Bridges across forever

I guess this weekend is over, and soon I can sleep again :) These two days were quite tiring and touristy, but all in all I had a good time again. On Saturday the plan was to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace and then take a ride on the London Eye - so we met up with a few colleagues near Westminster to walk along Whitehall for the Horse Guards' Parade. It must be quite stressy for the guards' horses to stand completely still during their shifts, and even though a horse standing still is just a horse standing still, when there are 15 of them it looks kind of impressive :) Obviously these are not the more famous guards with the furry hats, so we went to see them to - we had to cross St. James Park for this, which was lovely, full of little animals :) There was a man feeding the squirrels, they were basically eating from his hands, it was nice. Strange how squirrels tend to hang around in castle gardens, I have photographed them in Marbork (Poland), Schönbrunn (Austria), Potsdam (Germany) and now here. There must be an international squirrel conspiracy to overthrow monarchies, and seemingly they already succeded in 3 other places already :)
Anyhow, there were all sorts of critters in the park, but we went for the ones with the furriest heads - just like thousands of others did. Basically we did not see anything of the main part of the CotG show, but the band played very good music :) And we saw some of the guards march out afterwards to their barracks, where they had a nice short finishing parade, now that was something noone knew of - so we had that show for ourselves :)
Then, we headed towards Westminster Bridge, crossed the Thames and arrived to the Eye, where I collected the previously bought tickets - it was like 10 seconds, I just had to insert the credit card which I used for the online purchase in a machine, and it printed out my tickets without any human interaction necessary. So that was quick - the queue, not so much. We queued for the actual attraction for like half an hour, but it was okay, and of course the view would have been worth even more waiting :) The Eye is probably in the best possible place to see the bigger and more known monuments of London, and since it's by far the tallest building in that area, you really can see everything. In clear weather, you can even see Italy, or so we were told ;) Sadly, we had quite foggy weather, so visibility and photographability ( ;) ) were both restricted, nevertheless, this was an amazing experience :) Since the whole project runs under sponsorship by British Airways, the whole thing is arranged like it was an actual "flight", they even call your trip a "flight". You have to "board" before, then you get security checked, etc.
So then we walked northwards by the Thames to cross the Golden Jubilee Footbridge, on the way we could see a lot of mimes and other artists, it was more or less funny... the guitar players are usually quite good, too. On the other side of the Thames we split up, the others heading for the Tower, me heading for the nearest hamburger stall :) After that I went over to the Blackfriars tube station (everybody please read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman - the tube experience will never be the same boring thing again), just to check out St. Paul's, and cross the Thames again on the Millenium Footbridge. When this bridge was first built, it was so wobbly, that they had to redesign it to somehow dampen the wobbliness - on some of my pictures you can see the additional equipment installed for this purpose. On the other side of the bridge there was the Tate Modern and Shakespeare's Globe, neither of which is a particularly nice building, but the internals count a lot more I guess - no time for those though. I took a short walk in the surrounding area to the nearest Tube station to get me home, did some shopping, gave directions to 3 different British people, and did my laundry. Also, as I found the door of the dishwasher broken, I sent an email about this to the aparment owners, so they repair it and don't make me pay the costs :) Then, after all this fun I went over to one of my colleague's, where a few of us had a few beers before heading out to Soho! Soho's amazing, everyone's queueing for a pub, everyone's going for a party. We managed to find 2 pretty bad clubs to pay the entry fee of, so it was not the most succesful night money-wise :) Well, the first pub was a blues pub, which I would have fancied but the others did not, and the other was just not so very good. Basically we just had a few drinks and then tried to find our way home - it was not that easy to find the correct night bus, but eventually, past 4am, I finally fell asleep in my bed :)

And this was only Saturday... I guess Sunday deserves a separate post, and a shorter one, I promise :)

M.