London Blitz

We are continuing with our mad dash through London. We spent one day hitting St. Paul's Cathedral (including a round trip 1060 stairs to the top of the dome), the London Bunker and Churchill Museum and the Imperial War Museum. We spent today doing the most touristy thing imaginable: we took a double decker tour bus around the city. We enjoyed the first one so much that we ended up taking another tour of a different route.

No matter how cliche it is to climb up to the open deck of the bus and listen to commentary while clicking away at all photos ops as they whiz by (most of them ending up quite blurry), the tour was invaluable and we would recommend it to anyone. We saw many sites that we could have not got to on our own and we also got a sense of how London is laid out. The relative proximity of everything is very surprising, since taking the tube so much doesn't give us a sense of how close, or far, the older sites are. We never knew how far Buckingham Palace was from the Tower of London, or how large Hyde Park is or how much is concentrated in the area of the Parliament Buildings.

We have had surprises on the trip: on the first day the three of us had to run for our lives to get out of the way of a rogue pelican that was rushing through crowds trying to get back to his pond; we had dinner at a French restaurant that was run by the most militant group of French people on the planet: 45 minutes to eat, no choice for food ("take it or leave it" was the only choice) or wine ("house red")...but the meal was surprisingly good; and walking through Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park when all the crazies were out preaching their words. After 7 weeks of travel we thought we were pretty seasoned, but we had never before run into anything like it. We heard and saw everything from a man explaining the Big Bang theory, to a debate about democracy in the muslim world, to the people in the crowd who argue with the Speakers, to random yelling and, of course, the guy who was giving away free hugs. None of us took him up on the offer.

The best part was that someone took the time to tell us that Jesus loves us, so at least we've got that going for us!