My trip is about over. I feel very satisfied with everything I’ve seen and accomplished yet a bit unhealthy. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve gained a few pounds. The traveling, the eating out and the near constant intake of ales, coffees and tea has thrown off my body chemistry considerably. I’m used to a pretty good diet and running 5k 5 days out of the week. If you’ve ever had a good work-out routine and ever gone off of it for more than a week you’ll know how I feel.
Anyways, here are some photos and videos from Sunday. If you’re not subsribed to the RSS I made a pretty large post yesterday so just keep scrolling if you haven’t checked back in a while. Here’s a shot of the harbor near where I was working for the last couple of weeks. I’m going to miss London.
I started by walking up to the Chelsea football stadium. I decided I’d bite the bullet and pay the 15 quid for a tour so I could get some photos of a real football (soccer) stadium—haha.
After every game it’s a rule of the Premiere league that the coaches and sometimes players have to talk to the press. This is the room they do it in. The guide let all of the kids get their pictures taken by the sponsor wall.
The home team locker room. They have some pretty luxurious facilities. Drogba’s jersey is right next to that bald man’s cranium.
Then they brought us out to pitch-level. They played some crowd noise for effect. It was pretty cool. I took this video as well:
They pay a fortune to move those UV grow lights over the pitch to make sure it’s ready to go year ’round.
I then hopped onto the tube system, which by now I’ve mastered and hit Russel Square and the British Museum. This is Russel Square. I’ve got some sketches from here that I’ll post as soon as I can scan them.
The British Museum. I saw some incredibly old stuff here.
Some neat festival costumes
The big center area of the museum. This thing was massive.
A crowd of Japanese tourists were crowded around this incredibly preserved corpse when I arrived. It was pretty neat.
Of course, the Rosetta Stone. One thing about this museum that I didn’t like was it was so crowded the security people couldn’t stop visitors from walking up and just rubbing their grubby hands over everything that wasn’t covered. I was just thinking the whole time “Don’t fucking touch that! Do you know how old that is?!” Museum manners, for crying out loud.
After I got tired dodging other tourists in the museum I jumped back on the tube to Leicester (I’ve been spelling it wrong for the last couple of posts. Oops) and stumbled upon a caravan of people waving red and black flags as well as English flags and literally laying on their car horns. At first I thought they were football supporters because I didn’t recognize the flag but I learned later that they were Albanian flags and that the crowd was celebrating Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. What a weird thing for me to stumble upon randomly. As I walked down toward the National Gallery I could hear a massive crowd and more car horns coming from Trafalgar Square so I took a video. I posted it on youtube last night and it’s already got over a thousand views and 16 comments from random Kosovars (I’m guessing).
A photo of the crowd in the square with Big Ben in the background.
A picture of the expanding sea of Albanian flags.
I couldn’t take any shots inside the gallery but let me just say wow. I’ve never seen such great artists all in one place. Cezzane, Monet, Rubens, Seurat, Picasso, Caravaggio (one of my absolute favorites), Pissarro and the list goes on and on. I could have spent most of the day there had I not wanted to see a few other sites.
I jumped back on the tube and landed back in the Southbank for a walk on Millenium bridge. Here is a view of the Gerkin.
Millenium bridge.
A shot from the bridge of the Thames.
St. Paul’s Cathedral.
I was glad I ended the day at this site. The twilight dramatically lit up the beautiful architecture.
A church I spotted in a side street who’s name escapes me.
I forget what that is but I think it’s part of the Royal Court of Justice (below)
I ended up tubing back up to Soho but by that point my legs were killing me and I walked through some less than inviting looking areas (Soho’s got some sketchy parts as well) so I packed up the camera, grabbed a lamb doner kebab and hit the tube again for the hotel.
If you haven’t had a kebab I would probably not recommend it unless you’re smashed. Basically they have these huge poles of reconstituted meat that rotate in a rotisserie that’s usually just out in the open air. A “chef” will then take a blade and scrape it along the meat to shave off your kebab meat. They’ll take the meat, put it in a gyro style pita, pour some unhealthy greasy sauces on top, sprinkle a few vegetables on there to give the illusion of being healthier than it is and then you eat it. I ate half of it while waiting for the tube so that probably added to the disgust factor. It was good but the kind of good that any really greasy fast food is. You definitely feel terrible afterwards.
So now I must pack…
Ahhhhh London. I’ll miss it.
