingly). We saw the tombs of Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Oliver Cromwell (who was posthumously dug up, hanged, and decapitated before being put in his final resting place (don't piss off a Brit...)), Henry VII, Edward the Longshanks (who was 6'2"! also the bad guy in Braveheart), Edward the confessor, and many more famous monarchs. (On a separate note, our audio tour was narrated by Jeremy Irons, which was incredible. Kept thinking Scar, or the bad guy from Die Hard III, was vividly describing the 'large gilded bronze furnace' in front of me.)

What was way cooler (to me, at least) than the monarchs and royalty buried there was around in the corner, in the aptly named Poet's Corner. Geoffrey Chaucer has a large monument (I was mentally reciting the first lines of The Canterbury Tales in my head, cuz i'm a huge nerd), Charles Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rudyard Kipling, Laurence Olivier, Handel, Charlotte/Emily Bronte, and many, many more. Shakespeare has a huge monument, though is body is in his hometown, Stratford (still awesome). It's almost over the top how much Westminster Abbey has. They also have Charles Lyell, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Michael Faraday all buried within 10 feet of each other. I'm sure I won't have to go into further detail about that, as Joel will probably be talking about Darwin for his whole post :).

Joel and I walked down the southern bank of the Thames for a while on a cool little path they had, and walked halfway down London Bridge (not to be confused with Tower Bridge, which is surprisingly way cooler). We went to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, which was semi-disappointing. It's been extremely modernized and capitalized, which annoyed me. They also didn't have any shows, which was extremely disappointing. Next month Jude Law is playing Hamlet :(.

We also went back to Trafalgar again today (our like 3rd time there, still sweet), and went to the National Gallery. They have a surprisingly extensive and, at times, quite elite collection. Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' is there, Monet's 'Water Lilies' and 'Bathers at La Grenouillère,' a bunch of Manet, Renoir, and Cezanne, Rembrandt's most famous self portrait, Botticelli's famous 'Venus and Mars' (SUPER awesome), and da Vinci's 'Virgin and Child.' Of course, we hadn't heard of 90% of the paintings (not out of their lack of notoriety, but out of our philistinism), but were still extremely pleasantly surprised. An english painter named John Constable especially caught our eye. It actually kind of blew Joel and I away, despite how little we may know about art. Hopefully the Louvre will continue this trend...!

Well, mesdames et messieurs, the old internet's about to explode again. Stupid timed, not-free, un-American internet. Miss you all, and my country, a lot. Hope the weather is pleasant for you guys (it's been surprisingly sunny here, all three days!), and glad the Brewers finally won one today.


-TOm