London, Friday 26 Sept 08

The weather was gorgeous today, the most sun we'd seen in weeks (Nick must have bought it over from NZ) so we decided to explore a bit of London.

We ended up at the London Eye, where we took a ride up the ferris wheel. It was the perfect day to go up and the views were incredible. It takes about half an hour to do a full circle and the pods are actually huge, they fit about 15 people in each one. It was cool watching all the mechanics.

After the London Eye we headed across the bridge to check out Westminster and Big Ben, even now I'm still awed by Big Ben. We kept heading along the River Thames on the South Bank walk. There were some pretty cool things along the South Bank, crazy street performers, lots of human statues, musicians and a nutty guy in a box making bird sounds and jumping out at people.

We saw a cool skate park filled with awesome graffiti (which I hear may be removed, sad), and giant lounge furniture made out of astro-turf! We walked over the Millennium Bridge (a foot bridge over the river that was closed soon after it first opened because it wobbled too much, they've fixed that problem thankfully!) and found ourselves in front of St Pauls Cathedral.

We headed into the Cathedral and all I can say is Wow! It was breathtakingly beautiful. The art work, gold trimmings and ceiling was spectacular. After admiring the main area and ceiling for awhile we took the first 200ish stairs to the Whispering Gallery. The whispering gallery is the dome part of the church, called so because you can whisper on one side and hear it on the other. It works too. It was kinda freaky, because there were so many people if you put your ear to the wall you could hear lots of voices and it felt like there were lots of ghosts in the walls. Creepy!

We climbed the next 100ish stairs and reached the top of the dome where you can look through a peephole back down to the bottom which looked very cool. Then we took the last set of stairs which were a spiral metal staircase high enough to give me a bit of vertigo (but scary in a fun way) to the top.

It was pretty crowded up there so we didn't stay up for long but the views were very good thanks to the beautiful weather. We also checked out the crypt and the famous people buried there.

That night I introduced Nick to the Putney pub scene with some drinks with the flatties :)