a picture post.....[something weather-related]

this will be the last post full of pictures!

after we stayed in wales for two days, we traveled to oxford to visit Katie, and we stayed in her dorm room that night. oh! but before i tell you anything about that, here's a picture i forgot to put up in the Wales section. this photo has accurately captured the guilt i felt after i murdered someone, or at least ate a lot of mulberries from a public tree. a LOT of mulberries! they were some tasty eating!

right, so we were in oxford. so katie gave us a mini tour of the city and we saw a lot of neat buildings...such as this one: the pub where CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien used to hang out and discuss (among other things) their writings. we went inside and saw the table where they always sat. that was really cool. it's always amazing to be where famous people have been, especially people who are famous for good reasons.

this is a library. there are books on all sides, and also under your feet.

you guys are not going to believe this. there was a Krispy Kreme donut shop inside Oxford castle! it was quite the cultural experience to eat a jelly donut that you bought at a krispy kreme in a castle.

somewhere in Oxford.

this is a grave marker for a group of christian martyrs that were burned there hundreds of years ago. it's just there in the middle of the street, and people can drive and walk over it. kind of eerie, i think.

a street in oxford (compliments of natalie).

again, somewhere in Oxford. i lost the names of all these large buildings and monuments and cathedrals.

that evening, we ate at an Italian restuarant and met some nice people later on. ;) read more about the oxford experience here.

the next day, we made our way to london. you can read about our london escapades at the last link, and also at this one. here is a picture of Westminster Abbey, one of the best places I visited on our whole trip, and which we stumbled upon completely by accident.

now i am inside the palace. here's a contraband picture of Queen Elizabeth's casket (i took it shortly before they grabbed me and told me "No Pictures"). back in the day, they made death masks of important people when they died. so her face on that marble is exactly what she looked like at the time of her death. that is so surreal...i hardly know how to explain it.

another (illicit) photo from inside westminster. those flags are family crests hanging above the Knights' Seats, which have been there for almost a thousand years, and people from those families still sit on the seats for knights' meetings. i guess i don't know what you'd do at a modern day knights' meeting. (play chess maybe? ahaha!!) but the wood on those seats was all worn down and smooth. which was really cool, and then i thought to myself...wow, a thousand years' worth of butts, right there. :)

here's the view right outside Westminster. that's big ben, and the parliament buildings are close behind it. in front of big ben is an anti-war demonstration that was coagulating when i came out of the building. there was an angry man yelling about how america might as well be hitler, or something. i decided we maybe shouldn't hang around to make friends.

the next day we took the subway all over the city! it was really easy to navigate and it was fun at first. but then you are crammed with 50 people inside a tube car for 20 sweaty, airless minutes, and you realize that last year about this time, some terrorists blew some people to eternity on this very system, and the security is STILL absolutely zero, you start to get a little claustrophobic.

one place we traveled on said subway was to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham palace. it's supposed to be really neat. they have a parade every day. all the guards carry large assault rifles (why, i don't know; it's not like the queen really does anything). so here's the sign on one side of the courtyard...

...and here's the sign on the other side! we were extremely disappointed because we'd picked a "rare exception" to visit the stupid palace, which wasn't even very impressive on its own. oh well. we did get to see the guards, which was *Kip voice* pretty cool, i guess.

this is buckingham palace in all its prudently solemn yet disappoingintly bland mediocrity.

the gates outside the palace were more interesting than the palace.

later that day we saw the tower bridge. this was pretty neat. we went on it and up into the tower, and learned about its history and how they built it, etc. it was probably close to the most fun we had in london.

a view from on the bridge. you can see the Tower of London on the left hand side there. (when i was trying to find it, i kept looking for a tower, and eventually realized it wasn't really a tower. although it probably was when it was built.)

a street in london.

oh, you'll like this. we got to see london bridge, and walk on it even! here it is. wow. WOW! are you impressed yet? we weren't, either. (even wikipedia calls it "a dull edifice.") i don't even know why it's famous, and after seeing it, i hardly care. isn't that awful?

so as i said, no mas! no more pictures of my summer excursions! so if you're one of those people who only reads this for the trip pictures, and don't care about my real life, you don't need to come back. :) i'd really love you to, but i won't be offended if your IP address never appears again on my spying program. and i'm not spiteful, so i probably won't even blog about you behind your back.

thanks for reading once again!