Mind the Gap

London is frickin huge! My dad and I stayed in a youth hostel (apparently their definition of "youth" is pretty flexible) near St. Pancras Station and King's Cross Station (yes, the one in Harry Potter). We were also directly across from the British Library. The big red brick building houses tons of old manuscripts. They conveniently keep all the really famous ones in a single gallery so tourists can access them easily. Of particular interest to me was a couple copies of the Magna Carta, the original Alice in Wonderland in Lewis Caroll's own hand (and the original woodblocks used to illustrate the first printed copy! Awesome!), a page of Shakespeare's handwriting, and the Gutenburg bible, which is way bigger than I thought it'd be.

If you enjoy architecture, go to London! the buildings there are amazing. It's a financial capital so there are brand new banks, malls, and skyscrapers with crazy designs. All this is right next to (sometime adjoining) ancient buildings with medieval architecture.

You can't really say you've been to London unless you take a tour on the double decker buses so we hopped on somewhere right in the middle of London. The buses are great and worth the 50 pounds unless you sleep the entire time like my Dad did... o.k. he didn't sleep the ENTIRE time, but he was nodding off for a good 30 minutes. Can't really blame him though, we only slept a couple hours on the plane which meant we were somewhere around hour 20+ with only airplane sleep and serious jet lag. Somehow we did the library, the bus tour, and Westminster Abbey (fun fact: Darwin and Newton are buried there... who would've thought!)

The last stop of the double decker tour put us out in leicester square where Tom Cruise happened to be attending the premiere of Knight and Day (new movie with Cameron Diaz, she may have been there too). We got there just in time to see Tom walk the carpet and pose for the cameras (on a giant screen; even though we were about 100 feet away they had it blocked off with covered fences from the general public.

Overall London was a little too crowded for my tastes. It was like Seattle + LA. There were hundreds of people on every block and the squares were like music festivals without the music. Just tons of people smoking cigarettes. Very cool to see but I'm not sure I could handle more than a couple days there at a time.

Yesterday was our first day on the bikes. I have to shower and conquer some hills today so I can't elaborate now but I'll post about Switzerland as soon as I can! (it's friggen rad)

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