London Day 6

I woke up early, sometime before 7:00 A.M., and immediately felt as if my stomach had been removed, my knee caps bashed in, and walloped across the head with a baseball bat. I am usually not the type to get bad hangovers, but apparently the British beer, or air, or water, or a combination of the three contain the power to make one feel like complete shit the morning after partaking in spirits.

Anyway, back to the main event. I woke up early, ate a continental breakfast that included a croissant and about six glasses of water. After we finished a far from satisfying breakfast, we left to hop on the tube and go to Greenwich. I wasn’t particularly excited about riding on a train in my particular condition, but when we got off the train by the London docks instead of in Greenwich, my alcohol strained stomach dropped in horror. Larry had decided it would be a good idea to take a two hour scenic boat ride up the Thames River as our method of transportation to Greenwich. On any other day this would have been great, but as it was, the prospect of a boat rocking back and forth did not appeal to me whatsoever. I fell asleep a half hour into our ride, and when I woke up Larry happened to be holding his clip board over my head, which resulted in me hitting my head when I woke up, which did not improve my situation at all.

We eventually arrived at Greenwich and walked across town to the Royal Observatory. The Observatory is a very cool place; it stands on the exact Prime Meridian of the world and it is where International Maritime is kept. The observatory also housed a very neat museum that chronicled the development of portable clocks, methods of seafaring navigation, and lots of other stuff that I would probably remember had I not had the worst hangover of my life.

The Observatory was located on the top of a large hill with great view. Greenwich really is an aesthetically pleasing city. I got some great pictures from the top of the hill before going down to explore the city.

During this exploration I discovered that Greenwich is home to many interesting market places in which we explored for far longer than I would have preferred, but alas, that is the price you pay for going on a trip with such a high percentage of females. After I damn near dropped from all the shopping we had done, we continued our adventure by going to the Queen’s Greenwich house. Once we arrived, we discovered that the queen had never actually lived there, but instead used it as a party house. It was obviously huge since the Queen used it, and it was also full of interesting artwork, mostly of the portrait variety.

Somewhere in between all of that excitement, I was forced to use the Greenwich public restroom. This may have been one of the single most unpleasant experiences on the entire trip! There was trash all over, and numerous stains of unknown origin on the walls, and used pull chain apparatuses to flush the toilets. I took to very important things from my public restroom experience, the first was an unknown communicable disease, the second was the knowledge that British Public Restrooms should be avoided at all costs.

Mercifully, we took the train back to London instead of the boat and the majority of the group went to The Colosseo, a fancy Italian restaurant, to celebrate Jarod’s birthday. I had an exceptional bowl of pasta with meat sauce and a good time was had by all.

After dinner, we went to the famous Abbey Road Crosswalk where the Beatles took the picture for their last album, aptly titled Abbey Road. This was a lot of fun, we all tried to recreate the photo, I even went as far as actually taking my shoes off like Paul McCartney did in the photo. These pictures did not turn out as well as I would have hoped due to traffic and lack of any coherent idea what the picture actually looked like buy some of my fellow picture takers (JILL BOHNKER).

After Abby Road, we went to see the Magistrate Court. However, we were forced to take a detour once we realized we were walking on Drury Lane. We found the first store that sold muffins and posed for pictures underneath the Drury Lane street sign. So now in a manner of speaking I truly am the Muffin Man.

We found the Magistrate Court shortly after, but it was unspectacular. It did however, have a very nice bronze statue of a ballerina in the alley next to it, which made for some interesting photo opportunities.

The last stop on our famous photo run was Kings Cross Station, the home of Platform 9 ¾ from the Harry Potter books. We were worried about not being able to find it, but those fears evaporated once we realized that it was actually labeled, and had half of a cart bolted onto the wall to give the appearance that it is magically passing through the brick wall.

Finally, we took the tube back to the hotel, I drank large amounts of water, and went to bed.