Ramin and I left the hotel after unpacking and having breakfast. On the agenda for today?
- Take the Underground and walk to Kensington Palace
- Walk the grounds (the palace was closed to visitors for renovations)
- Walk to Hyde Park
- Walk to Buckingham Palace
- See the Wellington Arch along the way
- Walk to the Victoria & Albert Museum and explore that
- Take the Underground to Picadilly Circus
- Walk to Trafalgar Square
- Explore the National Gallery
- Walk to Madame Tussauds
- Take the Underground back home!
I just love Queen Victoria, and her statues were everywhere in England so I tried to get as many pictures with them as I could!
Next: Hyde Park
This was one of the gated entrances to the park. I always love everything ornate!
We weren't really sure what this monument was all about but it was huge and awesome!
Just outside of the Victoria & Albert museum was found our first telephone booth - so we had to get pictures here!
Next: Victoria & Albert Museum. We really had not clue what to expect when we got here but by were we amazed!
There were effigies all over the freakin place - and this goes for all of England too - pretty much every major place and church we went to had some sort of tomb monument.
Just one of the many galleries in the museum! I've only seen real art like this on TV
When we stepped into this gallery were just BLOWN AWAY - that's the best way to describe it!
The most badass statue ever!
One of the courtyards inside the museum. I just love courtyards - we saw so many of them on our trip. They are cute little open spaces entirely surrounded by building.
It's hard to tell in this pic but that is the life size reproduction of David (I think)...it was MASSIVE!
After the museum, we continued on our way along Hyde Park....it's a very large park!
Pretty much ever park we went to had swans and other birds everywhere!
We made our way past Wellington Arch. You can tell from the lady in the picture that this arch and the statue on top of it were MASSIVE!
The gate at the bottom of it was really impressive and ornate (remember, I like ornate things :P)
Past the Wellington Arch, we started heading toward Buckingham Palace. This was the fence alongside the palace - very intense!
And we're marking our way around to the front!
And here's the front. You clearly cannot go into Buckingham Palace because that's where the Queen usually resides...but apparently there are times in the Summer when she's traveling to her other places where they let you in for tours.
There were tons of people around but I hate bugging someone to take our pic, so I made Ramin take this awkward self-portrait of us!
The Palace sits at the end of a very cool round-about and in the center of the round about was this fountain and statue, with Victoria on it of course, so I had to have another picture! She's there on the right of the statue sitting on her throne!
A final view of the palace and Ramin
We continued walking and made our way to Picadilly Circus. If you're not familiar with what it is, well a circus is just a round about...and this particular round about is very Times Square-esque. We didn't get a picture of the stairs and statue in the middle of the round about because we were sitting there taking pictures of everything around us.
Making our way down a bit further we came to the National Gallery and Trafalgar Square!
The National Gallery was basically at one end of Trafalgar Square and it was very massive!
They also had a monument to count down the days until the 2012 Summer Olympics in London!
The large monument at Trafalgar!
This was just a really cool building near the Square
And our final stop on our first day of sightseeing was Madame Tussaud's House of Wax! I've always loved wax museums, thanks to my Dad :P So we went through this pretty quickly and snapped some pictures of famous people.
Kate Winslet
Robert Pattinson (aka Edward) and Taylor Lautner (aka Jacob) - from Twilight
Sherlock Holmes
Alfred Hitchcock
Lewis Hamilton (Forumla 1 race car driver from England - one of Ramin's favorites)
Tiger Woods
The Queen!
Stephen Hawking (for Chris)
Wolverine (for Chris too)
So that's the end of Day 1 - quite a lot of pictures! It's very time consuming to upload all of these pictures to this blog and write everything out so I'm going to take the next week to do the rest of the days of our trip. We still have 6 more days worth of pictures to go!
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