London

So there are several reasons why The Doc File has been pathetic lately, but one of the major ones was that for the week of Thanksgiving I traveled to London with my family (the week before London I was busy trying to get things done so I could be gone, and the week after London I was busy catching up with work that I missed).

It was an incredible trip. I had never been to London before, but it was quite a bit like I expected. One thing I expected but still couldn’t really get over was how much history there was all around you.

In the town where I live, buildings from 1900 are preserved for historical value and schoolchildren visit them on field trips. In London, we randomly stumbled upon a cathedral that none of us had ever heard of which dated back to the 12th century.

A non-exhaustive list of places we visited and things we did:

• St. Paul’s Cathedral
  
• Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and Mueseum (not the original, it’s been rebuilt)
  
• Southwark Cathedral
• National Library (Codex Sinaiticus and two 1215 copies of the Magna Carta)
• Natural History Mueseum
• Edinburgh Castle (we took a train to Scotland one day)
  
• The Royal Mile in Edinburgh
• Jack the Ripper walk (this was really cool; I’m kind of obsessed with Jack the Ripper)
• City of London walk (Big Ben, House of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace)
• Trafalgar Square
• National Gallery (Rembrandts and Van Goghs)
• Evensong in Westminster Abbey
• Tower of London and Tower Bridge
• Harrod’s
• Stonehenge
• HMS Victory in Portsmouth (Admiral Nelson’s flagship from the Battle of Trafalgar where Napoleon was defeated)

It was kind of an exhausting trip with all the stuff we squeezed in, but you don’t get to go to London whenever you want to. I hope to upload some pictures to Flickr later this week.