Day Two
Today we woke up early and had breakfast at the hostel's pub. I really like their tea. I had tea for lunch too, and they served it with the thickest, heaviest cream ever. Probably heart attack in a spoon, but really good.
The first thing we did was take the tube to Westminster where we spent about four hours in Westminster Abbey. It's really surprising how long one can spend with a lot of dead people. There are over three thousand bodies buried there, and God knows how many memorials. In some cases, the plaques over the body are so worn down you can't read the inscription, and I really wonder whether they know who's down there anymore. I think there was one inscription which started out to the effect of "so-and-so probably lies interred here." But there are a lot of famous people and royalty buried here. Among them are EdwardI, HenryVII, ElizabethI, MaryI and Mary Queen of Scots, Newton and Darwin. Oh, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. They have a Poet's Corner, and they have so many names there I haven't heard of before...I think I need to do more reading. But there was a memorial to Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, the Bronte sisters, Kipling, and actually some fairly modern authors. Actually, the most recent burial I saw there was in 1988, which wasn't so long ago. We had lunch there among a bunch of graves, which is slightly creepy to think of. So many people laughing and eating and buying souvineers while sitting on or walking over dead bodies. Usually graveyards are such quiet, solemn, spooky places.
After that, we headed over to the National Gallery via Trafalgar Square to see the Impressionist paintings. They have a lot of Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Picasso. The other paintings I really enjoyed were by John Constable and Joseph Turner. Turner's painting of Ulysses and Polyphemos was really neat.
After leaving the National Gallery, we decided to walk around for a while before dinner and got ourselves thouroughly lost before giving up and getting into a subway station to find our way back to Greenwich. We did get to the Victorian Garden Park while being lost, which made for a good walk, but I really don't know how we managed to end up where we did. It made no sense at all.
Vivian
The first thing we did was take the tube to Westminster where we spent about four hours in Westminster Abbey. It's really surprising how long one can spend with a lot of dead people. There are over three thousand bodies buried there, and God knows how many memorials. In some cases, the plaques over the body are so worn down you can't read the inscription, and I really wonder whether they know who's down there anymore. I think there was one inscription which started out to the effect of "so-and-so probably lies interred here." But there are a lot of famous people and royalty buried here. Among them are EdwardI, HenryVII, ElizabethI, MaryI and Mary Queen of Scots, Newton and Darwin. Oh, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. They have a Poet's Corner, and they have so many names there I haven't heard of before...I think I need to do more reading. But there was a memorial to Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, the Bronte sisters, Kipling, and actually some fairly modern authors. Actually, the most recent burial I saw there was in 1988, which wasn't so long ago. We had lunch there among a bunch of graves, which is slightly creepy to think of. So many people laughing and eating and buying souvineers while sitting on or walking over dead bodies. Usually graveyards are such quiet, solemn, spooky places.
After that, we headed over to the National Gallery via Trafalgar Square to see the Impressionist paintings. They have a lot of Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Picasso. The other paintings I really enjoyed were by John Constable and Joseph Turner. Turner's painting of Ulysses and Polyphemos was really neat.
After leaving the National Gallery, we decided to walk around for a while before dinner and got ourselves thouroughly lost before giving up and getting into a subway station to find our way back to Greenwich. We did get to the Victorian Garden Park while being lost, which made for a good walk, but I really don't know how we managed to end up where we did. It made no sense at all.
Vivian
posted by teabag | 2:01 PM
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