Hello all! Well, we've had a very eventful few days, but I am only going to write about Saturday in this blog post... and I think this will be plenty long enough even so!
On Saturday morning, we awoke bright and early to prepare for our day in the big city. At about 8:15am, we headed off to the Crawley train station, which is near County Mall and about a 25 minute walk. Ben had worked out the logistics of our day the night before – how to get from one place to the next at the right time and so on. He did very well, and the only thing that didn't go as planned was that our train tickets cost over £14 each, instead of the £6 we'd hoped for! Anyway, we set off on the train, changed to the underground once in London, and arrived safely at our first destination: the Camden Passage Markets!
These markets were mainly all antiques, and were quite interesting although we didn't buy anything! The stalls were set up along the footpath in little alleyways and roads and around corners, and offered quite a collection of interesting old items. Some of the things we saw included:
- Lots of old books, cutlery, ornaments, coins and jewellery;
- Cufflinks and gold watches on long chains;
- A shop with cool vases and teapot and mug sets;
- The African Waistcoat Company, where the owner talked to us over his breakfast;
- An actual real polar bear skin rug, which I found quite alarming – entire head, teeth and tongue included;
- More skins of cute little foxes :(
- A stuffed pheasant;
- Deer antlers; and
- A collection of 11 mostly-unclothed Barbie dolls hanging from a chain in a shop window like they were meant to be acrobats performing a complicated stunt.
The Camden Markets didn't seem particularly huge (although there could have been more sections that we didn't discover), and we didn't spend too much time there, as we wanted to be at Buckingham Palace by 11:30am for the changing of the guard! To get there, we wanted to walk through St James' Park, which Ben had been itching to walk through ever since seeing it in June last year. So we took the underground to the station near the park, and walked through the beautiful green park to get to the Palace. The park has lots of open grassy areas with wooden beach chairs that cost £4 to sit in for 2 hours, and lots of people had partly stripped off to soak up the sun and acquire skin cancers (Ben's taught me well!). The main footpaths through the park were lined with beautiful big green trees with knobbly trunks and little square metal plaques screwed into them showing their ID numbers!
When we reached the wall separating the park from the road outside the Palace gates, it was unbelievable how many people were already there, waiting for the changing of the guard! We were 15 minutes early and there was no way we would have been able to get anywhere near the big black and gold fence or gates outside the Palace. Cars were still going along the road, but there were people everywhere except for actually on the road! The big pond and statue feature across from the Palace gates was also covered in people wanting a good view. There were parked police cars, and police on foot and on horseback trying to get the crowds off the road and back behind the railings and barricades. Anyway, I thought I'd never seen so many people in the one place before, but that was until two days later (yesterday) when we went to the Notting Hill Carnival, which I'll tell you about next time!
We settled for a viewing spot on top of the stone wall separating the park from the road outside the Palace. The top of the wall was also full of people, but we were lucky to find a square metre free for us to clamber up onto! I sat on the wall and Ben stood on it, so we could see over the top of the people standing on the ground no worries at all.
The ceremony began with the arrival of the foot guards, who marched in along the road on the far side of the statue feature to us, playing instruments and keeping perfectly in step. These were the men who wear the tall black bear skin hats and red and black uniforms. They were followed by more soldiers marching (without instruments) in black uniforms and smaller hats. This procession was led by a policeman on horseback, and entered the Palace grounds via the gate closest to where we were sitting (there are three gates). From then on we couldn't see or hear them as well. All of the music sounded very grand and brassy, but the only time we recognised the name of anything was when they were inside the fence and started playing an ABBA medley that included Dancing Queen, Fernando, and Mamma Mia!
They remained inside for some time, playing music, and at some stage the actual changing of the guard took place. It's quite amusing that all this pomp and ceremony takes place to change over TWO guards only (or four when the Queen is in residence, Ben says)! We could see the guard on our end through the fence, and the changeover involved two bear skin hatted men marching over to him, then the old guard and one of the others marching away one at a time, swinging their arms, leaving the new guard in the spot where he will stand for the next however many hours! And that was the changing of the guard. :)
After all the other soldiers left, which happened via a couple of installments, we had been there for about an hour, and people started to trickle away. I also got quite sunburned during this, which shows that it was a lovely sunny day. We then walked back through St James' Park in eager search of toilets. These are few and far between in this country, and, quantity-wise, seem to be in inverse proportion to the popularity of an attraction and the subsequent number of people that one can expect will be simultaneously seeking said amenity.
It was then time to head to the Portobello Road Markets, which are in Notting Hill (where we returned two days later (yesterday) for the Carnival). There are apparently 2000 stalls at these markets, and they sell anything and everything! Hats, t-shirts, jackets, toe socks, pashminas, jewellery, bugles, trumpets, horns, signs, antiques, CDs, buttons, paintings, fruit, veggies, buskers (oh, the buskers aren't actually for sale though)...! The only things we bought were crepes for lunch, strawberries in the afternoon, and a red and white zip-up “London England” jumper for me.
When we had come up out of the underground station near the markets, a man was handing out pamphlets warning about pickpockets operating in the area. While we were at the markets, we also saw lots of permanent signs with the same message: “Warning: Pickpockets operate in this area”. So I stayed very aware of my surroundings – and, in particular, my pockets – and we reached the end of the day without being pickpocketed or seeing anyone else pickpocketed. :) Always a good thing!
At 4:30pm, we headed back to the underground for our journey to London Bridge Station, as we had pre-booked tickets for the London Dungeon via the Internet – £10 each instead of the usual £19.95, because of the late time slot (5-7pm). We walked to the Dungeon entrance and joined the “fast track” (i.e. online bookings) line. Pity the other poor people who had a much longer line – the website warns it may take an hour to reach the front! Actors from the Dungeon, dressed in period costume and with faces made up to look blood stained or boil ridden, went through the line painting occasional people's faces with similarly attractive designs. A cauldron issued steam near the entrance, and lanterns above us flickered with fake fire. Soon, it was time for us to enter.
After a little more waiting in line inside, and using toilets in which the cubicle doors were painted with a coffin shape and the words “Let R.I.P.”, we joined our group of 20 or so people and the tour began. Now, just so you know, the London Dungeon is based on London's actual history, so it's all quite historically accurate and meant to teach you something, but it's also meant to scare the living daylights out of you. Keep in mind that the whole place was very dark, with just enough light to see what needed to be seen, and enough darkness to convince you that horrible things were about to jump out at you (a very realistic fear, mind you). At the start of the tour, we entered a room where a creepy wild-haired lady stood silently just inside the door. She then shut the door, moved through the crowd, and quietly loomed at the shoulder of a lady in front of me until the lady turned around, stared right into the face of this startling vision for a split second, uttered a noise of alarm, and moved away very very quickly! Now, try to imagine the mood and atmosphere (and especially the fact that it's very dark) while I tell you some of the main rooms I can remember (warning to Shell: close eyes and hum loudly)!...
- One of the first rooms was a maze of mirrors. It was dark, and everywhere you looked you could either see yourself or someone else in front of you in the maze – but was it them, or their reflection?! Plus, we were at the back of the group so I was constantly checking over my shoulder! The maze was very confusing and totally awesome!! There was also a skeleton behind bars in the wall, and it would suddenly rattle the bars violently just as you walked around the corner.
- In another room, a sadistic actress took a volunteer from our group, sat him in a chair, and pretended to demonstrate instruments of torture on him – for example, a tongue remover and other things I won't say!
- They told us about the Black Plague and we entered a room where a “doctor” had a “victim's body” on the table and proceeded to give a grotesque demonstration of incompetent medicine, such as by pulling out a heart that squirted water over us, and finishing with the “body” suddenly sitting bolt upright with a loud clank (it was a dummy).
- The Jack the Ripper section involved a number of mannequins in very disgusting states – other unfortunate mannequins were also randomly located throughout other sections of the attraction. We watched a video about who might have been Jack, and it finished by puffing a big fireball out of the wall!!!
- We got into a little boat that went along a track, up a slope, turned around while a voice said creepy things to us in the darkness, and then took us to the next part of the tour.
- We also learnt about the Great Fire in the 1600s (between that and the Black Plague, it wasn't a very good time to live in London).
- In another room, we were asked to sit in the barber's chair of Sweeney Todd. He was a Fleet Street barber who would drop his customers suddenly through the trapdoor under the chair, and they would end up in meat pies sold at Mrs Lovett's Pie Shop down the street! (Everything at the Dungeon was supposed to be true, but I just looked online and apparently this particular story is often presented as fact but no evidence can be found that he existed!) We were in pitch darkness in this room, and the chairs included speakers beside our heads that made it sound like Sweeney was clipping his shears around our ears. It finished with the chairs giving a sudden lurch backwards like we were about to drop through the trapdoor! (I was not alarmed by this as I had seen it coming a mile away (i.e. “everyone sit down properly in your chairs”) and had experienced similar chairs in Singapore with Delle, so I recognised the setup!)
- We entered a courtroom where a judge up above us leaned over the balcony and proclaimed drastic sentences for the strange crimes our tour guide told her we had committed. I got called up as the third and last volunteer, answered her question with “Anna from Australia”, and promptly managed to get the entire tour group sentenced to death for associating with an Australian!!!
- The tour ended with one of the highlights, the anticipation of which was probably the thing that scared me most of all! It was the new ride: “Extremis: Drop Ride to Doom”. The sign outside the Dungeon before we entered earlier had apologised for that ride being out of order that day, which had brought Ben disappointment and me relief! But alas, it was not to be, and I didn't even have enough warning to enjoy some proper worrying! Anyway, it was like a mini Giant Drop: we sat in it, pulled the harness down over our heads, and then all the lights were turned out and we ascended slowly. We came to a stop (Ben thinks it was only 4m in the air – I think it was 6 or so) and there were mannequins of three judges lit up in front of us, saying that we were all sentenced to death by hanging. The lights then went out again and we dropped very suddenly into the darkness below. There was a great flash of light partway down, which was our screaming faces being photographed! The photo turned out with Ben's face resembling how mine would look if I were told a spider were nearby (i.e. slightly nervous smile), while mine was contorted into an open-mouthed, scrunch-eyed scream of blinding terror and possibly deafening volume! :) So that was a nice little adrenaline rush to conclude the tour!
We then had a quick look around the souvenir shop and then exited into the normal, comparatively unscary real-life London outside. All in all, it was rather a tacky tourist attraction (quite against some of the ideologies behind my tourism management studies, I'm sure), yet good fun and slightly educational, and while I probably wouldn't go out of my way to take visitors there unless they REALLY wanted to go, it was still worth £10 to see it once.
We managed to find a great little spot to have tea (it was 7 or 7:30pm by then – the tour took 90 minutes). It was a Latin (Colombian) restaurant called Sin Fronteras, and it was just across and down the street from the Dungeon. We had spaghetti bolognese and chicken carbonara for only £4.50 a dish – a very good price here!
Then it was back to London Bridge Station and on the train home. After our 25 minute walk from the Crawley train station to our flat, it was 9pm and my lower back was very sore from the unfamiliar sensation of standing up for most of 13 hours! It was similarly unhappy after our equally long day out yesterday (not to mention some full-on shopping days recently), so I feel I am getting much more exercise than I did in Australia, and will hopefully have some fitness to show for it one day!
By the way, in between all the things that I write about in the blog, the other things that take up a lot of our time are shopping and uni. On Friday, we had a full day of shopping at the County Mall and nearby shops, and over the last couple of weeks I have gradually been expanding my wardrobe (and so has Ben, but not as much since he brought more clothes with him)! Clothes are about the only thing here that I feel are on a par with Australian prices. There are lots more expensive ones too, but it is possible to buy clothes for around what we would be prepared to pay in Australia, so we've been sticking to that mental budget!
As for uni work, my first assignment is due in one week, and Ben's is due the week after. Ben has been working on his since we were living at Helen's! I started work on mine the day we got the Internet here, as the questions only got released online earlier that week. Mine is a group assignment for my subject “Accounting”, and it involves collaborating with four Australians via an online discussion board on the USQ website. Most of it involves analysing Virgin Blue's 2006 financial reports. Anyway, I volunteered to be the one who compiles our group's answers into the one document that we will submit to the lecturer, so between that and everything else, it's keeping me busy!
Well, I'm sure this is quite long enough (>2800 words!) to have lost half the readers partway through :P, so this will be all for now. Hope to hear from you soon! Love Anna.
"Of all the Anglo-Saxon names to come from Britain, Alcorn is one of the most ancient. The name is a result of the original family having lived in the village of Alchorne in the Parish of Rotherfield, Sussex. 
