London, Again!

The Entrance to St. Paul's Cathedral.

Well, I went to London for the third time (not including Heathrow) yesterday. It still hasn’t lost its charm for me, and I haven’t seen everything I want to. I went with Jaime and Maddie, so we got group day-passes. This is such a good idea! All transportation, including the Underground and the trains to and from Colchester, totaled 16 pounds. Amazing! Consider, as an example of transportation costs, that to get to Heathrow and back one must spend 48 pounds.

So, when we got to London we first went to the Thames river, where we saw the Eye, got pancakes, and walked to Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. Then we went to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. If you like Botticelli, Da Vinci, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Gogh, Seurat, Monet, and the famous Van Dyck, you’ll love the National Gallery. And, importantly for college students, it’s free!

Afterwards we got McDonalds, which seems to be quickly becoming an embarrassing tradition and which I should probably not admit in a public blog. We then went to St. Paul’s Cathedral, where we saw that Evensong would be sung at 5:00. We decided to come back later. We then went shopping on Oxford Street. Well, we tried shopping, but failed miserably. We went to Primark, possibly the cheapest store in the world, but couldn’t stand the crowds and so left with our heads hanging in shame. We went to St. Paul’s again, and had a coffee to wake ourselves up before heading to the Evensong Service.

We were stunned and excited to find that we got to sit with the choir. We even got to sing with them for a hymn! In the picture above, you can see lamps. We sat in the seats which those lamps are in front of. Yeah, we’re about the coolest people ever. The preacher did a lesson about Pharisees and their expensive looking houses. I found it a bit funny, to be honest, to be sitting in such a beautifully adorned church hearing about how bad it is to have beautifully adorned places.

Speaking of the beautiful adornment, here’s some great information I gleaned from the always-helpful Wikipedia. Its architecture is “a late Renaissance style that is England's sober Baroque. Its impressive dome was inspired by St Peter's Basilica in Rome. It rises 365 feet (108 m) to the cross at its summit, making it a famous London landmark.” Also, the organ which we got to sing with “is the third-biggest in Britain with 7,189 pipes and 108 stops”! We could feel the reverberation from the lowest notes. We even got Goosebumps.

When that finished we ate some awful, yet awesomely filling, peanut butter sandwiches which we brought from home, and headed to a concert Maddie heard about which was located in the basement of a bar far far away from touristy areas. But I’ll tell you about that next time!