London #1

Sorry this has taken so long, but it takes a while to sort through all the pictures and decide what to post and what not to. I'm starting with London, which is where we started, and we'll see how many posts this takes! :) Our flight over was pretty good, and our first order of business after finding our hostel, was to find lunch!

This is us at O'Neill's, a kind of scottish type bar/restaurant, that was really close to our hostel. For those of you who don't know, Christina, one of Eric's co-workers, travelled with us as well.


We went to the British Museum right after lunch to try to stay awake for the afternoon and evening. This is the Rosetta stone - from about 196 BC I think - and was used to translate ancient hieroglyphics.



There was a huge egyptian section of the museum with lots of mummies. These are real cat mummies...kinda funny. Behind the mummies you can see an xray that shows the cat inside.

Going down into the Tube! Every stop was different and I thought this one was fun because it was ALL in mosaics. Pretty impressive.

This was the view from the hostel we were staying at. I just thought the buildings were really pretty.

We thought this was pretty funny. At many of the crosswalks in London there was a special button for "equestrians" to use to cross. It was about 6 or 7 feet up too!

On our second day, we started at Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard. The flag was all the way up, so the Queen was at home! Can you imagine living here?

There were TONS of people there, so it was very hard to see, but we got a few pictures. The funny part was that during the ceremony the band was playing "Stars and Stripes Forever" and other Sousa songs. Weird..

Next, we walked by Hyde park to Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. We had to get a picture in the London phone booth...which were actually kind of hard to find! Big Ben is in the background.

This is front entrance of Westminster Abbey. It was very impressive and really detailed on the outside. We weren't allowed pictures on the inside, though we did try to sneak a few that didn't turn out. One of my favorite parts was actually the "Poets Corner" of the Abbey. Many famous writers are buried there and we saw the "tombs" of Jane Austin, T.S. Elliot...and lot of others.

This is the back entrance to the Abbey...pretty impressive for a back door, eh? After this, we went back to our hostel to get dinner and go see a show! More pictures to come!