Well, now for the final act in the string of Christmas holiday blog posts that seemingly never end and take me until almost a month to finish. Sorry about that, I’ll do one big catch-up blog post about what I’ve been up to since the holidays ended. To be honest, my days at Cheam have been flying by without too much event. This is very nice however it doesn’t present much of a writing opportunity for me. Either way, we’ll get into all of that later as I’m getting ahead of myself.
Once the New Year’s celebrations were over and we all recovered from the night before, Jer only had a couple of days left in London. We spent a good chunk of the time walking and seeing a lot of the sights in the city itself that we hadn’t hit yet plus we went on a couple more London walks to occupy our time and see a lot of the city in one fell swoop. The last major sight we wanted to hit, that Jeremy hadn’t seen in his previous trip to London, was the Tower of London. Going to see the Tower itself can take a good three hours total (that’s what the ticket people say is a sufficient amount of time) but we didn’t necessarily want to see every little nook and cranny in the place, just the really important and famous bits. So, naturally we opted for the London Walks tour of the Tower with admission included in the cost (at a cheaper rate too). We met up with the rest of the group (mostly Americans as per usual) and headed over to the Tower with a guide who had some serious historical knowledge.
We received a heads up on different sights we were passing on our way down to the Tower itself including the original site where public executions would take place (you would only be executed in the Tower if you were royalty or upper class). It seemed like an unnecessary amount of time spent outside of the Tower talking about what was inside before we finally went through the gates. Our guide was extremely knowledgeable but also rambled….a lot. So we ended up standing around for long periods of time while he discussed things that didn’t have any relevance to what we were visiting. We did however eventually make it inside.
I was actually surprised by the look inside. I knew that the original tower was the White Tower and everything else was slowly built around it over the years but I was unaware of the village feel it had. Different rows of housing as well as buildings all around the edge, different towers here and there all conveniently placard with name plates. There were also a lot of different exhibitions going on throughout the Tower including one on medieval torture devices and one displaying famous suits of armour of English Kings past. With our tour we spent the time outside of all of the areas while our guide talked about them all. Which was fine but we had arrived so late in the day that by the time the tour was over we only had just under an hour before the place closed to wander around! Jeremy and I bee-lined for the Crown Jewels exhibition first to make sure we saw that.
I was highly impressed by this…I mean, how couldn’t you? The amounts of gold, diamonds, and other jewels is just mind boggling and knowing that it is sitting right there in a rather heavily guarded and reinforced case is very other-worldly. I had no idea there were so many individual pieces for the Coronation ceremonies (all with very “World of Warcraft names….the “Spirited Sword of Giving” or something like that ha ha ha…+45 healing….I love everybody who understands this.) Even the Royal Spoon with which the new monarch is anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. All very pomp and regal, including a vast array of gifts collected by monarchs through the years on their coronation days including many a solid gold plate and even a GIANT punch bowl capable of holding around 144 bottles of wine. Complete with a ridiculous ladle that looks like it would take 3 servants and a ladder to use. My particular favourite was the Imperial Crown of India made especially for King George V upon his one and only visit to India in which he needed a crown as Emperor. The English crown jewels cannot be taken out of the country so a different crown had to be made and it looks fantastic. Unfortunately the only comment old Georgie had for it was that it was heavy and it made his head hurt…oh, to be royalty.
Once we had gone through the Crown Jewels exhibition we made our way extremely quickly through the suit of armour exhibition and then out of the Tower. A lovely trip in which we received quite a lot of interesting and somewhat unnecessary facts but I would definitely want to go back at some point to truly finish exploring this wonder in the heart of the city.
My god….that pretty much sums up the entire holidays….WOOOOOO!!!! Now I can bore you all with mundane teaching life!!!!! Nah, I’ll jazz it up a bit. You’ve all been so patient and good that you deserve to be entertained…let them eat cake! At least…I assume there are people reading this….hello?
Until next time kids,
Same Erik time…same Erik channel
Cheers and love!
Erik
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