Author: matt

We’re now in Egypt, but I’m still catching up on London, so hopefully I haven’t forgotten too much in the whirlwind of the last couple of days. On our second day we took one of the tour buses around London. It’s a great way to see the city if you can get over being those people on top of the bus gawking at everything (which I guess isn’t that different than being on the ground gawking at everything.) We explored the proper City of London with the Tower bridge, the Tower of London, and the aptly named “More London” area of amazing modern architecture.

 

Afterwards we proceeded to get lost, or at least unable to find a tour bus stop, near the Marble Arch. During this time, we ran across speakers corner, which is London’s famous “free speech” zone. People stand on soap boxes and spout whatever they feel like and people heckle them. It’s basically like any street corner in San Francisco.

 

The next morning we were up early again, jet lag has some benefits, and went to see St. Paul’s. It really is an amazing piece of architecture. It gives St. Peter’s in Rome a run for its money. Unfortunately there’s no photography allowed inside, because it really is beautiful. We climbed up to the very top of the dome, something like 1000 steps, all at full speed because Jack wanted to get there before the crowds. There are some amazing views of London though, so I suppose it was worth it. Our legs are still protesting though.

 

After this, it was straight off to the airport. I do have to say how impressed I was with the efficiency of security through Heathrow (terminal 2 at least.) They had awesome robots for returning the empty bins to the beginning of the line, I’m a sucker for automation.

Hopefully I get Egypt photos and a post  up when we’re in Jo’burg.

 

We’ve been in London for two days now. Since this is our first time in London, we’ve been doing a lot of exploring and seeing the major sites. That and fighting jet lag. I’ve started uploading some of the better photos to smugmug but I’ll include a few here as well in posts.

We got up early yesterday and wandered around Westminster in the rain. Given the weather back at home this year, it was a nice change.

London is so incredibly dense with landmarks, but it was still quite a trek to walk to the ones near our hotel. This was partly due to poor route planning.

We eventually made it over to the British Museum, where exhaustion and museum-itis set in quickly. It’s vast, with amazing things, but overwhelming.

Naturally, the day was broken up by stops at pubs, and we finished up with watching a performance of Phantom of the Opera a block from our hotel.

 

We’ve almost made it to our first destination and at Copenhagen airport, we learned that our destination still all wants to be a country. Economists everywhere were devastated as they won’t get a good show.

At least the airport is pretty.