National Library & Gallery

March 31, 2010

The last day of March and our last day in London. I can't believe we've already been here for a week. Time is going to go by so fast, I'm already a little sad about it. Hilary and I didn't coordinate our wake-up times since I was asleep by the time she came to bed, but we had been getting up around 8/8:30 everyday and I knew she wanted to get an early start so I set my alarm clock for 8. I have been sleeping with an eye mask and ear plugs since I have such a problem sleeping with other people, noise and light i knew I needed something to help with this. Turns out they help a lot, which is great. The one problem is the earplugs work so well I can barely hear my alarm clock go off. It took until 8:20 until I finally woke up to the noise. When I looked over I heard Hilary's alarm clock also go off and she was sound asleep with her earplugs in. I decided to get more sleep and set my clock for 10am after I woke her up and she seemed like she had no intention of waking up. At 10 I was still tired so I reset it for 11. Finally 11 came around and I decided we needed to get our lazy asses out of bed so I woke her up and told her it was probably time to get moving.

By the time we were ready to go, it was almost 1pm. We were moving exceptionally slow, I think the sleep was really needed. Our plan for the day was to go to the British Library then the British Gallery for touring and getting High Tea. Hilary did High Tea once in Victoria, Canada and really wanted to do it in London. However, because of the late start we weren't sure we'd be able to do all of those things. We decided to go to the library first since a friend of mine had told me it was his favorite attraction in London. SO glad we went. It was really cool and housed a lot of amazing documents such as: the Magna Carta, Some of Shakespeare original works, a letter written by Charles Darwin explaining the controversial nature of his Origin of Species book, original manuscripts from Beowolf, Jane Austin, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Wolfe, and Sylvia Plath, it had Beatles original song lyrics writeen down for Help!, Yesterday, I Want to Hold Your Hand, Ticket to Ride, A Hard Days Night, and Michele, there was also a whole display on the origins of Alica in Wonderland and sacred texts from Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Daosim, Islam, Judiasm, Christianity, and Sikhism. It took us over an hour to get through just this one room. It was amazing and I wrote down so much more detail but I don't want to bore you with the lessons learned so I'll let you wiki it if you really want to know. :)

It was time to head to the National Gallery for High Tea. Only once we got there we realized it was going to be 14.50 each for tea, little sandwiches, scones, and/or cakes. This wasn't worth it to us so we did a poor man's version of tea where we just got a dessert each and Hilary got some tea. It worked out great for me but I think sh was a little disappointed she didn't get to do actually tea. :/ The good news was we had enough time to see the National Gallery itself since tea didn't take as long as we thought it would. Hilary had heard this gallery was a top place to visit in London but I was a little disappointed. Turns out it is just a big building full of paintings, which if you are really in to art would be amazing, but I'm not and Hilary is even less into it than me so we just chose a couple rooms with people that we actually knew and looked through those. The rooms we saw (Monet, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo) we're cool to see. Money and Van Gogh are definitely my favorite, and I saw a couple other artists I liked as well - none that I previously knew though.

The museum closed at 6 so we decided to head back to Rob's neighborhood and walk around there for a bit. He had told me about a Brick Lane that was pretty famous and that there weren't many tourists in his area so we wanted to check it out and see what 'un-touristy' London was like. After wandering around aimlessly for awhile we somehow found Brick Lane which had a market on it, lots of little shops and live music. By the time we got there everything was pretty much closed, but it was pretty easy to imagine what the place would look like when it was active. Rob had mentioned there was a middle eastern area of the place that was pretty cool to experience and we knew right when we entered it. All of the sudden the streets were lined with Indian people trying to talk us in to going to their restaurant. They were offering special deals "just for us" and trying to entice us with free bottles of wine. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. They were all literally lined up outside of their respected restaurants trying to push us in, it was on the verge of comical.

It was starting to get later and really cold so we headed back to Rob's. He was generous enough to give us a key so we let ourselves in -- not without a bit of key trouble though. We did some CouchSurfing research for the upcoming countries, showered, uploaded pictures and blogged while waiting for rob to come home from work to take us to dinner. He didn't end up getting back until 10:30 (the man's life is on hyper-drive) so we were really hungry by the time he got there. On our way out he got a call that his CEO was out for drinks nearby and wanted him to stop by, so he showed us to a restaurant and said he was gonna grab a quick drink and would be back to meet us after dinner and take us to a pub. He was true to his word and took us to the Red Church after dinner. It was a pretty cool place but we didn't get there until midnight and it closed at 1 so we just had time for 2 beers... well I had time for two beers. Neither Rob nor Hilary finished there's, ha.

It was really fun to be able to sit and talk with Rob over a couple of beers. He is a financial banker for a company of around 5,000 people at the London branch. originally from Alabama, he is a huge traveler and wanted to live somewhere else which is why he ended up in London. The stories he had about traveling and the adventure sports he has done were amazing. I'm slightly in love with him and probably could have listened to his stories about the countries he's visited and things he has done all night. Yay for crushing on your CS host. Hilary already made it clear I'm not allowed to participate in any extra-curricular activities with our hosts, although I'm told their friends are fair game, haha. Don't worry, I have no intention of that, talk about making things super awkward with people who are opening their homes to you. I'd like to think I hae a little more common sense than that. She was just joking around with me - I hope...:). Rob himself is super busy and I can't believe he found time to host us. He just got back from a trip to Austin, TX and was leaving to Switzerland for a week right after we were gone. The only two nights he was home were the two nights he let us stay with him. He was working until 10pm both nights and yet still found time to take us out. Like I said, his life is on hyper-drive. I have no idea how he did it all, but I was extremely impressed.

Hilary and Rob went to bed around 2am but I stayed up talking to people from back home via facebook and uploading more pictures. I also did some Brussels research which is where we are headed next. I think it was 3:45am by the time I actually got to bed and at least a half hour after that before I fell asleep. So much for catching up on sleep.