Day Three

Still London

We went first to Westminster Abbey. I liked it, although it was different than I had expected. Elizabeth and Mary are buried there, and the coronation chair is there. Poets' Corner is especially cool, but I totally missed Chaucer's memorial, and now I feel like an idiot because now me and Chaucer are tight. Poets' Corner also has memorials to, among others, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Burns, Kipling, and Olivier. Shakespeare's pose was quite jaunty in his statue. I didn't take any pictures inside because I try to limit my photography in active places of worship.

They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palace--
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
Alice is marrying one of the guard.
"A soldier's life is terribly hard,"
Says Alice.from "Buckingham Palace" by A.A. Milne

From there we had some "free" time--free as long as we were in a group and had at least one chaperone with us. A bunch of us went to see the changing of the guard. Clive took us to where the ceremony begins, at St. James' Palace. For part of that summer the Australian army and navy were guarding the queen, and that's who we saw. We followed the army band and the sailors down the Mall to as near as we could get to Buckingham Palace. We also saw some Horse Guards, and some of the iconic beaver-hatted guards. As far as I know, no one went up and harassed them.
We had lunch at McDonald's--not my choice, they gave us meal vouchers--and it took us a bit for the gang to get sorted, but some of the adults and one of my friends and I went to the National Gallery for an hour. It was a good choice. The National Gallery is on Trafalgar Square. It has a good collection, including famous Impressionists, and many British artists. There was a huge painting of a horse that I remember quite vividly. My two favorite paintings at the Gallery are "Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba" by Claude Gellée and "Saint Mary Magdalene Approaching the Sepulchre" by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo. There's a version of the latter at the Getty, too, that I saw not long after we got back to the States. In the one in the National Gallery Mary is wearing a beautiful silver cloak. It's amazingly detailed, and the light is perfect on the folds of the fabric.

Trafalgar Square with Nelson's Column. And pigeons.

From the National Gallery we walked to the British Museum, where there was construction going on and thus no air conditioning. I really wanted to see two things: the Book of Kells, and the Rosetta Stone. After we wandered around for a while, my friend asked where the Book of Kells was; apparently it wasn't there, although the guard was a little hard to understand. But we found the Rosetta Stone! where I was mistaken on two counts. The first was that it was a lot larger in person than it is when you see it in textbooks. Honestly, in the books it looks like it's not that big, but it's probably a foot and a half wide and three feet tall. The second was that it was in a glass case, unlike two years earlier when my brother visited and touched the Rosetta Stone when no one was looking. I'd really wanted to touch it, and was wickedly thwarted.

Outside the museum we met up with the rest of the group and then broke off for further endeavours. I went back to the hotel with one group, which then split into walkers and Tube riders. The walkers made it back twenty minutes before we Tube riders did.

That night when we were in our room before bed we were watching TV and I thought I heard thunder. When I looked out the window there were fireworks near the horizon. Some English boys walking in the square outside called out hellos, and other kids from the group stuck their heads out their windows and talked. It was really pleasant, and a nice end to a nice day.

Tomorrow: the Channel and salut Paris!