London, UK - Part 3

Dear Friends:

Welcome to the third, and final, blog post about the time I recently spent in the UK.  As you may know, I was there on business.  Once that was concluded, my oldest daughter joined me for a couple of days of "fun".  We haven't traveled by ourselves in a very, very long time.  It was - needless to say - a blast ; )

This blog post is a compilation of two days worth of events.  We start out at church, at the Hyde Park chapel for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The chapel also houses a visitor's center:

The crazy thing is that my daughter knew at least three families that were attending church in London that day.  It's truly a small world.

We also had a chance to experience "high tea" in London.  We decided to really do it right, so we went to Harrod's.  This is the world-famous department store in London.  It's also known for one of the finest tea room experiences in the city.  Incredible elegance and ambience surrounded us for the experience:

I'm not a fan of hot drinks, but we enjoyed some herbal black currant tea, to go with our finger sandwiches and pastries:

A major advantage here?  They would bring as many sandwiches and pastries as you wanted.  And scones.  Don't forget the English scones....

What a fun experience.  I can honestly say that without my daughter suggesting it, I don't think I would ever have spent the time to sample that part of British culture.

We also had a chance to tour Buckingham Palace.  Once a year, while the Queen is traveling on holiday, they allow people to tour the interior of the palace.  

Since it's an actual working palace, the place is simple AMAZING.  We weren't allowed to take pictures, so I had to grab one from the website.  I can tell you that every room was spectacular.  I've toured other palaces in Europe, but none were in actual use.  You can definitely tell the difference!

In addition to the normal tour, they had created a fascinating museum exhibit in some of the larger rooms.  "Fashioning a Reign" is a celebration of the Queen's 90th birthday, and displayed events in the Queen's life through a collection of dresses and gowns.  It was interesting to see her fashion sense change from the beginning of her reign, to today.

This was the first opportunity that we had to take a picture.  This was the back of Buckingham, as we looked out onto a massive acreage of greens pace.  The crazy thing is that this is located in the very heart of London, surrounded by other financial and government buildings.

We also decided to visit the British Library.  The national library houses one of the most impressive collections of historical documents - some dating back as far as 2,000 BC.  Some of these items used to be on display at the British Museum, but have now been consolidated here.

The Treasures of the British Library Gallery has more than 200 historical items including magnificent hand-painted books from several faiths, maps, early printed books, and works from literary, historical, scientific and musical fields from over the centuries and around the world.  Again, we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, so I've grabbed a couple from their website.

We were able to see an actual Gutenberg Bible - the first real book to be printed using the technique of printing, which Gutenberg invented in the 1450s.

I was blown away by the early copies of scripture - mostly the four Gospels.  This is the Codex Sinaiticus.  It was produced in the middle of the 4th century,.  It's one of the two earliest Christian bibles (The other is the Codex Vaticanus in Rome). Within its handwritten Greek text are the earliest surviving copy of the complete New Testament and the earliest and best copies of some of the Jewish scriptures, in the form that they were adopted by the Catholic church.

I could go on and on...the variety of works was just amazing.  I'm still vividly remembering the spiritual experience I had there, while looking at the ancient copies of scripture.

We also decided to head out to Greenwich.  We walked by the St. Pancras railway station...another beautiful building with stunning architecture.  The majority of this building is now a hotel, with the train platforms extended into a more modern facility that is adjacent.

We decided to take a boat to Greenwich, as it sits only 20 minutes from downtown London, along the River Thames.  Greenwich has a long maritime history, with Royal Navy structures and large parks for citizens to enjoy.  We headed to the Royal Observatory, which included a pretty steep climb up a hill.  Looking back, you can see downtown London in the distance. 

On of the things that Greenwich is most well known form, is the establishment of the Greenwich Meridian (0° longitude) and Greenwich Mean Time.  This is the actual meridian line (not terribly exciting):

Outside of the Royal Observatory, there was a display of other historic British standards for measurement, including the foot and the yard:

While in Greenwich, we found a lovely outdoor market.  We focused exclusively on a stand that was selling desserts.  They sold aebleskiver - a Danish desert that could be described as "pancake puffs" or like doughnut holes, but sweeter and much better ; )  We made sure to have ours covered in Nutella...because we're not savage beasts.

We took the Thames boat all the way back to central London, but made sure we got the obligatory tourist shot with Big Ben in the background.  We didn't feel like fighting the 5,000 Chinese tourists to get any closer than that ; )

We finished the evening at a wonderful Indian restaurant called Chutney Mary.  It was a little more modern than the traditional Indian fare that you find throughout the UK - which is all really good.  To help illustrate, this is what the samosas looked like at this place:

Needless to say, it was delicious.  We had a wonderful time, even though we were horribly under-dressed.  However, we just didn't care what anyone thought ; )

That's it for our trip to the UK.  We had a wonderful time together and I'm always lucky to spend time with my children.  I loved that I was able to do some new things, after traveling to London for several decades.  I can't wait to bring the rest of the family to some of these choice locations.

Thanks for reading!