London, England

We arrived in London on Wednesday, July 1. Our last visit was two years ago, so we thought we would take these few days to catch up on some of the cultural and other ''non-touristy'' sites we had neglected last time. We started off with a visit to the National Gallery which has a fine collection of Renaissance, Baroque and Impressionism works.


Next we walked through Trafalger Square, down Whitehall Blvd. to Westminster Abbey. On our last trip we attended an Evensong service but didn't get to tour the abbey; this time we did and the tour was greatly enhanced with the excellent audio guide.

Westminster Abbey

From Westminster Abbey we took the Underground to the British Library. Although it is a huge building, the really exciting parts can be savored in less than one hour. You can view such documents as the Magna Carta, Leonardo daVinci's notebook and Gutenberg bibles as well as original Beatles' lyrics written on scraps of paper and on the back of a greeting card. Yeah, I know. Most people would have trouble putting a document which establishes the basic rights of Man alongside a rock band's songs, but hey, they had to put the Magna Carta somewhere.





On Thursday evening we attended a performance of Billy Elliot - The Musical. Its a musical adaptation of the movie from several years ago. The choice of the play was Cindy's since Mike didn't care for the movie. Both, however, really enjoyed the stage production - especially the score by Elton John.

Outside Parliment and Big Ben

On Friday we strolled through the Portobello Road market in the Notting Hill neighborhood near our hotel. It was reported to be good for people watching, but there appeared to be as many tourists as locals.

We next visited the British Museum -- an all-encompassing collection of artifacts that could only be amassed by the wide-reaching arms of the British Empire. Articles included mummies and the Rosetta Stone from ancient Egypt, carvings from the Parthenon in Athens, sculptures from ancient Rome as well as carved winged lions from Assyria.

Pharaoh Statue in the British Museum

Assyrian Carving in the British Museum

Our ''cultural'' tour of London ended with a visit to the Abbey Road crosswalk featured on the cover of the Beatles album. It was interesting to see that most of the visitors in the area had probably not even been born when the album was released. It was also interesting to see that most of the drivers were used to the tourists attempting to re-create the album cover since its the only time we have seen London drivers yield to pedestrians.

Well, OK, maybe we did do a couple of ''touristy'' things, but where are ''The Lads''?

Our final pub visit in London coincided with the Wimbledon men's semi-final match between the USA's Andy Roddick and Britain's Andy Murray. The televised event seemed to rival the ales as the main focus in the pub. Not wanting to be labeled the ''Ugly Americans,'' we quietly finished our drinks and left smiling when the American won.