Five days worth of London… Brace yourself.

Blogging, blogging!

Two hours and one ticket later…

Hello, hello everyone!

I’m currently sitting on the sidewalk in front of Sir John Soane’s Museum waiting to get in to the very popular Candlelight Tour! We’ve been waiting since 4:00 p.m., since lines to get into this special tour can get very long, and only the first 200 people are admitted at 6:00 p.m. There are only 4 people in front of us intrepid Southwesterners… Obviously we were very serious about getting in. I will type, type, type about my weekend until the tour starts (sometime in the next 20 minutes!).

The green marker shows the location of the Soane Museum.

If you notice on the little map that I posted above, we’re very close to what I’ve been calling the law district here in London; however, you can see close the the top right something labelled “Barristers Chambers,” which is a more accurate title for the buildings we’ve been looking at today (lawyers are called barristers or solicitors here in London). If you have ever read Bleak House by Charles Dickens (or have even seen the movie…), then you will appreciate the fact that I was walking up and down Chancery Lane just a short while ago! And yes, we even saw a barrister’s white wig sitting by his office window. We thought it was hilarious.

A beautiful building somewhere along Chancery Lane.

Even the pub in this area has law-themed decor. As we were passing by the local pub, we saw a cat pressed up against the front window taking a nap next to one of those infamous wigs:

Contents: One sleepy pub cat, complete with white, ruffled collar.

Anyway, I am so glad that I’ve been taking an absurd amount of pictures since I’ve arrived simply because I have to look back at them to remember all the things that we’ve been doing since I last posted!

On Friday, we went on a panoramic bus tour set up for the newly-arrived CAPA students that took us to see many of the touristy sights around London. These included: Buckingham Palace, the U.S. Embassy, Trafalgar Square, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Harrods, the Millennium Bridge, Tower Bridge, the Globe Theatre, London City Hall, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey.

The dome of St. Paul’s and a statue at the front of the church.

Not only did we see the standard London sites, but our tour guide also pointed out cool places we would have otherwise missed, such as the Australian High Commission (their version of an embassy) building which was evidently used as the set for Gringott’s Bank in the Harry Potter movies.

It was a lot to take in. I mean, it’s a lot to take in simply reading a list of all the places we saw, so you can imagine what it was like to see all these places for the first time. Most of these sites we were simply driven by, but we did get out to see the front of Buckingham Palace, we walked across the Thames River on the Millennium Bridge, and we had a nice cup of tea right beside St. Paul’s Cathedral… Coincidently, the French bakery where we had our tea was called Paul.

Thoroughly enjoying tea time.

I had peppermint tea… So refreshing!

We had a pretty nice view.

On Sunday morning, I attended mass at the London Oratory Roman Catholic Church, popularly known as Brompton Oratory, which is located in South Kensington right next to the Victoria & Albert Museum. This is the second largest Catholic church in London, and let me tell you, this place is massive! Every inch of this church was covered in beautiful artwork, and I definitely did not have enough time to look around as much as I wanted to, so I will definitely be back to explore!

A view of the main altar; this place is gorgeous!

At noon, all the CAPA students went on a walking tour of Brixton, which is a popular market area here in London. Most of the markets were closed the day we went, but we did get to explore a farmer’s market, and we also walked down none other than the real-life street, Electric Avenue, popularized by the song of the same name by Eddy Grant. After that, we took the Tube over to Spitalfields Market, where we got to do a lot of great window shopping and some actual shopping (the pink/yellow/blue headband I’m wearing in the very first picture… That’s from Spitalfields!).