Monday 8 September 2008

London Day 5

Our last day in London already. Woe.

This meant getting up early (yes, really!) so that I could go to The Globe for the first tour of the morning, at 9am. Most places don't open til after 10, so this was good and could be fitted in first thing. I met a young girl, waiting for the place to open. We spoke a few words and discovered our german language heritage (she was Austrian) and she immediately switched to german. She's in England to learn english, after all :-)

The tour of The Globe was quite interesting. Of course it was around 10 GBP, but that seems to be something like a minimum admission fee in London. One is, surprisingly, allowed to take photos of the theatre, so I took full advantage:
 
Mother-in-law didn't come inside with me, since the tour is only offered in english and she wouldn't have understood anything, so we met outside and headed off alongside the Thames:

 
Next stop was Somerset House to have a look at the Cezanne exhibition. It was only 8 GBP, but there were only 12 of his paintings  to see! At least some of them were new to me... We decided to get our money's worth and looked at all the others too, on a whirlwind tour of the other galleries. At least the building is worth seeing too:

 
Second last stop was The Tower of London. We'd walked past it twice a day for 5 days, so the anticipation was killing my mother-in-law. I'd been inside 4 times already, so my anticipation was non-existent :-) However, it was nice to have digital images of my own at last:

 
Then it was time to go to the  hotel to pick up our luggage and head for the station. At the station we wanted to put our bags in a locker to go and have a look at the 'gherkin' building (30 St Mary Axe), which had fascinated my mother-in-law the whole time we'd been here. However, when we discovered it cost 6.50 GBP per bag, we decided that I'd stay with the baggage and she'd go off on her own to check it out. She didn't even get lost! :-)

I don't have photos of the gherkin, since I'd not been. How sad. And there's no photos of the trip home by Stansted Express and then Air Berlin either.

Thus ends the London trip section of my jaunt to Europe.