Our second day in London got off to a slow start thanks to our late partying the night before. Jason and I both slept until around 10am. However, after that I think we made great use of our time.
We gathered up Mark and Paul and headed on the tube towards the Science museum. While some parts of it were oddly mundane, such as the "Household Materials" section which featured such simple items as tootpaste and baking soda, other parts were fantastic. There was a large section just on math; specifically dealing with calculus and geometry. There was also a nice section on various ships throughout time populated with incredibly detailed models. Some were huge and all were amazing.
We spent quite a bit of time in the museum until Mark, Jason, and I kind of gave up. Right next door was the natural history museum but we didn't really have the motivation to hang out in museums all day. Paul actually started to get the flu or something equally irritating so he kind of wanted to go back to the hotel. However, we looked at the map and saw we were only a few blocks from Harrods so we all decided to head over there and see that part of town.
We hardly spent any time at Harrods at all - maybe 15 minutes tops. We walked through their fine watch department and some of the watches pricetags lived up to the billing. I saw many at the 30-50k pound range; that's the $60-100k range in USD. We walked out of Harrods and there were two Ferrari's and a Mazeratti parked on the curb. Amazingly those weren't the nicest cars we saw. In fact, when we first got off the tube to go to the science museuem a Lamborgini store was just across the street so we swung by and imagined we could take a test drive. In reality we couldn't even enter the store.
After Harrods I thought Paul was going to head back to the hotel but then we realized we were fairly close to Hyde Park so we headed that way, then we were going to load Paul on a train but realized we were close to Buckingham Palace so we went over there.
We couldn't actually get close to the Palace, it is pretty well fenced off but we did get some nice photos of the famous guards. I was a little disappointed I couldn't get close to them though since Lisa really wanted me to get a photo up close. As we were leaving and heading down the main drive up to the Palace we saw a satellite guard shack that was just about to go through a changing of the guards. Sweet. I took some nice photos of the guards and Mark took a photo of me with one.
After our encounter with the guards we realized we were close to 10 Downing Street (Prime Ministers House) so we went there, then we saw Big Ben so we went there. By this point it seemed like Paul would never head back to the hotel but we finally split up. Mark, Jason, and I headed to Westminster Abbey but it was closed for tourists on Sundays so we decided to cross the Thames and check out the huge ferris wheel that is the eye. When we got there we ran back into Paul who had also decided to see the wheel.
Finally we headed toward a tube station and rode back to the hotel where we deposited Paul and then went out to dinner. Dinner was at a pitifully bad "pub" that was really more of a chain restaurant that was like a crappy Applebees. All in all it was a really good day and I think we managed to see an amazing amount of stuff. We still haven't made it to the Tower of London nor have we ridden the Eye but both are still planned for later this week.
I've put up some photos from day 2.
London : Day 2
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