Jolly 'Ol London!

Kim's friend Lisa was on vacation for a couple weeks and stayed with us here in Warsaw for about a week, then we all went to London to visit their mutual friend. Another mutual friend from the states met us there and we spent four and a half days in the city. Kim and I thought London would be pretty cool, we'd see Big Ben and the London Eye and so on, but we had no idea how amazing it was going to be. There was way more stuff to see than we ever thought. We did a few of the "have to"s like take a double-decker bus and go for a ride in one of those cool old fashioned taxis. Those taxis, by the way, look all cool and old fashioned on the outside, but the inside is pretty high-tech and swanky. Five people can fit inside with three facing the back and two facing forward so you can all have a conversation. There's a clear divider between you and the driver with an intercom system to talk to him.

For about 40 bucks you can take a double-decker tour bus around town, getting on and off wherever you want to explore. The ticket is good for two days, but we did so much wandering around and sightseeing the first day, we never even used the second day. I spent about an hour or so on the top level of the bus, with no roof, freezing my ass off in the wind and 40 degree weather so I could get some good photos. I haven't really looked at them yet, so I'm not sure if it was worth it, but I'll be going through them and posting the good ones on the flickr page soon.

We spent some time going through the Tower of London, which seemed less like an actual tower and more like a small castle. There was a short, but very informative tour given by an actual Beefeater. He said that no one really knows why they're called Beefeaters, but the one thing that's for sure is that the alcohol is named after them, not the other way around.

On sunday we went to Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard, which was pretty damn impressive. We got there an hour early to make sure we could get a good spot to see, since it's a pretty big deal and they only do it once every 48 hours. Luckily, we got a place right up against the gate over to the side, so we saw just about everything that happened. The whole thing lasted about 30-35 minutes. It started with a marching band being lead onto palace grounds by horse-mounted police, followed by two groups of armed guards, some of which had rifles, some with swords, and a couple with shiny axes. The band members had the black fuzzy q-tip hats.

We spent the second half of the day going through the British Museum, which is the world's oldest and biggest museum. It was pretty massive and very well laid out, with a ton of great artifacts. They have a lot of the original pieces of the Parthenon, some cool mummies, the Rosetta Stone, and tons of other stuff. On the way out I couldn't resist picking up an 800 piece puzzle of the Rosetta Stone from the gift shop. I'm sure it's gonna take me forever, but it should look cool once it's finished.

Another great thing about the city are all the huge parks. They were beautiful in the middle of February, so I can't even imagine what they look like in the spring and summer. Kim and I both agreed that if we ever live there (which could maybe someday be a possibility in the distant future, but we're not holding our breath) we would definitely take advantage and go running in the park all the time. We go running in Warsaw every once in a while, but the people all give us really weird looks. We've only seen a handful of people jogging since we got here, they just don't do it for some reason. We saw more people jogging in the first 15 minutes in London than the entire time we've lived in Warsaw. And it has [temporarily] inspired us to start training for a 10 mile race in August. 

I don't think it's gonna happen...