What a mess of a day! (Thursday)

Was much too tired to blog Thursday night, so as I write this Friday night, I don’t know what details I’ll remember. I only have my written vacation journal notes to go from at this point, but here goes:

We started by taking the wrong tube as we tried to get back on the “Original Bus Tour” of London (our tickets were good until 1 pm) so we thought we’d save our feet instead of running about numerous tube stations. Anyway, we wanted to alight the bus and make our way to St. Paul’s Cathedral. However, we got aboard the wrong one—there is a red, yellow, and blue tour. So we ended up seeing a lot of stuff again. To make it worse, we couldn’t just hop off as the traffic was so horrible, and it took a long time to get to the next stop. From there, we took a tube to St. Paul’s cathedral. By this time, we had already wasted much time. St. Paul’s was well worth the trouble, however. It cost about 9 pounds to get in (EACH), and I soon found out it was one penance after another. While I admired the grandeur of the ground floor of the cathedral, I wanted to get a little closer to heaven via the famous whispering gallery. On our way to the stairs, though, we admired many monuments, memorials, and other commerative regalia, most of which was aimed towards military personnel. The most memorable, though, was the tomb of Lord Leighton, a famous Pre-Raphaelite painter.

Once at the stairs, we encountered a sign that indicated the next penance was to be taken in the form of 259 winding stone stairs we had to climb to the Whispering Gallery. It was a work out! It’s not like they’re cushy steps either—we’re treading hard stone everywhere we go! At the top of the winding stairs was a long narrow corridor only wide enough for one person—this is a one way route. Along this passage way, there were spots where you could see in to what I would call the attic, for lack of better terms. We could see the top side of the domes for the ceilings of the church. It was all timbered and old and slightly creepy. It made me think of the hunchback of Notre Dame, but wrong church, wrong country. We finally emerged into the whispering gallery. This round balcony is lined with saints (the first I saw upon entering, interestingly enough, was St. Jerome). Supposedly, if one person whispers by the wall, a person directly across the room (about 100 feet away), will hear you! Paul and I tried it, but in conjunction with the way our day was going, it didn’t seem to work well.

We then wanted to go up to the Stone Gallery; this was another 116 stairs—we were now 328 stairs up from the main floor. This stairwell was narrower but not windy all the way. There were some more narrow passage ways before we emerged at a door going outside—not what I had expected, but cool! I felt a little wobbly looking down onto the roof of the main cathedral. I couldn’t even look up to see what loomed above. A few pictures of the skyline later, we reentered a narrow door to ascend the last 271 steps to the Golden Gallery. This stair case was metal and spiral. While I was reminded of the fire tower at Itasca, this was far more imposing! The Golden Gallery is the uppermost walkway on central spire above the famous dome. It was truly “awesome” in the sense that one is filled with awe at the sensation of being far above the city. This was HIGH!!! My knees were weak, I will admit, and not just from the physical exertion. Then we climbed down the whole lot, and worked our way to the Crypt below the main floor. yes, it was at least DOWN stairs, but that only meant we would have to climb out again, I thought. I was not wrong.

First, though we stopped by the Christopher Wren burial site. He was the architect of this cathedral and many other famous London sites after the Great Fire. He is buried near the middle of the church, in front of the altar. The marble slab over his resting place, reads "lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice" (reader if you seek his monument, look around). The cathedral is, indeed, a monument.

In the crypt, we saw the tombs for Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, and the Duke of Wellington. Each had huge monuments (rather plain, though, compared to the effigy-laden tombs at Westminster). Other more interesting, in my opinion, were the markers for the William Blake (his famous poem begins “To see the world in a grain of sand/ And a heaven in a wildflower.” This was etched in the stone, and I remember this from Dr. Gurney’s courses in Romantic Poets). Also, Florence Nightengale (neat, but not awesome), and a statue of Samuel Johnson, which made me think if this statue is life-sized, then Sam J was a mighty stout bloke.

After St. Paul’s cathedral, we went to a place called Paul for food. Silly us, though. We got a sandwich and other stuff. We thought the lady helping us had put the sandwich in the bag, but she hadn’t. We were in a rush to catch the bus tour again and thus didn’t realize it was missing until we got on the bus to eat (we were starving…apparently climbing 500 stairs can stimulate the appetite). Finally, we caved. We ducked sheepishly into a McDonald’s so we could get something familiar and quick before resuming our tour.

We then took a tube to the British Museum. There was simply too much to look at, but we did enjoy the Egyptian mummy displays. In the Greece and Rome rooms, I kept wondering which was the Urn from the famous Keat’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” As many of my students puzzle about what the heck he meant by “leaf-fringed laurels” and the reference to deities, I thought I could find a similar Urn to take a picture of for a reference (yes, you can take pictures….it doesn’t seem right, but you can).

Finally, our feet just wore out. We took the tube back to the Marble Arch (near a corner of Hyde Park which is down the road from the hotel), and then popped into Tyburns for Nachos (Tyburns is the name of the pub mentioned on day 1 when I had fish and chips, by the way. Paul now refers to it as “our pub.”)