London!

Lo and I went to London at the end of January for the wedding of some good friends. While there, we managed to squeeze in a lot of sightseeing with our friends Brad and Rachel. Basically what this day and a half of zipping around served to do was whet our appetites. Some day I will go back and visit all the museums we didn't get to. We had a lot of fun though, despite the cold and snow flurries.

The first thing we saw was St. Paul's cathedral. We went to the Evensong service there, and it happened to be the weekend they were celebrating the conversion of St. Paul. We weren't allowed to take pictures since we were there for a service, but it was nice just to sit and absorb the splendor around us.

Outside St. Paul's.

After St. Paul's we walked down to the Thames and caught the sunset. It was lovely.

Buckingham Palace.

We also saw Trafalgar Square but it was too

dark to take good pictures.

On our way through St. James' Park

afterstopping at Buckingham Palace -

Lo found a puddle of radioactive ooze.

Westminster Abbey.

This was one of my favorite

places.

Westminster is breathtaking,

and I'm sorry that our camera

did not do justice to it.

Lo and Rachel.

The Tower Bridge, which was very cool. We also saw London Bridge, but that was less cool and we didn't take any pictures of it.

It was just about at this point that it started to snow.

Walkin' across the bridge.

Brad and Rachel in front of the Tower of London. Someday I would like to go inside this place.

(Also, many thanks to Brad for planning our itinerary - he was a great tour guide!)

Thus ends Day One of our London tour (it was more like 1/3 of a day, but whatever). On Day Two we went to the British Library, which was my favorite. We couldn't take pictures inside, but we wandered around wide-eyed and giddy as we discovered such treasures as THE Beowulf manuscript (Charlie, eat your heart out), the original score for Handel's Messiah, Lewis Carroll's hand-illustrated Alice in Wonderland, Beethoven's tuning fork, the Lindisfarne Gospels (some of the finest illuminated manuscripts, circa 700 AD), pages from DaVinci's notebooks with sketches of pulleys and weights, the Codex Sinaiticus - the oldest complete Greek Old Testament, the Magna Carta, and countless other great stuff.

After the British Library we

had lunch at this pub. The food

was quite delicious.

After lunch it was the British Museum - hooray for ancient history! If only we had been able to spend the whole day

there. Oh well, I guess we'll just have to go back some day.

Pretty sure this is

Rameses II. What a guy.

Hieroglyphs!

Statue of an ancient man!

We'll call him Amenhotep.

Cuneiform writing!

Assyrian gate sculptures.

I love these.

On to the Greek and Roman stuff.

Bust of Pericles. Probably not what he really looked like, but I like it anyway.

Brad and Rachel's delightful son Soren, who is clearly going to study history when he grows up. He was fascinated by everything.

Mummies and sarcophagi!

Half the reason we came!

Gotta love ancient Egypt.

The Cyrus Cylinder.

Look it up.

I like mosaics.

This is cool. (But then, we really didn't see anything that wasn't.)

Mary, Jesus, and the wise men.

Ancient chess pieces.

I liked these too.

This is a clock.

This is also a clock.

We went back to Westminster Abbey on Day Two and attended the Evensong service. It is breathtaking inside, and so many cool dead people are buried there - George Frederic Handel, Edward the Confessor, and Sir Isaac Newton, to name a few.

We stood on David Livingston's grave.

Inside the ceiling just soars

above you, defying gravity.

After Westminster we walked down to the river and saw the Houses of Parliament all lit up at night, but those pictures didn't really turn out. In conclusion, there's no place like London.