Seeing Some Sights

London

14-15 March 2009.

It has been quite some time since I last updated my blog, so I thought it was about time I let everyone know what I’ve been doing to keep myself busy lately... I decided that my time in the UK should come to an end next year, so I’ve wanted to get as much packed in to my time left as possible.


Last weekend I spent Saturday sight-seeing. I picked a couple of places that were in the same sort of area – the Freud museum and the Old Operating Theatre museum. Both really interesting and well worth a visit for the small fee. The Freud museum is the house he lived in when he fled with his family from Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938. Freud spent the last year of his life in this London home before he died of cancer. His youngest daughter, Anne, who is famous for her child psychiatry, lived here until her death in 1982. It was her wish to preserve their home as a museum. If you are at all interested in Freud as a person or for his theories, this is worth the trek up to Finchley Road, North London.

From here I tubed to London Bridge where I took a quick walk around some of the Borough markets to buy some delicious cheese and cheesecake!! Probably one of my favourite places in London! Near here is where the Old Operating Theatre museum, Britain’s oldest surviving operating theatre from the 19th Century, is found, at the top of a narrow winding staircase. This is also an old herb garret, providing information on how herbs were used as medicine, much like the way the Chinese still operate. Here you will learn about the origin of aspirin, among other things. It’s great to wander around, imagining operations being performed back then, with no anesthesia. Gory? Perhaps.


This weekend I wanted to do the same, and while Russ is still playing hockey every Saturday, I wasn’t going to just sit at home, especially as the weather is getting nicer all the time now.

I picked two sites very close to one another this time. St. Paul’s Cathedral and Monument.

St. Paul’s Cathedral is awe-inspiring. You can spot its roof and spires from many areas of the city. There has been a Cathedral on this site for 1,400 years, the current Cathedral was built 300 years ago. It is most famous for the paintings on its ceilings, the building having been designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and I suppose the marriage of Diana and Charles. This is also where the Queen’s Coronation took place.

Unfortunately you can’t take photos inside the Cathedral, which I’m guessing is to preserve the colour of the paintings against flash photography, but if you look at the website here, you will see how magnificent it looks from the inside.


If you walk up 257 steps from the main floor, you will reach the Whispering Gallery. They say if you whisper against the wall, it can be heard on the opposite side of the dome. You can then walk up another 119 steps to the Golden Gallery where you have amazing views right across London.

At the bottom of the Cathedral is the Crypt, holding tombs of some important British historical figures, such as the Duke of Wellington, Florence Nightingale, poet William Blake and Sir Christopher Wren. I love visiting Cathedrals and St. Paul’s is a beautiful example. Worth every penny!

From here I walked east to the Monument, a structure built between 1671 and 1677 to remember the great fire of London in 1666. Aparently, if you laid the monument down, towards Pudding Lane, where the fire supposedly started, it would point you to the spot of the bakery in which it began, burning for three days and destroying a huge portion of the city.

Again, a creation of Sir Christopher Wren, the Monument is 202ft (61m) high and you can climb 311 steps, through a tiny entrance that the average obese American tourist wouldn’t get through, to reach the top for another fantastic panoramic view of the City of London. You even get a certificate to prove you’ve done it!

After all that stair-climbing my little legs were getting tired. I decided to stay on the flat and walked just over 4km, all the way back to Waterloo station. It was a beautiful day, on the quieter side of the Thames and the walk couldn’t have been more perfect. From here I could take in all the famous buildings along the river bank, along with the many bridges that dot the river. And as it was a Saturday in the financial district, there were hardly any people around!

We knew it would be another stunning day on Sunday, albeit a tad on the chilly side, so we decided to check out Hampton Court Palace, only a 15 or so minute drive from our house. All I really knew about this Palace before we went was that one of the King Henrys lived here because it was on the TV show, The Tudors. I had a lot to learn...

It was actually the home of King Henry VIII and then King William III and is spectacular, as the Royal Palaces tend to be. We spent three hours there and you could easily spend a full day browsing only a handful of the 3000-odd rooms (not all open to the public) and stately gardens, including the oldest hedge maze in England, which disappointingly only took about 5 minutes because Russ had remembered a trick from school.

Again, you can’t take photos inside the rooms to preserve the 300 year old paintings and furnishings, but click here to check out some of the professional pictures.

We got to look through the old Tudor kitchens and food storage rooms which had massive fireplaces for spit-roasting the meat. Aparently they kept the dining rooms right away from the kitchens because of the fire hazard.

We also looked through the King and Queens’ separate areas of the Palace, each with old paintings and furniature, blocked by motion sensors because as one sign said, a small child could crush the 300 year old chair that the Queen sat it to receive people. There were so many rooms and we only got to see such a small number of them. Even some of the rooms we did see appeared pointless., such as the King’s three or more closets which had no apparent space for any clothes... What would you do with all those rooms?? A lot of them had either extravagant paintings covering the walls and ceilings, or massive tapestries hanging from the walls. In one room we saw a huge tapestry, a lady there told us it had a lot of gold weaved into it and said at the time it cost the same price as a battleship and the workers on one. The Tudors show did make reference to King Henry spending a lot of money, willy nilly.

The Palace is right by the Thames, just out of London and I could definitely imagine myself living there!! Now I’m on the hunt for things to do next weekend!