London - Day 1

I am finally getting around to blogging about our trip to London!  I've had some troubles with the pictures, so that's why it's taken me so long.  I've also been pretty busy with laundry and knitting, so I haven't taken the time to blog.  It's been long enough now, so here it goes!

We left for London on Thursday, October 28.  The train schedules were not in our favor (a 4 hour layover in the middle of the night didn't sound fun), so we ended up renting a car and driving it to the airport at Memmingen.  We then flew from Memmingen to London where we had to take a 45 minute bus ride to a bus/tube station that was within walking distance of our hotel.  We got to our hotel before the check-in time and they didn't have a room ready for us yet.  We ended up leaving our luggage in their cellar (our clothes were quite cold later!) because we wanted to get going to see a few things before we went to a London Symphony Orchestra concert in the evening.

We took the tube into London and headed toward St. Paul's Cathedral.  On the way, we found this statue of a man walking some sheep - I obviously HAD to take a picture with it!

We then headed to St. Paul's Cathedral where we were able to go inside and use an audio guide for a tour.  We couldn't take pictures inside, but here's one of the outside.

Since St. Paul's Cathedral has a gorgeous dome on top, you have the opportunity to climb up it and get a view of London.  Brian wanted to do this so I went along with it before I knew what I was getting in to.  We first walked up a number of stairs and were in the whispering area because it is said that you can whisper on one side of the dome and someone can hear it on the other side.  At this point we were still inside the church.  The next step was to climb more steps to the lower part of the dome that can be seen from the outside.  You could then walk around up here and get a slightly obstructed view of London because of the columns that surround this part of the dome.  I was doing okay up to this point.  The next step was to climb even more stairs (and very scary stairs!) to get to the very top of the dome where you could walk outside and see London without an obstructed view because there were less columns up here.  Needless to say, I did not enjoy the grated spiral stairs that you had to climb in very small quarters to get to the top.

The view from the top was quite amazing though and we could see many of the famous things around London.  Here's the view we had of the Millennium Bridge from atop St. Paul's Cathedral.

And a few more of the city and Tower Bridge.

I was not very excited to be this high up, so I sat down as soon as we got up there while Brian took pictures.

Brian was much more daring than me.  :)

I was very happy to be on the ground again and had to take a picture with the bench that said "London" on it.

One thing we noticed immediately when arriving in London is that wherever there is a pedestrian crosswalk over a road, there are words painted on the road to tell the pedestrians which way to look for traffic since they drive on the opposite side of the road there.  It was good to have these because we definitely didn't always look the right way for traffic!

We then walked to the Millennium Bridge which was made famous by the Harry Potter movies.  It is a pedestrian only bridge and there were definitely a lot of pedestrians!

From the Millennium Bridge, you could see the London Bridge and the Tower Bridge.  In the following picture, the London Bridge is in the foreground and the Tower Bridge (what most people think of when they hear the London Bridge) is in the background.

We then made our way to the Barbican Centre which is the home of the London Symphony Orchestra.  We had dinner in a cafeteria style restaurant they had there and then headed to our seats for the concert.  It was a great concert!  We both enjoyed it a lot and hope to go back sometime in the future to hear them again.