God Save The Queen

Wednesday 15th June 2009

We thought we had a week to do the tourist thing in London, so we slept in and didn't leave Matt and Nicki's until 11:30am. We didn't work out until later that we really only had three days so had to kind of rush everything in.

Matt and Nicki live near an underground station so we took the tube to Harrods and had a look in there for about half an hour - talk about extravagant luxury! £100,000 speakers in the hi-fi department, £65,000 earrings in the jewellery section... the list goes on. There are some fantastic decorations in the store (like the Egyptian escalator) but after all it is just a store, so we kept going.

We started walking down Picadilly and found a giant archway called the Wellington Arch and the road that passes underneath is called Constitution Hill and it goes through the middle of a park so we followed that down. After getting our bearings on the map we were excited to discover that Buckingham Palace was just at the end of this road so we hurried on down and spent a good few minutes taking photos of the palace, the guards and the Queen Victoria memorial in front.


Us out the front of Buckingham Palace, with the Queen Victoria monument in the foreground.

We were just kind of following our noses at this point and started walking along St James's Park. We had missed the changing of the guard at the palace, and the palace itself wasn't open for visitors until next month so we were a bit disappointed we couldn't get closer to the guards with the big hats. But as we were walking we came across some of the same guards that were more out in the open guarding St James's Palace. We were about to get some close up photos when about 5 more came marching down the driveway from inside the palace and did their own little changing of the guards right there (from what we hear it was the same as at Buckingham Palace just without the band) so that was exciting!


The changing of the guard at St James's Palace. The bobby at the front was there because there was some kind of VIP shindig going on and he was part of the checkpoint at the front.

As we continued walking down alongside St James's Park we came across a few more interesting sights - the Duke of York Column, Regent Street (has a lot of random statues), the International College of Art (had a quick look), Admiralty Arch, a memorial statue of Captain James Cook and right at the opposite end to Buckingham Palace was Trafalgar Square with Nelson's Column.


Admiralty Arch

From there we found some souvenier shops and Mel bought a keyring like she's been doing from everywhere (plus some pressies) and then we kept walking down towards Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.


Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament

From there we walked across the bridge to an area called Southbank and took a ride on the London Eye - the big permanent ferris wheel. It takes about half an hour to go around and from the top you can see just about everything - even Buckingham Palace! From there we took the tube out to Oxford Street just to have a look (and to find a GPS for when we go through Europe) but by then we had to get back for the mid-week church meeting.

The London Eye

The mid-week church meeting was a housemeeting and they call it Central London but the only ones in the church who live in Central London are all Aussies, some of whom we were good friends with before we left Australia, so it was great to catch up with everyone!