London, Pt. 2

Our second day in London was a busy one, since we had so much left on our list of things we wanted to see and had to catch our flight to Dublin that evening.

And of course, we had to take the Underground from our hotel, after we had walked the mile-plus to the train station...so it took a little while to get going in the morning.

On the subway, a class of elementary school students got on with their teacher. All the students were dressed in neon vests that you would see a crossing guard wear here in the States. They immediately spread out all over the car we were in and the teacher and her two assistants were walking all over the train the whole time to try and keep tabs on them. I couldn't help but think traveling that way must be a teacher's worst nightmare! 

I had read in a book about one of the most famous skyscrapers in London, so we decided to see it. It's called "The Gherkin" and yes, it is shaped like a giant cucumber.

We got back on the subway and found the Sherlock Holmes Museum. We didn't go in because the line was ridiculously long, but we were glad we found it. We had gone completely the wrong direction when we got off at the Baker Street station, so it took us a while to figure that out and get turned around.

Here's the famous address:

The Baker Street Underground station is decorated in a Sherlock Holmes theme...I thought it was awesome. This giant profile of Sherlock Holmes in the station is actually made up of tiny images of Sherlock Holmes.

Here you can see the tiny profiles that make up the larger picture, above.

This is a view of the Thames River in London. If you look really, really closely, you can see part of the Gherkin in the background.

Here I am with the London Eye in the background. We didn't go on the Eye because: (1) the line- super long, and we hadn't bought tickets in advance, and (2) the price...$45/person. 

Next, we found Big Ben. I'm pretty sure that's the most famous sight in all of London. Or at least, when I think of London, that's one of the first images that pops in my mind.

Here I am in front of Big Ben.

And here's Jason...

I thought this was a classic picture of London, the Eye and a red double decker bus. Those buses aren't just for show, by the way. They are everywhere and run regular routes all over the city.

This is a really good picture of Jason standing with the Eye in the background and a corner of another red double decker bus.

Next, we walked to Westminster Abbey, which is pretty much just across the street from Big Ben (and the Parliament buildings).

This is me in front of the Abbey. See the line that stretches from the doors off to the right of the picture? Yeah...we didn't go in the church either... This picture actually only shows one part of half the line, because it also stretched off to the left, and both lines extended beyond the sight of the camera.

We had a little more time on our hands than we thought we would, since the lines everywhere had kind of prevented us from going into things we thought we might do, so we took the Underground to the Science Museum.

Here you can see Jason studying the map of the museum and figuring out what we wanted to see.

This museum might have been one of Jason's favorite things in London because he loves looking at things and learning how they work (or, more likely, he already knows how they work), and then explaining to me how they work. Here he is in front of a giant steam engine.

There were a few things in the museum that I knew about, too! This is the first model of DNA built by Watson and Crick. I had no idea that they had used standard lab equipment to build part of this. I kind of geeked out when I saw this, because without these guys, I wouldn't have learned half of what I did for my biology degree in undergrad!

I had to include this picture. It's a Jenessa-sized car. I can't imagine a car like this is street legal, but I kind of want one...

Also, this is the only picture I took on our trip that shows how truly light we packed and traveled. See the size of my backpack? Everything you see with me right there is all I had. Jason's backpack was the same size as mine. They had to be this size in order to fit into those delightful luggage sizer bins at the airport. Amazingly, the backpack was much lighter on our trip than it was during all of law school!

After we left the museum, we took the Underground back to Victoria Station and then got on the Gatwick Express back to the airport. In all the Underground and train stations we were in in London, we had to scan our ticket to get in and out of the platform area. 

We had done just fine with this until we were getting off the train at the airport. Jason pulled his ticket out of his pocket in preparation of scanning...and dropped it on the train tracks. And there was no way he could safely retrieve it. So...he had to beg (ok, ask politely) the security guard by the ticket scanners to let him through. Lucky for Jason, the guard just kind of rolled his eyes and said "this is why you let the woman hold the tickets...she didn't lose hers"! I thought it was hilarious. Jason did not find it quite as amusing.

And on that note, we were off to our last city...Dublin!

London, England, UK- Part 1

I'm breaking the London post into two parts because we saw SO much stuff in just two days and the post would be twice as long as the others I've written about our trip, so here's day 1:

The morning we left The Netherlands started really...really...early. 

So early that we walked through the barely dawn-lit sky in The Hague through Chinatown...and didn't see anybody on the streets until we got to the train station. I put this picture in my post on The Netherlands, but here it is again anyway.

This was our first time flying a "budget" airline, so I was a little nervous about the storied luggage restrictions. Thankfully though, we flew EasyJet, and as of now, they don't have weight restrictions on carry-on luggage. And, even better, they didn't make us squeeze our backpacks into those tiny little baggage check containers. 20 cm is not very much length and my backpack, at the time, probably wouldn't have made it without me getting up and jumping on the bag and forcing it into the container. Jason helped me repack my bag after we got through security in case an attendant decided to measure my bag at the gate (they didn't), so it might have made it in after we did that, but, to say the least, I was thankful not to have anyone examine our backpacks too closely!

We flew into Gatwick Airport in London, which is quite a ways outside of the "touristy" part of London. Thankfully, Jason is a planner and had looked at this in advance. We bought our tickets for the Gatwick Express in advance and all we had to do was pick them up when we got to the airport. It was about a 1/2 hour ride and then we were in London, at Victoria Station, just a few blocks from Buckingham Palace!

We conveniently arrived about 30 minutes before the famous "changing of the guard" at Buckingham Palace, so we stuck around to watch.

This is us waiting across the street from Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard.

This was all we could see of the ceremony because we didn't fight to stand right in front of the fence by the palace, nor had we gotten there early enough to do so. Here you can see the guards in their very famous uniforms marching down the street before the entered the Palace grounds. Even though this was all we could see, I still thought it was pretty cool to be able to see that much of it, considering we hadn't thought we'd see any of it!

It started to rain as we were leaving Buckingham Palace and so we were walking around, trying to find the nearest Underground (aka the Tube) station when we happened to see the famous hotel, "The Ritz". It looked really fancy (a guy on the fourth floor had his window open and was leaning out his little balcony as we were walking by and the room behind him looked really nice...I saw a chandelier), and when we walked under the archway you can see in the picture, there were doormen in uniforms standing at the doors of the hotel, ready to open them. I, in my North Face fleece, felt under dressed just walking past the doors!

We bought day passes for the Underground. Unsurprisingly, the London Underground was the most expensive subway system we used in Europe. I think Munich was 2nd, followed by Vienna, and then Prague.

We had planned to do a LOT of walking that first day in London (all the way from Buckingham Palace to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey), but we were getting fairly damp, so we headed to the British Museum instead, which was on our list of places to see anyway.

In London (not sure about the rest of the country), the museums that are state/government-owned have free admission, with just a 5 pound ($7.50) suggested donation.

Here is the outside of the British Museum. Apparently, lots of other people wanted to escape the rain, too, because it was fairly crowded.

The British Museum is unique because it houses very, very famous pieces of history from all over the world, not necessarily just the UK. You can see history from all over the world under one (large) roof.

Here I am in front of a statue from Easter Island.

And this is the Rosetta Stone. 

Yes, the Rosetta Stone.

Compared to a museum in the States, very few things in the British Museum (and the Science Musuem that we would go to the next day) were actually behind glass, but understandably, the Rosetta Stone was one of them.

Here you can see Jason getting a close-up look at carvings from the Parthenon in Athens. See what I mean about the glass? In the States, there would be a huge plexi-glass shield in front of it. And even more astonishing, even though things like this weren't covered over, I didn't see anyone touching anything!

We saw some ancient Greek pottery. I couldn't help but think of the Disney movie, Hercules.

Here's an example of Greek battle armor. Jason and I enjoyed the foot armor... Think it hampered the soldier's movements at all? 

This was a carving taken from the wall of an Egyptian tomb.

And this, apparently, is the most famous chessboard in the world (don't ask me why).

This is a view of the inside of the British Museum.

This is a picture of the famous St. Paul's Cathedral.

And this is us in front of St. Paul's.

 We hopped back on the Underground and rode to the Tower of London.

There's me in front of the Tower.

We turned the corner and found the Tower bridge. 

Here we are with the Tower Bridge in the background.

And this is another picture of the Tower Bridge. 

We were tired of walking around by this time, so we got on the Underground to get to our hotel. We didn't want to pay for a hotel close to all the tourist stuff, so we had booked a hotel in Barking, that, believe me, wasn't close. This hotel was not meant for tourists. 

Not only was Barking not close, but the hotel was NOT close to the Underground/train station. Not at all. We found a map in the train station, so we knew generally which direction we needed to go and the street names we needed to look for, but for some reason, what we were seeing on foot wasn't matching up with what the map had showed. With all of our previous hotels, we could see them from a little bit of a distance, but not this one. We found a bus stop a couple blocks away that had a map and found that we were, actually, on the right track, but for some reason it didn't seem right. We turned a corner and still didn't see the hotel until we were practically right in front of it. 

To top it off, this hotel was the only one out the many different hotels we stayed in that wasn't as clean as I would have hoped. The floor looked like it hadn't been cleaned and the nightstands had crumbs/dirt/dust on them. But really, it could have been much worse. We were only there for one night, so we could handle it.

In good news, we were right next door to a Tesco again, just like in Prague. We walked over and got breakfast for the next day, since the UK isn't known for having little bakeries all over like we found in the rest of Europe (and we hadn't seen any on our walk from the train station to our hotel). 

London, Part 2, coming up!

Munich, Germany

Muenchen, as it's known in German.

We spent our time on the day we arrived at the Dachau concentration camp which is about a 20 minute train ride outside of Munich.

It was hot and we had (thankfully) locked our backpacks in a locker in the train station. 

So, Jason acted as our camel. Note the water bottles in his pockets.

What a good sport! 

Going to Dachau was by far the most educational part of our trip...and also the saddest. Seeing where thousands of people lived, worked and died made all those history classes seem so much more real than a textbook ever did.

This first set of pictures is pretty depressing...but I promise the next set is much happier. So, bear with me (or at least scroll down) and I promise it gets better.

At the entrance to the camp is the famous quote "arbeit macht frei"..."work will make you free". 

Once inside the gate, there is a huge open space where the guards used to make the prisoners line up for a type of roll call every morning, in all weather conditions, sometimes for hours on end.

This building was kind of the "nerve center" of camp, it's where the guards would stay and it was through the gate on this building (the "arbeit macht frei" gate) that the prisoners would march when entering the camp. 

This room was where the prisoners were forced to strip and shower upon entering the camp.

This was part of the wall surrounding the camp...obviously has not been maintained.

These foundations, filled with gravel, outline where the barracks used to be that housed the prisoners.

This is a guard tower, not that dissimilar from what you would see surrounding a prison today.

A ditch like this ran all the way around the camp and would have had at least some amount of water and sludge/mud in it. If a prisoner got too close, they would be shot. Reportedly, some prisoners would purposely run into this area to end their suffering.

This was an execution range. The small trench in the foreground was used for blood drainage.

The crematorium.

This is a bathroom inside the barracks prisoners would have lived in. So much for privacy.

Imagine sleeping in bunks like these...

This is Jason walking down a hallway...the doors off either side are small cells that would hold "special" prisoners or prisoners who were being punished with isolation for some reason.

Ok, enough with the sad concentration camp pictures. I'm incredibly glad we went, but I was grateful for the happier things we saw during the rest of our time in Munich.

We found our hotel, just a couple of blocks from the train station. This was where we learned not to stay near train stations...we had to walk past a couple casinos, strip clubs and...ahem...adult stores to get to our hotel. 

This hotel was also the smallest we stayed in on our trip and the only one without a deadbolt lock.

It figures.

So this is me showing just how small the "closet" was in our room.

I'm not sure what you could fit in this closet...but it certainly wasn't a useful size. 

The next day we went to see Munich's famous Glockenspiel that's built into the "new" city hall. 

"New" in Munich meant that the building was over 150 years old. In the States, that might mean the building's on the National Registry of Historic Places! And we certainly wouldn't call it "new".

This is the Glockenspiel. The figures move around the music a couple of times a day. A huge crowd gathers and everyone oohs and aahs. 

Next we went just down the street to the Frauenkirche where Jason, who has a thing for clocks, found a gigantic grandfather clock.

There's a black footprint in the church that's purportedly the devil's footprint. If you are standing in this footprint, you can't see any windows in the church other than the one in the front, which was covered with a screen at the time the footprint was made a couple of centuries ago. The devil was gleeful that there was no light in the church, but then took another step and realized there was light flooding into the church from windows he didn't see at his previous step. And he stormed out of the church with such force that he created a wind, and that's why there is always a wind whistling around the church towers. 

So, this is probably the worst "important" picture that we took on the trip. Not only was I not smiling, Jason didn't zoom in very well and he got the camera strap in the picture.

Great. 

Well, at least the story's good.

These are the towers of the church, the far one was under construction, so that's the shielding you see in the picture.

We walked to another outdoor food market,  though it wasn't as big or as good as the one in Vienna.

And then we hopped on the subway and toured the Olympic Stadium. You can see it in the background of this picture...

This is a closer shot of it. Pretty cool, right?

And this is Jason and I standing under a random section of the structure. The picture above is the main stadium, but this little part we're standing under wasn't housing a stadium...it was just hanging out.

We went to the top of the Olympic Tower and had a great view of the city. We were right next door to BMW headquarters (the tall building) and the museum (with the giant logo on top).

And this is us on the tower.

It was another hot day, so we shared a blueberry slushy. 

And promptly got brain freeze and blue tongues. 

We walked over the BMW World, where the company displays all its latest prototypes and technologies. 

May I just say, they have some pretty awesome stuff.

And the building that houses it all isn't bad either.

I got to sit in a Mini Cooper. Jason didn't want to because it wasn't a "guy" car.

But he was willing to pose with this one, a prototype they had on display.

To cap off our day, we went to the English Gardens. 

I had no idea Munich was such a surfing hot spot.

The surfers all hang out and wait for their turn on the rapids formed when this river goes under a bridge. 

They attracted quite a crowd.

We had to stop for one of our regular iPad map checks on our way back to finding the city center and our hotel.

 And this cool building (not sure what it is) was across the street from where we stopped to check the map.

And so ends our time in another city in Europe. Next up, Luxembourg!