Exploring London – finale

Having been unsuccessful in our previous attempts to meet the Queen, we decided to take matters in our own hands! We went to Madame Tussauds, a wax museum.

heeelllpppp!!!!

There’s a certain creepiness to wax museums that somehow attracts me. I know they’re cheesy tourist traps, but we promised ourselves not to leave London without meeting the Queen and visiting this place provided us the last chance to honor that promise

If you’re like us and love odd attractions with a certain aura of spookiness, Madame Tussauds is one place you shouldn’t miss. The place is full of life-sized wax images of all popular icons in show business, politics, religion, sports and academia.

I’m not sure if they still have this booth there now, but when we were there, they have this Big Brother booth. We went inside and somehow foolishly did what Big Brother asked us to do. We answered all his questions in the most funny way.  We even sang and danced. I know it was silly but nobody knew us there anyway so we threw all our inhibitions out of the window and enjoyed the whole experience. When we went to see the recording of what we did, it didn’t look pretty so we didn’t buy it…haha!

with the Queen

They also have this very dark haunted lane full of scary images of murdered people. Joan didn’t get inside as she was afraid she’ll gonna have nightmares after. I went in. It wasn’t as scary as advertised, well for me anyway. Probably because at the back of my mind, I knew that all of those images and effects weren’t real. The only thing that got me was when one of the actors, in Halloween costume, came out of nowhere and screamed right next to my ear. That scared the shit out of me! 

After almost draining the batteries of our cameras from taking photos of ourselves with almost all the celebrities’ wax images, we decided it was time to leave and do some last minute shopping before going home the next morning.

And yes, we’ve met the Queen and David Beckham. Well, their wax images anyway but still. The Prime Minister doesn’t have a wax image that time.

 

Exploring London – part 5

You have to take a day trip to England’s countryside when you’re in London. You could easily find a tour company doing this kind of trip as they are all over the place. Usual options would include a trip to Bath, Windsor Castle, Oxford, Stonehenge, Brighton, etc.

Windsor Caste, England

Since we were unsuccessful in our attempt to meet the Queen in the past few days, we decided to visit Windsor Castle, one of her official residences, hoping she might be there. We also paid Stonehenge a visit, to find out if there are alien remains left in the site. And lastly, we did a short trip to Oxford, to check if Harry Potter left some magical wand we could to use to magically appear in front of the Queen.

First stop – Windsor Castle. The largest and oldest occupied castle in the world, Windsor Castle is one of the principal residences of the Queen and covers nearly thirteen acres. The first castle on the site was set up by William the Conqueror in about 1070. Although much of the castle isn’t open to the public and you’re not allowed to take photo inside, we still had fun roaming around the various rooms in the castle. The rooms were lavishly decorated with priceless furniture, paintings and what have you. They are all massive. I can’t imagine myself living there, it would be horrible. I probably would need a GPS to find the kitchen or my bedroom.

Outside the Windsor Castle

The Queen wasn’t there that day so we didn’t get the chance to have a tea with her. We went to the nearby cafe and ordered a lemon tea instead. Well, that is after visiting the lower ward of the castle where St George’s Chapel is located.

Second stop – Stonehenge. If you’re into UFOs and aliens, you probably must have heard of Stonehenge. Researchers in the past, found relationships between the locations of various stone monuments to the movements of the sun, moon and stars, which is very odd considering that this structure was built some 5,000 years ago, supposedly by primitive people. For that reason, the alien story came up. The story is that when the aliens visited the earth and needed to tract the movement of heavenly bodies, they set up this structure using the materials they could find around, in this case stones.  I, however, favors the idea that the place was built for worship. The ancient people must have built this place to worship the heavenly bodies and since they don’t have TV or internet to destruct them before, they have all the time to observe the movements of the sun, moon and the stars and must have collated all those facts when building this structure.

Stonehenge, England

There were not so many people when we arrived, probably because it was raining! We were given an audio guide to listen to whilst roaming around. I didn’t use mine. With all the mystery surrounding Stonehenge, I bet the audio guide’s isn’t really accurate with everything it says. So I chose to approach Stonehenge my way. I must say, I felt like walking on hallowed ground. I’m an atheist so I have no intention of doing any worship ritual there. Yet I couldn’t help feeling that the site was a spiritual space for people at some point. I can’t imagine the amount of labour it must have taken them to put those massive stones in their exact locations. The symmetry and design of it is beautiful. It is not just a prehistoric monument; it is an art, right there in the middle of Salisbury Plain.

At the Stonehenge

Last stop – Oxford. On our way to Oxford, our tour guide was talking about the rivalry between Oxford University and Cambridge University, two of the world’s topmost universities. I didn’t pay attention to him and slept instead.

The first thing I noticed when we got off the coach was that there were so many bicycles chained at the side of the road. I was told that those were of the students.

I was actually expecting that the Oxford University would just be in one massive campus. It turned out to be divided in several colleges and are located in several locations. We visited one college and their library. I secretly envied those students. I wondered if I could have been admitted to Oxford University had I been given the chance… hmmm

One of the colleges in Oxford

As we walked down the street, the tour guide pointed out some of the very old houses. The doors were so short as people were really small back then. (That there is one proof of evolution!) Then he talked about some Harry Potter things, which I wasn’t really interested. My friend Joan though was really into it.

I was knackered at the end of that day. It was worth our while though, I must say. After buying some souvenirs, we headed back to London.

Still unsuccessful in meeting the Queen.

 

Exploring London – part 4

I have tons of women friends that’s why I know what they’re like when it comes to shopping. They’ll search the entire mall, try on everything they think would look good on them, ask your opinion, then your second opinion but then they won’t buy the item in the end. Then you’ll move on to the next mall repeating the same ritual all over again. But I made peace with it through the years.

St James' Park, London

Well, that’s roughly what happened on our 3rd day in London. We decided to go shopping and shopping we did!

Around 9 AM, we were already in Oxford Street. However, just like in the Philippines, most of the shops open at either 10 AM or half past 10. So we decided to walk to the other end of the street just to see if there are other interesting shops that we might wanna check out later. We walked past many people queueing in one of the shops and we thought that there was a massive sale that day, so we decided to join the queue. We didn’t even checked the shop’s name. It turned out to be Primark. Primark is known for selling clothes at the budget end of the market.

Westminster Palace, London

Their products are so cheap that we didn’t even bother to fit anything we fancy. Whether they’ll fit to us or not, was not so important that time as we could always send them to our relatives in the Philippines. Plus the queue to the fitting room was ridiculously long, so it wouldn’t be worth the effort. You could get a trouser for £5, a t-shirt for £3, a jumper for £5 and the list goes on. I even got a luggage trolley for only £9 and I’m still using it until today in most of my travels. So when you’re in London and you’re on a budget, I highly recommend this shop. Grab anything you fancy, put it in your shopping basket and decide later whether you really like it or not.

We probably spent half day in that shop alone. Then we moved on to the most obvious options, Topshop, Mango, Marks and Spencer, Next, Selfridges, John Lewis, Debenhams, House of Fraser, HMV, etc.

Millennium Bridge and St Paul's Cathedral, London

Our hands could barely held all the things we bought at the end of that day. Obviously because we didn’t go to Harrods (a high-end department store in Knightsbridge), otherwise, it would have been a totally different story.

We were so tired at that point that we decided not to watch any West End show as we originally planned. We haven’t met the Queen, the Prime Minister and David Beckham yet but our hopes were high that we might finally meet the Queen the following day as we’re going to visit one of her residences.