The Duc Pond

The flight wasn’t too bad. Virgin Atlantic gave us two meals during the flight, and they have LCD monitors for every seat. Their entertainment is on-demand with a damn fine selection of TV shows, movies, music, and more. I watched an episode of The Office (U.S. version) and most of Team America: World Police. Slept maybe an hour or two, which sucks because we left Monday night and thanks to time zone shifting, arrived at 10 AM Tuesday morning in London, ready to start a new day.

When we arrived, we chilled a bit at Amy’s friend’s apartment (which is where we’re staying), then went on this bus tour of London (we figured we’d do something easy and low-key after the long sleepless flight). It was a nice quick overview of the major sights in London.

Then today (Wednesday) we went to see St. Paul’s Cathedral, which is quite beautiful inside. Many, many Britons are entombed there, mostly in the floor of the crypt level. So many in fact that they’ve become quite blas? about having dead bodies in the floor and they just set up their chairs and such right over them. Everyone steps on the tombs as well. We went on a very informative tour about the place. Also, there’s a great dome. We climbed all the way to the top and got a great view of London.

We headed over to Westminster Abbey afterwards, but they were already closed. We met up with Amy’s friend and we walked around London to Trafalgar Square, parts of Soho, ate in Chinatown (which is only a couple streets; quite small and lame quite frankly) and up to Hyde Park to see the Marble Arch.

A good day!

Very interesting thing about London (and Britain or the UK in general): they rebuild the same buildings over and over again in the same location. St. Paul’s Cathedral, for example, has existed in one form or another for like 1400 years. The current version is the 4th or 5th I think. It’s the same with other places. On the bus tour they would say something like “Taxes have been collected here since 1620.” Now the building isn’t 400 years old. It might only be 100 years old or even younger (much was destroyed in World War II after all). But the point is that some kind of tax collection building has been there for 400 years.

Makes me wonder how Britons would have handled 9/11. Now the World Trade Center isn’t a government or royal building, but I can’t help but think that British citizens would have wanted to just rebuild the Twin Towers. Didn’t Churchill say, regarding Big Ben if Germany were to destroy it, “We shall rebuild it again, and again, as many times as is required. Because it is not theirs to destroy, it is OURS.”