Day At The Museum

 Dear Grace,

I promise I'm going to get on to my latest adventures right after my first story. So I'm incredibly stingy and didn't want to pay something like $15 to do a load of laundry, so I had the (not so) brilliant idea to wash my laundry in the bathtub. I do not recommend doing this. It kills your back, and takes a lot of time. Anyway, I had to get clever finding places to hang everything to dry (which took a couple of days).

So, yeah, I think I'll either keep up with the wash or else go to the laundromat next time. So today we had a very long day of walking and climbing a goodly number of stairs on our travels. We started out at the monument that was built in memory of the 1666 fire that burned down most of London...

...and walked and walked and walked around the city seeing the sites and occasionally hanging around some places...

...checking  out various lovely things along the way like churches and cute little shopping plazas (which I would have liked to stop at and see, but we didn't have time).

At last we came to our first destination: St. Paul's Cathedral! All this time I've been able to see the dome of this building from various places in the city, but I always thought it was some sort of city capitol building. I couldn't believe it was a cathedral until we went inside!

Sadly they didn't allow any photography inside, which was a truly spectacular sight, but if you ever get the chance to travel to London one day, I HIGHLY recommend you stop by St. Paul's for a peek inside. The other best part of the tour was when we climbed 528 steps to get up to the lookout point above the dome. Best. View. Ever! From up there you can see all of London stretching out before you for miles and miles in every direction.

After meandering at the cathedral for quite some time, we split up to go to lunch. Most everyone here seems to be able to eat out for every meal, but as I am a pack-your-own-lunch kind of girl, my fellow sack-lunch buddies Briona and Betsy and I all took a little stroll down to Postman Park to have a little picnic, which I thought was much more fun :)

(That is a pack of gum on my butt, just FYI)

After lunch we walked down the street to the London Museum, which was my favorite museum I've seen so far on this trip.

After the museum, we were pretty trashed, but no so trashed that we didn't stop to pick up some cakes from the store on our way home! I seriously don't understand how everyone here isn't morbidly obese when they have such good chocolate and so many amazing pastries and treats everywhere! We're going to watch Pride and Prejudice tonight after we do some homework, and we're motivating ourselves to do that by not eating the cakes until we're done!