London - Day 3

Saturday didn't quite start out as we expected it to and it really wasn't for the best.  We were staying in a Holiday Inn outside of the city center of London.  At 5:30am we were awoken to the horrible noise of the fire alarm.  We both panicked, threw on some clothes and shoes, grabbed our passports (the last thing we wanted to lose in a foreign country!), and headed down the stairs.  It was amazing to watch some of the other people in the hotel because they weren't really taking it seriously.  I think too many people get too used to fire drills in schools and never actually take them seriously when a real one happens.  We got outside and there were immediately two fire trucks at the hotel.  Apparently there wasn't really a fire because the firemen went in and then a hotel worker came back out and told us that we could go back in.  We did end up going back to bed since it was too early to head into London to see things, but it wasn't the greatest way to wake up in the morning.  It really made us think about what we would grab first if there really was a fire!  Since we didn't have a whole lot with us and the only important thing we had was our passports, that was obviously the first thing we grabbed.  We tried to imagine what the rest of our vacation would have been like if our passports had gone up in flames in London and nothing sounded very fun.

When we woke up the second time, it was a beautiful day to explore some more of London!

When we stepped out of the tube station, there were men moving this thing...I don't remember what it is, but Brian thought it was cool and wanted his picture taken with it.  :)

Our first stop of the morning was Westminster Abbey, but we made a few pit stops along the way to take some pictures of some famous things.  On the road that comes out of Buckingham Palace, there is a large arch thing that cars drive through.  We had been through this on the bike tour and the tour guide told us about a stone nose that was put onto one of the lower squares on the arch.  We saw the nose, but couldn't take a picture of it while riding bikes.  Since we walked right past it again, we made sure to get a picture of the nose.  Our tour guide isn't really sure why it is there, but it's rather funny.

Since Brian had gotten a picture of a London taxi, he also had to get a picture of a double decker bus.  We did ride the bus on Sunday, but never were able to get on a double decker one.

We walked past the houses where Prince Charles and Henry and William live and this guard was out front.

We also walked past Downing Street which is where the British Prime Minister lives in number 10.  Our tour guide said you used to be able to walk down the street and right in front of his house, but since 9/11 the whole street is very heavily guarded.  There were multiple police men out front with machine guns.  It was interesting to see the difference in security between this and Buckingham Palace.

We then made it to Big Ben!  We got some great pictures because it was actually sunny and blue skies!  We also got some pictures from the Westminster Bridge of the London Eye which is a giant ferris wheel built a few years ago.

We then made it to our first tour of the day - Westminster Abbey!  We couldn't take pictures inside, but Brian got a few of the outside.  We had an audio guide through this church where a lot of famous people are buried.  It is also the church where new kings and queens are crowned.  My favorite part was the Poets' Corner where people like Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland), Rudyard Kipling (author of The Jungle Book), and G.F. Handel (composer) are buried and other authors and musicians are buried or remembered.  We also saw where Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton are buried.

For lunch, we ate at McDonald's because we're trying to eat at a McDonald's in as many different countries as we can.  Neither of us are big fans of McDonald's in the U.S., but we'd thought it'd be fun to say we ate at them in a bunch of different countries.  We've eaten at McDonald's in Spain, Germany, and England now and I've eaten at one in Hungary also.  We took our food to go though and ate it in St. James Park where we saw these man feeding the squirrels as they crawled all over him.

We then went to the Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum.  This is an underground area that Winston Churchill and his cabinet ran WWII from during the German bombing.  It was a secret during the war and was recently turned into a museum.  I loved this, but Brian wasn't as big of a fan of it.  :) 

This first picture is of the cabinet room where many of England's big decisions regarding the war were made.

Since there was no access to the outdoors and many people didn't leave this underground area for days, they had this sign to let people know what the weather was like outside.  Lots of people worked in this place including lots of typists.

The toilets down here did not flush at the time that they used it and it was always a luxury to go out and use a flush toilet.

We were both surprised that Churchill actually never smoked the cigars he was always seen with in his mouth.  Here's one of them.

Churchill won a Nobel Prize for Literature after he was Prime Minister.  Maybe I'll have one of these someday.  :)

The door to No. 10 Downing Street was down here also.  Churchill and his wife had special quarters in this underground area to live, but often still went back to No. 10 because they didn't like entertaining underground.

This underground area wasn't actually the safest of places for Churchill and his cabinet.  For a while, it was just a basement in a store.  Eventually they put steel reinforcements and 6 feet of concrete above the area without anyone is London figuring out what was going on.  Even with all of this, if a bomb landed right on it, they probably would not have survived.

This was one of the map rooms they used to keep track of the war.

This was Brian's favorite sign in the museum.  It was meant to tell people to turn off the lights to save on electricity.

This area used to be a stairway, but that was a security hazard, so they filled it in with cement so no one knew there was a stairway there.

Here's the larger map room where they kept track of the war.

They even had a cigarette lighter that looks like a doorbell!

Once we were done here, we walked back through St. James Park and headed to Buckingham Palace.  We didn't see the changing of guards, but took some pictures of them and the Palace.

Once done there, we headed over to the Tate Modern which is an art museum that is open late on Fridays and Saturdays.  There didn't end up being anything too exciting there, but we were able to check our e-mail and find out that friends of ours had had their baby the day before!  We were able to take some pictures of St. Paul's Cathedral, the Millennium Bridge, and the Tower Bridge at night.