The second full day in London brought a touch of disappointment and a slight sigh of relief at the same time when we discovered that the London Eye was closed until the 19 January so we wouldn’t be able to go on it this time around. My slight sigh of relief was due to the fact that I am petrified of heights, I’m not entirely sure how well I would have coped with the experience but was willing to give it a go. It will have to be next time now!
We headed back to Buckingham Palace and joined the already massive queues outside the gates, this is one of those things that I didn’t really care if I saw or not as Royal stuff has never really interested me. However when in Rome.
The first half of the procession we couldn’t really see a thing and were watching bits and pieces through someones ipad that they kind of shoved through the gates, then a lot of people left, they must have had enough. Good news for us as we go right on the fence, I could fit half my head through the fence even, yes I did try. We had an awesome view for the rest of it so am glad we ended up staying in the end even though it was pretty cold standing around waiting.
In the afternoon we headed for Tower Bridge and the Tower of London, which consequently is not a tower like one would expect with such a name, but anyway! The Bridge is awesome, although from what I understand is not the original London Bridge that came down, excuse my ignorance. The colour on the bridge is a bit weird (blue) although I kind of liked it on the day we visited as it was overcast and the blue added a bit of colour to the dreary day.
The Tower of London is incredible and I’m glad we ended up paying the (almost) 20pound admission, admissions to things over here can add up pretty quickly so we were a bit uncertain as to what to actually pay to go in and what to just look at from afar (Westminster Abbey). I was trying to keep in mind that I will come back to London at some point and hopefully not by myself so there was no point trying to fit absolutely everything into this visit.
I would recommend having a few hours at the Tower of London, half a day would be sufficient. I’d also recommend either getting the audio guides or go to the meeting point for the free tour that takes about an hour to go around, and make sure you get to the meeting point early! We were 5 minutes early and they had still left, and it was the last tour for the day! Darnit! You can get museum / castle fatigue so easily here, or maybe it is my very very short attention span, perhaps normal people can manage to be interested for the whole time they are there. After about 1.5hours I was failing with keeping my mind on the task at hand and had enough. The crown jewels are in the Tower of London though which I didn’t know before going there, and they are pretty impressive.
It’s amazing to think how people made such amazing buildings and jewels way back in the days!
Anyway this is long enough for another post, there will be two more London posts before we move on to Paris 🙂