The trip over was insane. We got up at 6 (which is really early for us, especially since we hadn't slept much lately), got on a plane at 10:45, and landed in Philadelphia just after lunch. We walked around the historic part of town for a few hours and saw the Liberty Bell, which let me tell you, is pretty damn lame. It's just a medium ole bell. I expected that it had rung some signal for the Revolution, but no, it had just been decided as a symbol of liberty. Hmmm.
We left the Philadelphia airport at 9:00 pm and flew all night. By the time we got to London, we were out of it, but we didn't want to go to sleep because we wanted to get our schedules lined up. So, the only thing to do was to ride on one of those cheesy tour buses for a while and see the sights while sitting down. Aaron fell asleep on the bus a few times, and I was completely out of sorts. I decided that I had been to London one too many times.
18 hours of sleep later, I love London! We ate lunch at a nice little Indian place, and since we still had our tickets to the tour bus, we took a loop around the city again, this time excited about everything we saw. We walked through Westminster Abbey, lovely as always. The neatest things we saw there were Isaac Newton's tomb, Poet's Corner, a memorial to Caedmon (sort of the first poet in English), the tombs of Elizabeth I and Mary Tudor, the tomb of Mary Queen of Scots, and the shrine to Edward the Confessor. It's just so awesome to me that I could stand by the tomb of Edward the Confessor (thinking in my head about what a douche he was to practically invite William the Conqueror into England) and then stand on Tennyson's grave marker (thinking about "Crossing the Bar"). Westminster Abbey is like all of the good parts of English history all in one building.
Because Aaron loves me very very much and is a wonderful man in every possible way, he endured Evensong at Westminster Abbey with me. It was lovely. There was a boy choir singing all the responses and the psalm, and we got to sit right in the quire in the back row in those big stalls! There was a lot of kneeling and bowing of heads and repeating of creeds, and I LOVED it. Aaron, on the other hand, said it made him feel kind of creepy, but did it anyway for me.
Afterward, we had dinner at a delicious little pizza joint, where we talked and talked and got to hold hands across the table and do all the googly-eyed romantic stuff that is kind of hard when a trip to the pizza joint always mean playing 46 games of tic-tac-toe and having conversations about whether Phineas and Ferb is better than Madeline. We took a rambly walk home (stopping at McDonalds because it has the only reliable free wireless access in London, apparently), admired the lovely Westminster Cathedral (the Catholic church I'm gonna see if I can make Aaron go to), and are settled into our tiny hotel that only has hall bathrooms. (Wow, London is beautiful and interesting, but America has it beat for convenience.) Tomorrow we are going to spend the day at the British Museum.
Aaron notices and is entertained by different stuff than me, so he is going to dictate a few observations at the end of my blog posts. So, today, Aaron says:
- I love having septagonal currency.
- Quire (spelled with a Q) and Isaiah (pronounced I-zie-uh) make me happy.
- I'll forever think that Philadelphia is the land of union thugs who inefficiently run trains with punch cards and are mean to old ladies.
- I wish I could drive on the roundabouts.
