London (Day 4)

Went further afield today. We took the tube to the train and headed out of London for Hampton Court. This was a palace Henry VIII lived in (as well as many subsequent royals). You can click on the pics here (and in all my posts) to make them bigger. While the Crown Jewels got me interested in a jewelry display (which is something I never thought I'd care about), Hampton Court made me all excited about architecture, which is a subject that has never really flipped my switch. I ended up taking pictures of all kinds of little details of the buildings and interiors.

Hampton Court holds many portraits of the Tudors, and it was great to see them in person. Photos in books never do justice to the real thing. The interiors of the rooms and the chapel were plush and very (what I call) 'rococo', meaning beautifully fancy and ornate but today only a very flamboyant gay man or a really old lady with ancient-skool taste would decorate things like that. It works in a palace though. See photo below for an example of what I mean.

They had several people running around dressed up as Henry VIII, Katherine Parr, pages, etc. And they interacted with the tourists. Now I know you're thinking: Ick! However, these people weren't interacting in an overly cutesy kind of way, and they seemed to make a point of referencing something around them in a way that told you something about the court. It was actually a pretty cool way to have someone proactively providing information to people in an engaging and non-intrusive way.

We loved Hampton Court and all it's splendor, but I didn't take to many pictures because I knew I could get a book at the tour shop that would have better quality photos than anything I could manage to get. I prefer this because then I can put away the camera and really absorb what I'm seeing and catch little details I might otherwise miss.

After Hampton Court, we came back to London and got into Westminster Abbey. Very impressive architecture, and so extraordinarily Gothic (in the Siouxsie and the Banshees sense). Dimly lit and full of dead bodies and effigies and Latin and crumbling stone. Again, seeing a place like this would normally send me into a yawn spiral, but this was just so top notch for this kind of attraction, that you are engaged in spite of yourself.

We then walked around Soho for a while, which I didn't find especially interesting. Maybe because I lived in a city? It just didn't seem at all trendy or cutting edge to me. Luckily, we spotted Chinatown and wandered in there to find a good restaurant for lunch. After that, we took a stab at the Victoria and Albert Museum, but I was so exhausted from walking around at that point that I could only snap a few pictures of some particularly gaudy/rococo-like beds, mirrors, and interiors that they had on display. I was becoming obsessed with this stuf that I started taking pictures of the extreme examples I saw.

The bad thing about Europe is that you spend so much time walking and standing and looking that your feet and lower back just start screaming by the time nine hours have passed. We had to head back after this especially grueling day. And I thought this was a vacation!