London

08/25/2010

Today I left Edinburgh at 6a for a nine hour bus ride to London. At 3:30p I arrived, set my GPS for the Sidney Webb House, and walked 3.3 miles in the rain with 50+ lbs of stuff and a cold… I arrived about an hour later and was about to pass out when a guy from the lobby showed up with information about a class meeting taking place. After the meeting I took a shower, unpacked and passed out in my dorm.

08/26/2010

This morning we went on a walk around Southwark (pronounced "suffic"). The first stop was St George the Martyr - a 1726 church with a beacon utilizing three aluminated faces.

Next we went to Southwark Cathedral and Borough (pronounced "burra") Market - the last wholesale food market, where we saw "dead" rabbits hanging around still twitching a bit.

Then we saw a reconstructed galleon called the Golden Hinde. Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world the world from 1577 to 1580 and 140,000 miles in total in the galleon.

Finally, we stopped at The Tate Modern museum where we also saw the Millenium Bridge, St Paul's Cathedral and the Globe Theater. 

We took a break and then went to the London Eye where we saw Big Ben, Parliament, etc from a birds eye view. 

08/27/2010

This morning we went to the British Museum and saw the vast selection of fossils, modern art and artifacts from around the world including the Rosetta Stone - an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BCE on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek. The stone provided the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

After the museum I went to Tesco and bought some food and an Ethernet cable then had an LSE student try to log me into the internet with her log in info but it didn’t work… worth a shot.