Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures inside, so I will just have to tell you about it in my own words. St. Paul's is very open and spacious inside and seemed much bigger than Westminster Abbey but not nearly as big as St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. It had extremely high ceilings and the most beautiful mosaics I have ever seen. The dome itself was incredible too. Apparently it is one of the three largest domes in the world and it is decorated with amazing paintings of scenes from the bible. I was in awe at how beautiful and detailed St. Paul's was from its gold and glass mosaics to the baroque style gates inside to the marble columns holding the structure up.
St. Paul's Cathedral was the first Anglican Church built in England since the Reformation occurred. It has housed many important weddings and funerals and even served as a symbol for hope for the British citizens during World War II. We learned through our audio guide tour that St. Paul's was the site for Princess Diana's wedding to Prince Charles as well as Winston Churchill's funeral. The cool thing about St. Paul's is that it is still holds church services all the time. Even though it is very old, the church is still in use today....there was even a Eucharist service being held when we were there touring.
Although we were too tired to walk up the 500 or so stairs to see the dome up close, we decided to venture down into the crypt of the church. The crypt was really cool because it contained many burial sites and tombs of important people in British history much like Westminster Abbey. We saw the tomb for Lord Nelson, the Admiral who led the Brits to victory in the battle of Trafalgar as well as the tomb of the Duke of Wellington. Overall, we enjoyed our trip to St. Paul's Cathedral and I learned even more about the history of England.
From St. Paul's, we walked over to the Millennium Bridge nearby. On our walk over there we found a really cool statue/art thing with a mirror on the outside that we used to take a cool picture.
This one was an accident, but I still think it looks cool.
In the same area there was a small orchestra playing lovely music that we stopped to listen to for a bit.
The Millenium Bridge is very modern and cool looking in my opinion. Since my Dad is a structural engineer, he taught us a few things about how the bridge is suspended and how they were able to make it stable. The best part about the bridge is the awesome view of St. Paul's Cathedral.
As soon as we crossed over the Millennium Bridge we were standing in front of Shakespeare's Globe Theater. We wanted to go in and tour this historic site, however there was a play going on and we weren't able to. I have read many many many Shakespeare plays during my years in school including Othello, Hamlet, The Tempest, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer's Night Dream so it was neat to see the place where these plays were all performed back in the day. I'm sure all of our English teachers would be proud.
As we walked along the Thames, we began to feel hungry and looked for a place to rest and chow down. We spotted a traditional looking British pub right near the water and decided to eat there. The pub was called "The Anchor". Unbeknown to us, the set up inside was a little complicated. If you wanted to order fish and chips, you could only order on a certain level and if you wanted any other kind of food or beer you had to order on a different level. After a few frustrating tries, we finally figured out how it worked and successfully ordered lunch.
My mom, dad and I went traditional and ordered fish and chips for lunch. We thought that we must at least have it once while we are in England. I'm not a huge fan of fish, but anything that is fried is automatically fair game for me. The fish turned out to be good once I added a bit of malt vinegar and tartar sauce and the chips of course were delicious. The meal also came with "mushy peas" by default. I guess it must be some kind of traditional English thing so I decided to try a small bite......nastiest thing ever. I should have foreseen from the title that "mushy peas" would be pretty gross but now I know better. Oh well at least I tried!
After an extremely filling lunch, we continued our walk down the river until we arrived at the Tower Bridge. This is probably one of the main sites people associate with when they think of London. I love how distinct and unique this bridge is and how British it looks. It's very regal and distinguished against the London skyline and Thames River.
Tower of London from across the river.
We crossed Tower Bridge and were planning on going to tour the Tower of London, but unfortunately it was closing in an hour and we decided that that was not nearly enough time to get through the whole tour. We ended up buying tickets for Sunday instead.
Because we could no longer go to the Tower of London today, we decided to make the rest of the day a shopping day. We journeyed over to some of the best shopping streets in London: Regent Street and Oxford Street. We had fun looking at all of the stores that lined the streets, but we really only had two stores that we were dying to go in. We made another stop at a different Zara and then hit up Topshop. I love Topshop clothes, but that store is sooo big and crowded it gets overwhelming at times. Luckily I was able to handle it today and found a beautiful dress that I absolutely love.
We came back to our hotel and headed down to the lounge for snacks and drinks. To our surprise, the semifinal match between Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal was playing on the TV. We didn't know it was to be played today but we were able to catch the last few minutes which Nadal ended up winning.
We were all still full from our big lunch and snacks so we ate a late dinner tonight. We went to an Italian restaurant literally about 150 yards from our hotel called Bella Italia for dinner around 9:30 pm. Surprisingly the restaurant was still hoppin' even at that late hour. Although I wasn't super hungry, I still ordered a pasta because I knew I'd be miserable if I didn't eat something for dinner. I got a pasta dish with whole wheat rigatoni pasta, mushrooms, spinach, shredded chicken tossed in a Gorgonzola cream sauce. It was very good but I was too full to eat most of it. We were all happy to find a close by restaurant that could accommodate Emily's allergies and that had good food at a good price.
I've been craving fish and chips for a few months now even though I've never tried it, haha. I think I'll wait til I'm in London to try it. Might as well go straight to the source, right???
ReplyDeleteI actually think mashed peas sound really good!! Hahaha