Monday, March 24th

Since riding the tube doesn't really help to orient a person to the above ground topography, we decided that Monday morning would be a good time to go up the London Eye. Despite the SNOW that was falling, the cloud cover was high enough to give us a view of London from this giant bike-wheel looking structure. The next morning we read about the Eye having technical difficulties and people being instructed to open up the emergency supplies while they waited for it to get fixed. They were only stuck for about 30 minutes, but I imagine it was a little nerve wracking for long enough.

From the Eye, we tubed it over to Victoria Station which is a place to see in itself. It was eerily quiet since it was still a bank holiday, but everything was open and we looked in vain for a few toques for our windblown selves. We knew that we wanted to see the musical "Wicked" and that it was playing across the street from Victoria Station, so we went directly to the theatre box office to inquire about tickets for later in the week before walking towards Buckingham Palace. On the way, we stopped in at Westminster Cathedral, the largest Catholic church in London I believe. The mosaics in there are beautiful, and many are quite recent and still in bright colours. We also found a pub on our way to eat lunch at, "The Bag of Nails". Excellent fish and chips, but , alas, they were out of mushy peas.

Once we got there, we took quite a few pictures in front of Buckingham Palace, Canada Gate and down the Mall through St. James' Park. The weather cleared up a bit, but there was still a nasty bit of wind to chill us. By the time we had walked to Trafalgar Square, my search for a toque was getting a bit desperate, and thankfully I found a cheap one so I could let Keith have his back (he had bought one at the Chelsea game the day before). We posed with the lions at the base of the Nelson Monument (they are higher up than they look!) before spending a bit of time in the National Gallery and then heading to supper.

Our evening was spent at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church listening to Handel's Messiah being performed. It as an excellent concert, though I would have preferred an alto to a contra tenor. Seeing a grown man sing with a woman's voice coming out just didn't do it for me. This church has been an still is undergoing major restorations, but at least this trip we were able to get in to it.

The pictures above seem to be loading in the reverse order that I choose them in. I'll see what I can do about it in tomorrow's post!