On Thursday, we took a trip to the incredible Tower of London. I remember visiting the Tower when I came to London in 7th grade. Walking up to the building brought back an incredible flood of memories. Beefeaters, ravens, crown jewels, bloody towers, jail cells, fuzzy hatted guards... I didn't think I would remember as much as I did, but it seemed like I had just visited last summer. Oh, what's that? You want to see some pictures? You've got it!
"That's no moon, that's a battle station."
Here is a nice wide shot that gives a pretty good feel for how large the Tower of London is. It's well guarded and very castle-y.
Quoth the raven, "Give me more."
I saw this raven as soon as we arrived. He managed to pull a sandwich out of the garbage can and started picking at it right there! Yummo!
Here's that raven eating the sandwich!
Next, our whole group galloped into the Jewel House, the storage center for the -- ahem -- family jewels. We saw the royal sceptres, crowns, capes, punch bowls, rings, coronation spoons, cuff links, and goblets, but I wasn't allowed to take any pictures. Weak, right? Don't worry, there's plenty more to see from the tower.
Meanwhile, outside the Jewel House...
We were allowed to take as many pictures as we wanted of the Jewel House. Here, you can see how awesome I'm getting at taking panoramas. This is stitched together from 9 separate photos. This is only the short side of the Jewel house. The wide side takes up almost the entire width of the complex.
Pickles? Yes, please.
I got so excited when I saw the Gherkin again, I had to take another photo and share it with you, dearest readers. It was perfectly visible from the Tower.
We saw the guards undergo inspection and march away. There was a huge crowd gathered around the guards. Some Beefeaters attempted to clear a path for them, but they cleared it in the wrong spot and the guards almost trampled a few people. I was smart enough to realize they weren't going through the nice wide hole the Beefeaters had cleared for them, but instead they were going to go wherever they wanted.
"Honey, I'm ho- ouch!"
I've noticed that I'm a bit too tall for some doors and tube stations around here. I've been ducking left and right to dodge the next potential head injury, but nothing could have prepared me for this door. Think "Being John Malkovich". A staircase in front of me, behind your viewing perspective, led to high up jail cell. In the cell, old wall carvings, referred to as "graffitio," marked the stone walls. Most of them were in Latin, but from what I could tell, were all about the desperation of man in the face of adversity. If you wanted a translation, I'd say it was roughly, "OHMIGOD I'M ABOUT TO DIE, DON'T FORGET ME."
At least it's not a bloody shower, right?
I'm almost positive my dad took the same picture when I visited the Tower in 7th grade. Did you get a good look at that year? 1225. Wow.
After we saw the Tower of London, we headed over to the Tower Bridge, the bridge most often mistaken for London Bridge. I posted a picture of it in an entry a few days ago, but here are some great shots from the bridge.
A great view of the Tower of London's river side.
A view of the other side of the river.
Here's a great view of the other side of the river. The squat, round building is city hall.
I took a handful of panoramas from inside the bridge's walkway, 45 meters above the river. I won't post them here but you can look at them on my flickr page. Remember: every picture here is a link to my Flickr photos!
After we visited the Tower and Tower Bridge, we went home and rested our barking dogs for a day at Hursley Park the site of IBM's British campus. Hursley is 75 miles outside of London. We took a coach bus out of the city to IBM's unmarked campus which was surrounded by lush purple fields.
So pretty!
We guessed that this stuff was lavender, but our host told us that its a plant grown for it's valuable oil.
"Oh, hello there."
Whatever it is, I look great standing in front of it.
We spent the better part of the afternoon hearing from IBM developers and liaisons. We learned about the CICS ("Customer Information Control System", pronounced "kicks") a transaction server that handles nearly every single transaction we carry out. I won a bumper sticker for guessing that nearly 1 million developers in the world use CICS.
The best part of the day was visiting the Innovation Centre. The IC is where IBM develops services that will help improve our lives by reducing costs for businesses and, by extension, us.
"Price check on year 2050."
This was one of the coolest things we saw. It's a digital price tag that can receive updates on price instantly. No more will stores have to go around manually marking and remarking prices using stickers.
Electronic ink? Chea, right!
No, really! This price tag is an earlier version that uses a special type of ink called E-Ink. Hand scanners used by store employees can be used to change the price displayed without ever printing a single new price tag.
Do you think this thing gets hot?
IBM is big on storage. This particular unit has 160 Terabytes of storage, thousands of times as much storage your home computer has.
Are you being coy?
We also took a tour of the campus grounds. IBM has made a point to maintain the original look of the grounds. Hursley House has a long history - it was owned by Oliver Cromwell, a British Civil War general. It was later used as a hospital during the first and second World Wars and a development site for the Spitfire.
Nothing to see here.
We didn't go in here, but this is where monitors and computer innards were placed and the amount of radiation they produced was measured.
Aren't we handsome?
Another cute class photo. Behind us is the grandiose Hursley House.
After our visit to IBM, we returned home to our London flats and regrouped. After dinner, Zak, Lucas, Chip, Vinny and I decided we wanted to go out. My friend Dan Reedy recommended a visit to Fabric, one of London's posh night spots. Thanks Dan, it was awesome! Well dressed Brits and foreigners alike joined us in a night of sweaty dancing. We had a great time, but I wish we had checked their website first. They offer a student discount on admission!
The next morning, after a full night of sleep, Mia and I decided to visit Portobello Road Market, an almost undescribeable collection of vendors selling fruit and veg, tea, candy, antiques, clothes, sunglasses, CDs, and more. The market stretches for several miles and occupies the entire width of the street and sidewalk. Thousands of tourists and Londoners flock to the market to pick up viturally anything they want there. I didn't take too many pictures, but those I did give you a pretty good idea of the madness that is the Portobello Road Market.
People!
It was like getting out of a Red Sox game but more fun and there were fewer drunken baseball fans. But I did see one guy wearing his Sox shirt.
Buildings!
These buildings were gorgeous! Most of the buildings on this road were gorgeous. Even the junk shops that sold the same things as Good Will or the Salvation Army had nice shop-fronts.
Banksy!!!
Here is something I never dreamed of just stumbling upon. Banksy is probably the most famous graffiti artist in the world. I say famous, an important distinction from infamous or well known. Banksy, while not universally loved over here, is appreciated by a surprising number of people. He has snuck his work into museums, painted The Wall in Israel, and as you can see here, hit the Market.
The owner of this store sold the painting on eBay for more than £200,000 with the buyer taking responsibility for collecting it. It seems that the buyer or owner decided it would be best to leave the wall intact and allow the public to see it.
After the Market, my flat mates decided to visit Soho for dinner. We looked all over Soho but couldn't really settle on a place to eat. We picked King George, a bar that served burgers. I know, so American. What we found afterwards made almost an hour of wandering and sub-par food all seem worth it.
G-A-Y.
It was some theatre doing a gay play. No, no, a play about gay. Forget it. It's just about the most bold, fierce sign I've seen in London.
While I'm being childish, I'll finish off this post with one last picture of me. I found this just outside the IBM entrance. Think about it.
I hope I don't have to do any more of these marathon posts. They take forever to read and I really wanted this to be a bite-size blog. Look for more (but less than this) later. Oh. And check my last post for an new panoramic of The Queen's House and a video of the protest. Cool!
From London with Love,
Eric
2 comments:
your posting is hilarious =)
Eric, I am very serious. You must let me know in someway or another about what you think of this.
Eric --
Please, I know you want to avoid me and not talk...but you have to understand that this is serious. Please act like an adult.
You are treating this as the worst thing that has ever happened. This will seem like a little blip in our lives later on. You don't have to ignore me and keep doing this. We *will* run into each other someday, and probably soon. I want to be on neutral ground. I don't want to hate you, I would much rather simply co-exist and move forward.
You are keeping this from happening by acting like nothing existed, nothing mattered, and that we never shared anything meaningful. We did many wonderful things together, and I am lucky to have experienced them with you. I will always see you as a special person, and someone who had a major influence on my life -- both positive *and* negative, I may add. I'm happy where I am right now, but there are things that need to be respectfully and completely cleared up. The night you left was a whirlwind, and although you may say that you gave me answers as to why you were doing all of this...it still makes zero sense to me what got into your head that changed you and pushed you to make this decision without sitting down with me and talking about your problems first. In any relationship -- with you family, friends, co-workers, whatever...it's a given that you have to communicate in order to make any progress. You ran away because you never experienced any struggle. I hope that you see this clearly and understand.
Thanks,
Rebecca
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