London rain and London Tower and Tate Modern

Finally, the weather decided to "cooperate", and pretty much rained all day. The perfect day to visit the Tower of London. And so I did! I mentioned before that I feel it my duty to attend to at a minimum one proper tourist attraction per day, and although it is pretty hard to beat the British Museum as a tourist attraction, I thought the Tower would be a good substitute.

It is pricey as such (£15.5 for the entrance fee). But there is a lot to see, and there are excellent (and highly comedic) tours led every half hour by a member of the Beefeater Guard. He carries on for about an hour, and fits quite a lot of sound historical information about the tower, the history of its inmates and some general history of England, all wrapped up in a comical bundle. Well worth the price - free!


A walk past Traitor Gate; where supplies and new prisoners would be brought up to the tower. A stop at the chapel (no photography permitted). Also, a visit to the crown jewels (also no photography permitted). Quite heavily monitored, and no up close standing permitted. Viewing can happen somewhat close up on a slow-moving walk-way, or you can stand behind the walk-way, and peer at the jewels from a small distance. Still, I had a look at the "Star of Africa", which was cut into the Culloden 1 and Culloden 2. There were some massive jewels in those state pieces. Unreal. Truly.

Naturally, I paid a visit to the Bloody Tower, where the young princes were supposedly bumped off by Richard the (later to be) 3rd. That was the only perilous part for me; the old fortress circular stairs were in use; with dips in the stone from countless feet, and very narrow walls (thin, small people?) and no stair-rails. The last bit I did on my hands... Tiny rooms and cells have been preserved at intervals that you can go in and see how various inmates would have lived - or waited to die. It was instructive. There was one small guard room leading on to the wall walk, where there were helmets you could try on (chained to a barrel) and a lovely piece of chain mail (also chained to a barrel). It is astonishingly heavy - there was only a 6 inch wide band there, about 3 feet long. The links were riveted, and flattened. Most instructive!

The rain started in earnest as I was leaving the tower. The rest of the day was pleasantly spent with my current room-mates; Steph of England and Antonia of Cologne. We found a very reasonably priced vegetarian restaurant in Walker Court (Beet Root), and proceeded on to the South Bank. Wandered past the London Eye, down to the Tate Modern. We did go to the Tate Modern (about 3 pm) and spent the rest of the afternoon there. The building is massive - I believe it is a converted industrial building of some kind - with a huge chimney-like tower rising up in the center of the museum. Unfortunately, you cannot go up to the top of the tower at all. Now that would be a view! The interior has vast vaulted ceilings with all the beams and bolts left over from whatever industrial uses the building was once used for. Or so it appears. The exhibits were excellently displayed. Still, it was not quite what I was expecting. I suppose there are so many other museums in London that have every other phase of art that the Tate specializes in the truly modern. There were some sculptural works I liked quite well, though. I particularly liked the four huge mirrored cubes on the floor that would pretty much only show feet and ankles; because of their placement, it would appear that there were feet wandering all over the room unattached to bodies, and out side of the cubes, many people wandering around the room separated from their feet, which might be wandering completely elsewhere, or missing altogether.

About a half hour before closing, we all stopped for a much-needed and lovely tea at the Tate café. Back into the rain, wandering past the Globe, across the Millenium Bridge, eventually found a bus, and arrived back at the hostel looking quite like drowned rats.