London trip: London Eye

Here's the last London trip post I had announced.

Since the London Eye, although slightly annoying with the Coca-Cola advertising, is regarded to be one of the top sights of London, I had decided to spend the money for a ride. I mean, it's Europe's biggest Ferris wheel, and the view of London from up there was supposed to be great.

We arrived a bit earlier, so we still had time to go to the "4D Experience". That turned out to be a short film (4 minutes, according to Wikipedia) about the London Eye and London in general in 4D - 3D plus a bit of water. Not the most exciting event ever, but it was included in the ticket, which wasn't exactly cheap. Therefore, Christian was like, "we won't allow a part of our ticket to go to waste!" Good point.

Afterwards, we went straightaway to the queue for the London Eye. According to the ticket, you are required to start queuing 30 minutes before your booked slot. Unless you have a fast track ticket, which of course we didn't have - would have been even more expensive.

However, this way, we had lots of time to take pictures of the London Eye from all possible distances and angles.

By the way, there were lots of people behind us, although I had bought tickets for the last slot, 21:30. If you're wondering: getting tickets for the latest slot was intentional. There would have been tickets for the same price from as early as 17:30 (before that time, tickets would have been more expensive - they seem to use every way they can think of to make more money). But I wanted to see London at night anyway so I decided for a time that was for sure after sunset. As you can see from the pictures taken while queuing, it got dark at that time.

According to my camera, the first picture taken from the capsule was taken at 21:33. So the estimated queuing time of 30 minutes was pretty accurate.

So, here are the best pictures my camera was capable of taking at night. I think, it looked even better when seeing it for real.

Yeah, too many pictures, I know, but it was just so beautiful...!

P.S. Solution from the announcement post: that was shortly before landing at Stansted. I couldn't take a picture of flying over London, which was way brighter, because they hadn't turned off the lights in the plane by then. As I said, Stansted is not really London. ;-)

London trip: a bit of Harry Potter sightseeing!

It was only during the tour on Friday when I actively realised the connection between London and Harry Potter. Sure, Hogwarts is not in London, but some other places. :-D Additionally, the films were shot in a studio close to London. No, I didn't do the Studio Tour - but that might be a reason to go back at some point!

Anyway, I wouldn't have had time for a lot of Harry Potter sightseeing. I didn't even do one of the self-guided Harry Potter tours (there were maps on sale at a place we passed during the tour). But Harry Potter was at least a small part of the "London all in one"-tour. That's because next to St Clement Danes, there was Australia House, the Australian embassy - which happened to be Gringotts in the films!

(stupid trees ...)

Our tour guide said, if you asked politely, they might even let you inside (ask Google, it must be really cool).

On Saturday, I could also spot a bit of Harry Potter in the British Museum. In the Money exhibition, that we passed, to be precise:

By the way: although it looks more like play money, this is real money, issued by the Isle of Man in the 2000s (not kidding).

In the afternoon, I wanted to go to King's Cross, the famous railway station where the Hogwarts Express departs from platform 9 3/4. We ended up visiting three train stations that are all connected to Harry Potter.

First, we went to King's Cross, of course, because that's the station mentioned in the books and films.

That's what it really looks like at the entrance to platform 9 and 10:

That's how you miss the Hogwarts Express for sure: no access without a valid ticket. :-P But for the fans, there is a fake platform 9 3/4 for taking pictures:

Poor Hedwig ...

And, of course, there's also a Harry Potter shop ... We didn't go in though, because you actually had to queue for entering shop. Maybe another reason to come back sometime, it looked quite cool when ignoring all the people:

Next to King's Cross, there's another station, St Pancras International. I think, that's what you can actually see in the film(s) when they show "King's Cross" from the outside - just because it looks more impressive than the real King's Cross:

Well, and then we took the tube for just one station in order to go to the third railway station: Euston (still confused because of Heuston station in Dublin). That was because J.K. Rowling once said in an interview that she had Euston in mind when writing about the train station in Harry Potter and only noticed her mistake when the book had already been published.
But as you can see, it doesn't really look any better at Euston:

Fact is, J.K. didn't really have the chance to check out the train station when writing the first book: Google Earth didn't exist in the nineties - and J.K. wrote Harry Potter not in London, but in Edinburgh (that's where I'm going at the end of the month, by the way ...).

London trip: the gigantic tour

So this is the first separate post I had promised in my overview post.

I had registered for the "London all in one"-tour by Free Tours By Foot (the woman in the website's video is actually Margaret, our tour guide). This 6 hours tour turned out to be a combination of two tours: 2.5 hours Westminster tour, 1 hour lunch break, and then 2.5 hours City of London tour.

The start of the tour was at the Diana Fountain in Green Park. Since I didn't feel like walking through Hyde Park in order to go there, I used this opportunity of taking the tube for the first time. That worked surprisingly well (no tube strike on that day), and I was actually at the meeting point early. So I even had time to meet other people going on this tour and to discuss whether this was the right fountain in the right park. There's a fountain with a similar name in Hyde Park which causes a bit of confusion ...

As you can imagine, Margaret showed us a lot during the next hours. I even took notes, because I knew I wouldn't be able to memorise everything. I'm currently trying to match my notes with my pictures and will try to do my best telling you what parts of London I saw. But I need to stress that I can't promise this to be a complete report of the tour. :-D

Westminster

First, we made our way through Green Park to Buckingham Palace to see the Changing of the Guards - and the Palace itself, obviously. We were even on time to see the Changing of the Horse Guards / Mounted Guards:

A short photo stop at the Palace:

Lots of people waiting for the ceremony ...

 We didn't try to get closer to the Palace, but instead walked along the road, making a short stop at Charles's and Camilla's place:

There are always two guards, no matter if they are at home or not.

Then, we lined up at the street where the guards arrived within a few minutes:

Of course, a bunch of people followed them ... However, we walked in the other direction to see St. James's Palace:

Afterwards, we had to walk a bit until we came to our next stop: Trafalgar Square with the National Gallery in the background:

At the moment, you can see a skeleton horse on a plinth left of the fountain. It's part of a project with changing artworks on this plinth.

"Gift Horse"

From Trafalgar Square, we walked along Whitehall to Whitehall Palace - or what's left of it:

Next to the former residence of the monarch, there's also 10 Downing Street. But there's not really a lot to see, because it's not open to the public. Fun Fact: Prime Minister David Cameron actually lives in 11 Downing Street. :-D

Since this was the Westminster tour, guess where we went afterwards? Westminster Abbey, of course:

And the final stop of this tour was the famous Elizabeth Tower. You think, you don't know it? Yes, you do! It's the tower with Big Ben, the really famous bell. The Clock Tower was just renamed in 2012.

(In fact, this picture wasn't taken during the tour, but a day later.)

Then, we had about an hour lunch break. We went to Villiers Street, and since I didn't really know anyone I joined two Argentinian girls for going to a pub. I won't repeat the conversation which contained the quality of Argentinian food (meat ...) and the seemingly terrible lack of differentiation between friend/boyfriend/husband in Germany (didn't know before that there was a problem).

City of London

We managed to find our meeting point, the tube station Temple. At the beginning of the tour, we were told that there is actually a difference between London and the City of London, although some people might refer to London as the City of London ... Actually, City of London is just a small district of London, the historic city.

There are a lot of churches in this part of London, so we just started with the first one, St Clement Danes. However, the important thing about this church is not the building itself, but the fact that it was bombed during WW2. Okay, that's not only true for this church - but this one wasn't completely restored. People still come here to see the holes which are a memorial site, a place of worship:

Another important building, but no church, is the Royal Courts of Justice. It's a really impressive building designed in Victorian Gothic style:

On the other side of the street, so small we probably would have failed to notice it, was the very first Twinings store:

Then we came to Fleet Street. I mean, the street was still the same, but the name changed when passing this thing:

Temple Bar Memorial, I think.

Fleet Street

Prince Henry's Room, an old building on Fleet Street.

Then we visited some places connected to Samuel Johnson, an English writer and lexicographer (he published A Dictionary of the English Language). The most interesting one was the statue of his cat Hodge. xD

Then we went to another church designed by Christopher Wren - this guy practically designed everything in the City of London! But this church is especially important because it inspired the shape of wedding cakes:

Next one was St Paul's Cathedral - Christopher Wren's highlight:

Second biggest dome, directly after St Peter's in Rome.

But the tour wasn't over at this point. We saw a few more churches, e. g. St Augustine. That one is interesting, because it's not a church anymore, but a school:

We also went to Mansion House and the Royal Exchange, but I didn't get nice any pictures of them. Afterwards, we stopped at the Monument to the Great Fire of London; the fire in 1666 which lasted for about four days and destroyed major parts of the city.

Then we had a short photo stop at the River Thames, somewhere between London Bridge and Tower Bridge.

London Bridge is the boring bridge you might spot here.

Just to make sure: Tower Bridge is the nice bridge you can see on all the postcards:

Victorian Gothic style again, I suppose ...

From the photo taking point, you could also see The Shard, a skyscraper:

This building caused some more Dublin-London-confusion for me, because it strangely reminded me of the Spire in Dublin. Probably the names ...

The gigantic tour finally ended at the Tower of London, which in fact is not a tower, but a castle.

Don't ask me why I added links to some sights, but not to other ones. Not sure whether there's logic behind it ...