Saturday 6 September 2008

London Day 4

Today was the day we went to visit the Queen. Or at least, the palace. It was the first time I'd been inside - this hasn't been possible for long, and is only possible in the summer when ol' Queenie's away. It's a very popular destination and I'm glad we'd bought tickets from the concierge at the hotel, because that cut our queueing time down considerably. As it was, we still had to go and do the Royal Mews first, because there wasn't a slot for the State Rooms for another hour!

The weather today was so beautiful and warm - wish we'd had that weather the day before in Oxford! :-(

We took the tube to the St James' Park stop and then walked around the front of the palace for a few shots first. It was so crowded! Would have been worse during the changing-of-the-guard ceremony though:

We then organised our tickets and walked down to the Royal Mews for a look around. They gave us little headsets with information as a sort of guided tour. The nice thing was that I could have mine in english and the mother-in-law in german, so I didn't have to translate so much.

I hadn't thought the Mews would be so interesting, and I guess they weren't really. Though there was an Australian coach, which was nice :-)
And the gold State coach and its livery (which is only used during coronations) was pretty spectacular:

After leaving the Royal Mews, it was time for our State Room viewing. Of course, we weren't allowed to take photos of the interior here - they would have been full of people anyway! It was soooooooo crowded! Seems everyone wants to see how the Queen lives. Well, the rooms of state anyway. It's not like we can see where she spends most of her time. I had not expected this to be so beautiful, but it was! If you do a google search you will see some pictures that others have taken, or that are used to advertise, just to get a general impression. Well worth seeing, in any case. One of the rooms has been set up for a state dinner reception and it's just amazing - all that gold! It's certainly most luxurious!

After the 'tour' of the state rooms, we were able to see the back of the palace and were allowed to wander about a little corner of the palace gardens, which seemed huge:


Security around the palace gardens:

After leaving the palace grounds, we were on the other end of the palace from where we wanted to be, so decided to walk around the other way, by Green park, back towards the front of the palace:











to go through St James Park with its pretty flowers and views of Westminster:

back to the underground station.

We hurried back towards the opposite side of the Thames, over the new Millenium bridge, with its gorgeous view of St Paul's:
Next stop was supposed to be The Globe, for a tour, but there was a matinee on, so there were no tours of the theatre available. So instead of that, we decided to have a nice late lunch/early dinner at a pub right on the bank of the Thames instead:

Since it was still early-ish, we decided to go back across the river, to the Inner Temple and Middle Temple, which I had recalled walking through on one of my other trips to London. Looks like most of that is no longer publicly accessible. So I took photos through the fence....ah well.

And then it was onward to the underground station to go to Picadilly circus and Soho. It was as packed as the rest of London, and as it darkened the crowds only thicker.
We had a nice little sit-down for a cup of coffee, and it took us quite a while to realise we were in the gay district. Not even the pubs that seemed to be full of men only clued us in....innocents that we are :-)

And my feet were sooooooooooo sore... but only one more day to go, before I could rest my poor little tootsies for a while. Well, a day or two at least.