The Cosmopolitan London Continued

"The world is a book and those who don't travel read only one page"

- St. Augustine

 

Although getting a view from a local's point of view is great, you can't travel somewhere and not see its main attractions. We started the attractions by walking through Green Park, which like its name suggests is very green and very beautiful, to Buckingham Palace. Buckingham Palace was huge and beautiful, but extremely crowded which made it hard to enjoy its beauty. The changing of the guards happened while we were there which was really cool, but again, hard to see or enjoy because of the massive crowd of excited tourists we were squished in.

Buckingham Palace

We then walked through St. James Park, another gorgeous and green park, and then down Birdcage Walk to Parliament Square. This is where we saw the Parliament building which had crowds of protesters outside of  it, the Supreme Court, Big Ben, Westminster Abby, and St. Margret's Church. All very impressive buildings!

Big Ben

Then we walked down to Trafalgar Square which has a huge art gallery called the National Gallery. This contains thousands of prints of famous artist's masterpieces, we wandered through here for a couple of hours and probably didn't even see half.  



Tower of London

 After this, we took the tube to Tower Hill Station, which is right next to the Tower of London - my favorite part of this city by far. Walking through the tower is like being transported to the medieval days. It is all made of stone and is made up of many different buildings and court yards. Each building has a bridge connecting it to the next old stone tower. Once inside each building we would twist though the tight spiral staircases that lead to multiple different rooms. Throughout the historical walk there are posters with information about the tower. Something I found really interesting was, it used to be a zoo, however had to be closed down due to a few people dying after bad encounters with the animals. We also got to see the crown jewels and armor. Once we left this fantastic building we walked right out in front of the London Bridge, this was neat to see. Needless to say, this part of London has far more photos than any other area or day in London.