How Come Everytime You Come Around, My London, London Bridge Wanna Go Down Like

A ninety minute plane ride, we arrived in London with a whole day to kill. Perhaps the most exciting prospect at first was staying in an actual hotel room. Not only could we leave all our belongings there, but this meant we were actually going to be in the same place for a good chunk of time. We had the rest of the evening to ourselves. A few of us decided to head over to the Apollo Victoria theater on the off-chance that there would be a couple of returned tickets to that night's sold-out showing of the musical Wicked. To our unbelievable luck, we managed to get tickets for all four of us - on a Saturday night at that. Not only that, but they were discounted because it was something like two hours before the show. AND, when they checked our student IDs, we got the coveted student discount applied. $50 for $200 tickets? Hot diggity damn! The show itself? Spectacular:


We decided to walk back to the hotel and ended up cutting through Hyde Park at midnight. Luckily there were enough drunken teens populating the park to make it safe. It was a gorgeous park and sadly, I didn't get a chance to go back and take pictures.

We spent the next morning wandering the street markets of London, including Petticoat Lane Market, which was established over 400 years ago.


That afternoon was spent sight-seeing. The Tower of London took nearly two hours to walk through. The Crown Jewels are every bit as impressive as you would imagine. Photography isn't allowed within the building and they had scary looking military guards there to enforce that particular rule.


In the distance you could see Tower Bridge, which, for the record, is about a million times more impressive than London Bridge. You can judge for yourself:


From there, we paid a visit to St. Paul's Cathedral. As luck would have it, we had plenty of time before Sunday night Mass for a cup of tea (with scones) at a local shop. The interior of St. Paul's was gorgeous, especially the paintings of Mark, Luke, John, and Matthew around the interior of the dome. We actually sat beneath the Dome during the service - which was hardly impressive. As a Protestant church, it was quite different from what I was used to, but also, it wasn't a full blown service (which are done in the mornings) and in general, the pastors were just quite dull.