London!

We left for London at 11 am on Saturday - it was nice to get a chance to sleep in, but we didn't get into the city until almost 2, so I kind of wish we had left earlier. We went to the Tower of London and got about an hour and a half there. It was enough time to see the Bloody Tower, the armoury, and the Crown Jewels, which are very very very impressive. Some of them were missing and labeled "In Use." If only the US had anything nearly as impressive...

Then we headed over to St. Paul's Cathedral and went up into the galleries. It was most of 600 steps to get up there, and most of them were very winding and narrow, but I'd say it was worth it for the view from the top. It was kind of foggy but still beautiful. And then we had to walk down...

Afterwards, we had some time off, and a few of us just ended up sitting in a restaurant for a while. It wasn't enough time to head too far, as we had to be at the Globe to see Henry IV, Part 1. The Globe is pretty cool, a recreation of the actual Globe of Shakespeare's time. There are standing room tickets that are open to the elements, and those people got a lot of rain on them during the play last night - a lot of them ended up leaving. The actors got rained on a fair amount, too. Luckily, the Programme had invested in actual covered seats for us, so we got nice wooden benches to sit on. The show was pretty good, though I was fairly confused for most of it, since I wasn't familiar with it at all before.

After the show, everyone headed back to Oxford, but I took the Tube to Kensington to see old family friends. I got there late at night and just went to bed, but woke up and spent a lovely night with them. We biked up Central London to Trafalger Square through a bunch of parks, and we went to the National Gallery and looked around for a while. Barbara rated their Italian collections, which has its own wing, a B-, because they had no Boticellis and very few of a lot of other Italian artists. Afterwards we biked back to their house with a detour by Big Ben and Parliament. We had a late lunch and then I headed to the Oxford Tube, a bus that goes between Oxford and London. For 15 pounds, I got a ticket to Oxford with a "period return," which means I can go back anytime in the next three months. It's a pretty sweet deal, since I'm fairly positive I'll be back to London sometime soon.

Waiting for the Tube, I was a little confused about what time it would come, so Matt (family friend) asked a woman standing there if she knew. Surprise - she did her undergrad at Stanford! She's 30 now and doing a masters at Oxford, but seriously, what are the odds? She gave me her contact info and we spent a lot of the ride back talking about Stanford, especially stuff that's changed since she was there - she didn't know what the Axe and Palm was! It was so funny to meet her.

Now I'm back in Oxford and heading to bed soon. Tomorrow I have an orientation of the library at my college, Brasenose, and I meet with my tutor for the first time!


Love.