The Heart of the UK

After church yesterday I had the genuine pleasure of accompanying five friends to the capital city of London. As my second UK city outside Cambridge, it was a wonderful trip. I successfully organized the transportation, which was very simple: we took a train to Liverpool Street in London... and walked everywhere else. I'd say we tallied up about 15 miles of walking in just over 24 hours.
Our first stop was the outside of the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge. That's the bridge they erected the Olympic rings on last summer. Once we got to the south side of the Thames, we were off to the Globe Theatre, a re-creation of Shakespeare's old stomping grounds. The next thing we experienced was probably my favorite: the Millennium Bridge. An engineer was commissioned in the mid-1990s to build a walking bridge in London for the new millennium. It opened in June 2000, and once the first influx of people stepped out onto the architectural marvel, it began to sway, and nearly collapsed. As it turns out, the architect only accounted for the downward force of people walking, not the side-to-side force as well. Anyway, it's all fixed now and it was a joy both to look at and to walk across.
Then came St. Paul's Cathedral, followed by a walk through central London, where we saw a number of iconic London sights. We saw the London Eye (it wasn't that difficult to locate), Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, St. Margaret's Church, Westminster Abbey, New Scotland Yard, and Buckingham Palace. The one sight out of those seven that I had strongly wanted to see was Westminster Abbey, so after our night's stay at a hostel across the river, we went back to see it more fully in the daylight. On the right is a picture of me in front of the entrance to Westminster Abbey. This is the church that houses Poets' Corner, where many masters of the pen are buried. Among these greats are Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Hardy. Seeing this was well towards the top of my London list.
After resting in Green Park for a spell, we moseyed through Piccadilly Circus and ate at an Italian sandwich shop, then set out to the British museum.
At the museum I saw the Rosetta Stone (the stone tablet that was found, decoding the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic language), along with artifacts from the civilizations of the Mayans in Mexico, the ancient Egyptians, the Assyrian Empire from 3,000 years ago, the Greek and Roman Empires, the Indians of North America, the Persian Empire, the Roman occupation of Britain from AD 43-411, the Celts of Ireland, and the Babylonian Empire. Needless to say, it was an unforgettable two hours.
To the left is my favorite building I saw in London. I liked this one even more than Big Ben. Built in 2003, I think the London Gherkin (along with the Millennium Bridge) embodies the future of England. London is a crossroads of the world, with people from every country on the planet calling it home. And if there's anything London loves to do, it's to be different.