London: Tuesday

Anna had class on Tuesday morning and since it was such a beautiful day, I decided to take a walk along the Thames (which is like a 5 minute walk from the LSE campus) while she was in class. I ended up walking toward Big Ben and hanging out around there for awhile. I had downloaded a Rick Steves podcast guide to the area and listened to that while I walked.

View from the park next to Westminster Abbey.

View of Westminster Abbey from the park (isn't it so amazing outside?? I couldn't have asked for nicer weather during my trip!)

Big Ben. Did you know that Big Ben is actually the name of the bell and not the entire tower? But since the bell is hidden and you can't see it, most people just refer to the whole thing as Big Ben.

Westminster Abbey which has like 1000+ rooms in it. That's so many!

View of the Thames from the bridge.

London Eye, which called the London Eyesore when it was first built, but has now become a really important part of the London landscape, especially since they don't have too many tall buildings.

Then I walked back towards Anna's school but took a break to sit on a bench, read a little, and listen to the Beatles on my iphone. Anna met me when her class was out and we decided to walk to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

We walked past Buckingham Palace on our way there.
The V&A was a really cool museum, in an awesome old building and it's also the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design. Unfortunately they seemed to be kind of in exhibit transition mode, because a lot of their spring exhibits weren't open yet. And they had some really awesome special exhibits but you had to pay to get into them and Anna and I didn't want to spend more money. We got to see this cool fashion exhibit they had as well as this really great movie exhibit that had so many costumes and memorabilia from shows and films. And we got tea and cake as a little snack, which was delicious. Oh, and Anna bought this cool poster in the gift shop for her room.

For dinner that night, Anna found a great fish and chips place (my one food request) for me to eat while she went to swim practice. It was delicious! Then we tried to go to Anna's friend's birthday party, but there was a huge miscommunication with their reservation and the lounge wasn't letting any of her guests in so that was kind of a birthday party fail. Instead we went back home and finished the Sound of Music!