On our second day in London, we began our trip to the British Museum, which includes a huge collection of artifacts from the Ancient World, essentially perfectly linking up to Jake's curriculum of his 6th grade Social Studies class. We saw a variety of exhibits ranging from Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome! It was very interesting!
In the gift shop, there was a book that features a main character named Jake!
After spending most of the day at the British Museum, we went to the Westminster Abbey. While visiting during the day is incredibly expensive (roughly $25-30 per person), every evening at around 5pm they offer a free service called Evensong, in which you can listen to the choir sing some hymns in the cathedral. While you aren't free to explore the entire cathedral and you can't take pictures inside, we loved being able to listen to the voices of the choir ring out throughout the entire church. It was stunning (and we definitely appreciated saving our money!) After the service, we took some pictures outside of the abbey. There was even a sculpture on the from of the church of Martin Luther King, Jr., among other martyrs of the 20th century.
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Conveniently located nearby the Westminster Abbey were the Parliament Building, Big Ben, and the London Eye, so we spent some time looking at these as well!
I always get excited when I see people who just got married!
I do love a good Ferris Wheel, so we did decide to do the London Eye. While this ride was quite a bit more expensive than in Liverpool, the ride lasts about 30 minutes and does give really great views over the city. We definitely enjoyed it.
The Shard, the largest building in London.
We concluded our night just as the sun was setting by Big Ben, so it made for a lovely picture!
On our third day in London we actually started our day again with the British Museum for a couple more hours. Since their collections of artifacts were so large, we couldn't get to everything the first day, so we stopped back again! And, I should add, that despite how expensive most things are in the UK/London especially, most of their museums are free!
These are pieces from the Lewis chess set, which date back to the 12th Century. I love their facial expressions!
The interior of the center part of the British Museum
One exhibit that we really enjoyed was one about money, which included some of the history of coins and banknotes from around the world.
The money in Zimbabwe used to make the following artifact was essentially worthless around 2008 and 2009. To give an idea about how worthless the money in Zimbabwe was at the time, government workers were getting paid a monthly salary of about 109 billion Zimbabwe dollars, or the equivalent of $.74 in the US, and people were limited to withdrawing 100 million Zimbabwe dollars per transaction at an ATM. I find this very fascinating!
As the UK is famous for their fish and chips, naturally we wanted to participate! Luckily enough for me, there was a famous pub that served vegan fish and chips! Woohoo!!!! It was super delicious and definitely had some of the flavor that I remember from when I ate fish several years ago. They called the dish Tofush and chips and it was a mixture of some tofu, some seaweed (for that "fishy" flavor), and some additional seasonings as well!
After eating, we spent a bit of time at the Natural History Museum, in which there was a very cool dinosaur exhibit, featuring 6 of 7 complete dinosaur skeletons and an awesome exhibit of rocks and minerals! That was about all that we had time for, but we really enjoyed these parts!
A statue of Charles Darwin!
Lastly, we ended the night with a simple meal at home with some food from the adorable co-op that was located in the same building as the apartment where we were staying! During our trip we have definitely had some delicious food, but it did feel so nice to cook/prepare some of our own food again! We had mango smoothies, fresh bread with red pepper hummus, salads, and I had some vegan coconut yogurt with berries!
That concludes several of our days in London, and I will finish off our travels in London with my next post! As always, thanks for reading! Hope you have had a lovely July! :)
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