I Love London!!!

Hello! I know it has been a while since I last posted, but I just spent two weekends in London and wanted to be able to make one big London post, so here we go. : )

The Monday after we got back from Bath and Oxford was a Formal Hall, so that was lots of fun. Here are some pictures from that.

On the grass for drinks before dinner at Formal Hall

At dinner!

The week after we got back from Bath and Oxford was pretty stressful. We had module one class finals that Friday, so I took the final for my Contemporary Issues in Neuroscience class. It was pretty different from the finals I am used to, because back at BYU most science classes just have multiple choice tests with maybe one or two short answer questions at the end, possibly involving drawing out mechanisms for chemical reactions. This test, however, was entirely essay-based. We could pick two prompts from a list, and then we had to write an essay on each. Lots of classes had their final at the same time, so we were in a large examination room where everyone had two hours to complete their final. The exam room was super hot since air conditioning doesn't seem to be a thing here. And I hate essays. So altogether it was a rather miserable experience. But now I only have one final left, so yay!

After we all stumbled out of the exam room in a daze, we decided to have a picnic and then go punting. It was my first time punting, and it was a lot of fun! Basically, one person stands on the end of the punt with a really long pole, and you just push yourself along the river by pushing off against the bottom of the river. It is super hard to navigate the punt since it always wants to turn one way, but we finally figured out that if you use the pole as a rudder once you have pushed off, you can go pretty straight. That made things a lot easier, so we crashed into the sides of the river a lot less and ran into fewer punts. But the real victory was that even though I crashed into a lot of things, I never actually fell off the punt into the river! : )

Riding in a punt behind King's College!

Now I'm punting the punt!

On the River Cam on the punt behind King's College

The river is called the River Cam, and it runs along the backs of the colleges. We punted under a lot of really cool bridges, and we also got to see some great views of the other colleges. It was beautiful and I can't wait to go punting again! The first bridge we saw was the Mathematical Bridge. It is so named because it built using only straight panels of wood and a really complicated design. It was supposedly built by Isaac Newton using only wood panels and requiring no nails or bolts. They say that members of the colleges took it down to try and figure out but it was built, but then they couldn't figure it out and were forced to use bolts to rebuild it, but unfortunately none of this is actually true. Either way, it is still a cool bridge.

The Mathematical Bridge

We also went under the Bridge of Sighs, which is named after the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, which is called the Bridge of Sighs because it was the last bridge prisoners would go over before being taken to prison, so they would sigh as they went over it. Oddly enough, these two bridges look nothing alike, so I don't really know why the one in Cambridge was named after the one in Venice. Oh well. It's a pretty bridge though!

The Bridge of Sighs

On Saturday we hung around Cambridge while most people took off for the long weekend between modules. We had originally planned to go to Amsterdam this weekend, but we found cheaper tickets for a different weekend, so we decided to stay in Cambridge and go to London on Sunday. It was great to be in the college when most people weren't here, so we had the place mostly to ourselves.

On Sunday we got up bright and early to catch the train into London. We went straight to Buckingham Palace once we got there so that we could see the changing of the guard. We actually couldn't really see anything because of the massive crowds of people, but it was cool to listen to the bands play, and we eventually made it up to the gates of the palace.

Buckingham Palace

The guards at Buckingham Palace

We finally made it up to the gates!

We then went to a Singles Ward in South Kensington. The church building was pretty cool because it had a mini visitors center in the front, complete with a smaller version of the Christus statue.

The coolest LDS church building I've ever seen!

After church we headed to the British Library to see their Treasures of the British Library exhibit. This exhibit was amazing because it has hundreds of original books and texts from all over the world. We saw original music by Mozart and Chopin as well as lyrics written on scraps of paper by the Beatles, and we saw the original music for Handel's Messiah. They also had the original draft of Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte's handwriting! It was opened to a page where she had written a couple paragraphs and then crossed them out, so Nicole and I were drooling over that for a while, trying to decipher her handwriting. We also saw lots of little prayer books and illuminated bibles as well as sacred texts from other religions. There were a lot of Islamic texts, which were really fascinating, and some Buddhist and Hindu texts as well. The illustrations and drawings on these texts were gorgeous. We also got to see the Codex Sinaiticus (a handwritten copy of the Bible written in Greek during the 4th century AD), and a Gutenberg Bible. The library also had two of the original four copies of the Magna Carta on display in this exhibit, so those were interesting to see. They also had the massive seals that were on the documents, and those were incredible as well. Other texts that we saw included Beowulf, lots of Shakespearean texts, letters from past kings and queens of England, poems by Sylvia Plath, documents from Charles Darwin, original copies of Dickens' works, Jane Austen's writing desk, all sorts of notes and journals from scientists, and the original Alice in Wonderland. Basically, the whole exhibit was incredible, and I didn't want to ever leave. It was amazing to have so many literary treasures all on display in one place, and all of them were so well preserved. I couldn't believe that the originals of all these famous handwritten texts were just inches away! The whole exhibit was definitely one of the highlights of all of my London trips.

Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures inside the Treasures of the British Library exhibit (understandable, I guess), but I did get a picture of the King's Library Tower that is six stories tall and sits in the center of the British Library! This library was compiled by George III and has lots of texts from the Enlightenment.

King's Library Tower

Just a couple streets over from the British Library is North Gower Street where they film scenes for the BBC's Sherlock series, so of course we had to go see that. The address 221B Baker Street doesn't actually exist, but there is a house on Baker Street that has been given that address, and it houses the Sherlock Holmes museum. That isn't the site though for the TV series, because they wanted to use a location that was a bit less crowded, so they found a flat a couple streets over.

The location of 221B Baker Street in BBC's Sherlock!

We then just walked around the city until it got dark. We started out in Trafalgar Square and then wandered up to Parliament and Big Ben and Westminster. We wandered all along the river and through quite a few streets as well, so we stumbled upon some cool locations. We found the original location of the Scotland Yard as well as the house that Benjamin Franklin lived in when he used to come to London. We saw the London Eye and debated about whether or not we should go on it, but the line was horrific, they pat everyone down as part of security, it's expensive, and the whole thing just looked like a big production, so we opted to just keep wandering along the Thames. The Thames is actually a pretty nasty-looking river, and I inadvertently added to the litter floating down it when my water bottle fell out of my backpack as I was standing on a bridge and leaning over the edge to get a picture. Sorry, River Thames.

Me with one of the lions in Trafalgar Square

Me in front of Trafalgar Square

Big Ben from Trafalgar Square

Big Ben

Me in front of Big Ben

Parliament!

 More Parliament!

We took a late train coming back to Cambridge, and on Monday I mostly just caught up on sleep. By Monday night, almost everyone had come back from their trips, so it was a lot of fun to hear about all the things they did over the weekend. Now we know all the places to go see when we actually make it out to Amsterdam and Brussels. : )

Every day this week I went out to Dr. Kotter's labs by the hospital that I talked about earlier. I basically have just been helping out a PhD student with her research, so that is fun. I've been learning how to isolate OPCs and convert RNA back into cDNA and stuff. And then when we're not doing that, we are quantifying axons from images of brain slices from rats. It is definitely interesting, and I am never bored.

We had another Formal Hall on Wednesday. I'm actually really starting to get tired of these. I hate dressing up. It's awful. And I only brought one dress to wear to these since I didn't realize there would be so many, so all of my pictures kind of look the same even though they are from different formals. The food is very fancy and interesting, and I definitely at least try everything, but sometimes it isn't exactly something I would choose to eat. It is still really fun though to be able to eat dinner with everyone, and everybody always takes a ton of pictures!

On the grass before the Formal starts. Again.

Me and Nicole!!!

On Thursday we had the opportunity to go sing in the King's College Chapel. This was an event organized by the BYU kids, but anyone from the program who wanted to come was invited. We sang old polyphonic songs in rounds (the kind that would have been sung there hundreds of years ago), songs from the chapel's old hymnbooks to tunes that we all knew, and LDS hymns. It was amazing to sing and be able to hear everything echo in the chapel, and the acoustics were incredible. It was definitely an amazing opportunity.

Inside King's College Chapel

Rubens' Adoration of the Magi underneath a stained glass window in the chapel

Stained glass windows in the King's College Chapel. They were removed during WWII to protect them from bombs and were later reinstalled. Also, the fan vaulted ceiling is the largest in the world.

King's College Chapel

Random pretty picture of the entrance to King's College from the inside. Look at the pretty rainbow!!!

On Saturday we rode a bus down to London with lots of other kids from the program. We get one day trip to London in the program, so we decided to use ours on Saturday. Once we got to London we went to the Tower of London. They were in the middle of installing 888,246 clay poppies around the tower as part of an exhibit called "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red." The exhibit commemorates the 100-year anniversary of Britain's entry into World War I, and each poppy represents one British soldier that died in the war. The poppies spill out into the moat, and it really is a beautiful installation.

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

Me in front of the Tower of London

The clay poppies in the moat

Me in front of the Tower of London and the beautiful poppies

Once inside the Tower, we went on a tour with one of the Yeoman, which are also called "Beefeaters" for reasons unknown. They don't even know where the name came from. Anyway, we saw the Traitor's Gate, the outside of the Tower of London, the place where people were publicly executed back in the day, and the chapel. Unfortunately we couldn't go inside the chapel because they were in the middle of restoring it. Our Yeoman tour guide told us a lot about all the people that were executed there, including Anne Boleyn (one of the wives of King Henry VIII) and Lady Jane Grey, and then they also told us about the two young princes that were murdered there and then their skeletons were later found buried in the tower. Prince Edward, age 12, was supposed to be king but was too young to rule, so his uncle took the throne instead, and Edward and his 9-year-old brother Richard mysteriously disappeared. It turns out that they were murdered.

This nice glass pillow thingy commemorates the spot where lots of royal people were executed.

Our tour guide kept making jokes about the U.S. while we were there, saying stuff like, "this tower is 700 years old! Hear that, Americans? 700 years old! THIS is history!" So that was pretty funny. He also mentioned that this tower could have been ours too if we would have just paid our taxes, and then made a comment about how can we have whole classes on American history when all of it could just be learned in about an hour and a half. The Yeoman tour guides are all pretty funny and animated, so the tours are definitely entertaining.

The Beefeaters in their awesome outfits!

We went and saw the Crown Jewels and other really valuable things that they keep with the Crown Jewels, like scepters and spoons and coronation gowns and such. Among them was also a gold punch bowl that could hold 144 bottles of wine. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let you take any pictures of these.

We then went in the White Tower where they had tons of armor and weapons, which was rather interesting to look at. Outside the Tower we saw the ravens, which are kept at the Tower of London because legend has it that when the ravens leave, England will fall. We also went to the Bloody Tower and checked out their torture devices. Torture wasn't really a big thing at the Tower of London, but they did have a rack (where they just pull your limbs off) and a scavenger's daughter (where they squish you until you bleed from your ears and eyes and stuff).

In front of the White Tower

The White Tower

After the Tower of London we took pictures of Tower Bridge and then walked over to London Bridge. Lots of people confuse the two and think that they are the same bridge, but they aren't. The iconic bridge that you think of when you think of London is Tower Bridge (which fits, seeing as though it has two towers and is right next to the Tower of London). London Bridge, though it used to be the only bridge spanning the River Thames and bridges have been located at that spot since the time of the Romans, is actually really boring and ugly.

Me in front of Tower Bridge

Tower Bridge. It's so pretty!

This is London Bridge. Very unimpressive. And kind of ugly.

We then booked it to the British Museum after stopping at a pub for lunch. We only had half an hour to look around before it closed, so I was glad that I had been there several years before. We basically just saw the Rosetta Stone (always fun to see again), and then went and wandered around the Egyptian mummy exhibit. We saw this horrible looking broken femur from a mummy where the bone had broken, but then the two broken ends overlapped and healed like that. It looked terrible. So I took a picture.

The Rosetta Stone!

The broken femur. Ick. This grosses me out.

You could really spend forever in the British Museum because of all the artifacts from all over the world that the British have brought back, but unfortunately we didn't have much time, and there were other things we wanted to see too.

We headed back to the river and just wandered around again. We saw some war memorials that were really interesting, and we also saw the MI6 building! It was basically a massive, intimidating fortress.

The MI6 fortress

Me in front of the London Eye

The London Eye

Me in front of Westminster Abbey

Big Ben

Battle of Britain memorial

We then got back on the bus to head back to Cambridge. We would have just spent the night in London, but it was actually cheaper for us to ride the bus back to Cambridge and then take a train in the morning back to London, so we opted to do that even though it resulted in less sleep. : )


On Sunday the first thing we did when we got to London was to head to the Churchill War Rooms. The War Rooms had two parts: the Cabinet War Rooms and the Churchill Museum. The Churchill War Rooms are basically part of one big underground bunker that is located beneath Westminster, and they are the place from which Winston Churchill and other British government officials directed Britain's movements in World War II. Though the rooms were continually busy during the war, after the war they were pretty much abandoned. The rooms have either been left as they were at the end of the war or reconstructed to look exactly as they did during the war. They even have dummies of many of the people that worked there, so you can get an idea of what the room looked like in action. Most of the rooms are roped off so you can only peek in, but others have glass windows you can look through.

One of the main rooms is the War Cabinet Room where Churchill met with his ministers and those in high positions in the military. We also saw the Transatlantic Telephone Room, with its phone that would connect Churchill directly to the President of the United States, who was Roosevelt at the time. We saw rooms with switchboards and typists, as well as bedrooms for the workers there and even the kitchens. We also got to see the Map Room, with its massive maps on the walls dotted with pins that lay out the movements of the various armies in the war. They kept emphasizing that this Map Room has been left precisely as it was when the lights were turned off for the first time in years at the end of the war, so the stacks of papers on the tables and maps on the walls and piles of pins scattered about have all not been touched. There is even some guy's stash of sugar cubes that he received as part of his wartime rations sitting on his desk still. Churchill's bedroom was right next to this Map Room, and it was from here that he gave several speeches over the radio during the war. We also got to see a cross section of the six-foot-thick concrete slab that was built over the bunker to protect it during the German bombing raids.

The Map Room, with all the different telephones. The green ones are called "scramblers" because they can't be intercepted by enemies. Somehow you can't bug them, but I didn't quite understand how that worked.

The War Cabinet Room

Look at the switch room with all the top secret switches!

It was incredible, once again, to be standing where so much history took place. I couldn't believe that so many people lived down here for so long, especially since it was so dark and stuffy. Churchill, though, would apparently go up to the rooftops to watch the Blitz occasionally. Crazy! But I definitely understand the need to get some fresh air.

We then saw the Churchill Museum, which was part of the underground War Rooms. According to the exhibits, Churchill was a very demanding boss who hated paperclips and staples and instead preferred that all his papers be hole-punched and held together with little string and plastic things, and he referred to his hole-puncher as a "klop." All the people that worked for him seemed to really admire him and value the opportunity they had to work for him, even if he was rather cross at times. He also always had a cigar, but he never seemed to actually smoke it, he would just light it and chew on it. I also liked one of the quotes they had on the wall, where Churchill said, "We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm." I think that's a hilariously awesome quote : )

This is the Churchill Museum. It was really weird, but it had a lot of cool displays. The tables are touch screens that you can use to look up different events in different years, and there was information running along the back wall in red letters.

After emerging from the Cabinet War Rooms and being blinded by the sun, we headed off to the Imperial War Museum. This museum had exhibits on both World War I and World War II as well as exhibits on more recent wars and conflicts, like the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. While there were tons of interesting displays, this museum had the most annoying layout I've ever seen. Displays were scattered throughout the room, and each display didn't have its own plaque. There were only several plaques in each room, so you had to go track down one of these, look for the location on the map on the plaque of the thing you were looking at, and then read the information about it. It was so annoying. Sometimes you would go to the wrong plaque too, so you would have to track down the one that actually had the information on the artifact you were looking for.

Anyway, we got to see lots of tanks and airplane models, a model of the atomic bomb Little Boy, chemical warfare detection boxes, a mangled window frame from the World Trade Center, part of the Berlin Wall, submarines, guns, swords, suicide bomber outfits, flags set up after certain battles, and tons of other things related to war. They also had a really cool exhibit on the history of MI5 and MI6 and the history of British secret intelligence. It was definitely way cool to learn about different spies and their missions and to see lots of the things they were able to accomplish. We even got to see an Enigma machine!

The Imperial War Museum. It's a really pretty building

The mangled window frame from the World Trade Center

An airplane. I don't know anything more specific than that. It is just an airplane.

Model of the atomic bomb Little Boy

An Enigma machine

Part of the Berlin Wall

The chemical warfare detection box. Yeah, I wouldn't really like to be squished up in there. I actually wouldn't like to be squished up in any of the planes or submarines or tanks that we saw.

There was also a really fascinating exhibit about the Holocaust. Going through Holocaust exhibits is never a pleasant experience. They're really depressing and make me lose all faith in humanity, but I also kind of feel that we have a duty to those poor people that died to learn their stories. This exhibit had a miniature model of the Auschwitz concentration camp that showed you where everything was, and behind it was a glass container full of the shoes of the victims of Auschwitz. They also had displays showing hundreds of little trinkets that were taken from people upon their entry into the camp, and in the background they had video and audio of interviews with survivors. The whole exhibit was filled with awful and heartbreaking photographs, and I definitely learned a lot about what many people went through during the Holocaust.

After the Imperial War Museum, we headed to King's Cross Station to see Platform 9 3/4 from Harry Potter. The train station has attached half a trolley to a wall so that it looks like the trolley is going through the wall, and everyone takes pictures pretending that they are pushing the cart through the wall like in Harry Potter. The last time I came to London, the part of the station that had this trolley was under construction so they had moved it somewhere else that was pretty tucked away, and you definitely had to go looking for it to find it. However, now the construction is done, so they've put the trolley back to the original location, which is unfortunately in a pretty obvious place right across from the food court area and the boards with all the train times. They totally exploit this as much as they can. The line to take a picture was over an hour, and they have a person there to take your photo professionally. You can then buy this photo for a mere 9.50 pounds! Ridiculous. 

The horrible line for Platform 9 3/4

Anyway, Nicole had never gotten her picture there before, so we decided to wait in the line. They had a worker there doing Harry Potter trivia when we got there, and we were astounded by the lack of Harry Potter knowledge all the people in line had. Nicole and I answered the remaining three questions correctly, so we won a box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans from the Platform 9 3/4 shop. Yes, they have a shop to go with this--like I said, they milk this thing for all it's worth. We thought our reward should have been to cut the line, but apparently they didn't think so. Instead we got to wait in line for an hour with a bunch of people who didn't even know what the different colored scarves meant (they're for the different Hogwarts houses). It was painful. But we finally got to the front! They give you a scarf to wear, and then they have another worker there to hold the end so that it looks like it's flowing behind you as you pretend to run into the wall. Yeah. Kind of lame, but whatever. I was just happy to finally get a picture in front of the platform.

I'm going to Hogwarts!!!

After our Platform 9 3/4 experience, we wandered around Hyde Park until it got dark. The park is huge! I didn't realize how big it was! We went to Speaker's Corner, where the tradition of speaking there allegedly comes from the fact that hangings happened nearby, and those who were executed were usually given the chance to say some last words. We wandered around for a while, and eventually we got to the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, but it was closed so we couldn't go up to it. We also wandered along the Serpentine, which is a pond that is in the middle of the park.

Finally we took the last train out of Liverpool Street Station to Cambridge. My time at Cambridge is quickly coming to a close, which is so sad! I love it here and I love being able to travel all over England. I'm so grateful for the great experiences I'm having, and I don't want them to end!