Plain old tourism

I start to gather a backlog of things and photos and it's time to write more stuff in order to catch up.

On the weekend of April 26th, four of us took a train to London and did not much more than what a common tourist would do. We took the tube to Westminster and visited the Houses of Parliament. However, we did not find out how to get in - normal visitors where rejected and obviously you had to wear strange choir or clerical costumes in order to get in. This might have been the reason for some people to show their protest in front of the building.

Sadly moving on, we crossed the road and stood in front of Westminster Abbey. First shock - they take a 10 pounds admission fee. However, my English Heritage Young Persons Membership card helped me here, as it was accepted as a replacement for my missing student ID and I got to pay the reduced fee.

We figured out pretty soon that the admission's height was legitimate. The church is really astonishing. It was the first time I got into contact with the British way of building a church and I realized that buildings of prayer in Britain always also are buildings of worshipping the death. Large English cathedrals (and I should later see that this was the case in Ireland, too) contain tons of monuments erected to remember some dead officers who lost their lives fighting for the honor of their Queen/King and their country at some weird places all over the world.
Interestingly, Lord Wellington is known to have said "It's victory or Westminster Abbey for us!" at the beginning of the Battle of Trafalgar. Poor Wellington was wrong. He won the battle, but was shot by a French sniper - and they buried him in St. Paul's Cathedral.
On we went through St. James Park, where (as a matter of signposts allover) you are allowed to feed the ducks, the swans, and the pidgeons, but not the pelicans. Probably pelicans are a pest and they try to get rid of them this way - sucessfully, as we didn't see any pelican there. Our way lead us to Buckingham Palace, where we were to take the usual photos, although anyone will agree that there are much nicer palaces in the world.

After all these touristic activities we spent one and a half hour to search for a reasonable place to eat and then kept walking along river Thames. We lost Malo for a while as he went to see Tate Modern, while the others of us decided the weather was much too nice to lose time watching some blue rectangles over green circles on a white canvas. (Yes, I'm prejudiced...) Walking along the river we learned that museums close pretty early here. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre hat just admitted the last group of people at half past 4 and when we finally reached St. Paul's Cathedral, we only were allowed a quick glance at the inside before being thrown out by the security.

Question: How many Starbucks cafes are in 3-minute walking distance of St. Paul's? Answer: Three! After this experience I wrote a sad e-mail to Starbucks Germany and requested a shop to be opened in Dresden, too. However, they thanked me for my interest and had to admit that there were no such plans for the year 2008.

We finished our touristic tour by visiting the Barbican Music Hall that evening, where we heard the London Symphonic Orchestra Wind Quintett play 4 pieces by Krommer, Beethoven, Seiber, and Mozart.