Today TJ, our friend from TU who's studying at Leicester, came to London for some sightseeing, so we ran around the city with him for a while. We started out at Trafalgar Square (to see the Naional Gallery) where an enormous anti-war protest was going on. The entire square was full of people parading in from other parts of the city, all carrying protest signs and yelling crazy things. Many of the protesters were socialists but most just seemed to be against the war in Iraq and further conflicts with Iran. They had even strung a huge banner on Nelson's Column, the giant obelisk in the middle of the square. Not quite our cup of tea, but fun to watch for a few minutes.
We also hit up my favorite spot in London -- the British Library. The library houses pretty much every book printed plus a huge room full of famous handwritten manuscripts, first editions, etc. Some of the great stuff they have there: works from James Joyce and Lewis Carroll, Handel's Messiah and other great compositions, three versions of the Magna Carta, pages from Leonardo Da Vinci's and Charles Darwin's notebooks, the Gutenberg and King James Bibles. The nearest tube station -- King's Cross -- is home to platform 9 3/4 from the Harry Potter books. The station has embedded a luggage cart in the wall under a 9 3/4 plaque, so we took to opportunity to do cheesy tourist photos there.
Next we went on a tour of all the random free attractions around London that I could think of, including: 221b Baker Street, fictional home of Sherlock Holmes; Abbey Road, of Beatles fame; and a plaque at the place where William Wallace (think Braveheart) died.
After dinner at Mr. Wu's (an amazing 5-pound buffet in China town) we walked around Picadilly Circus for some souvenir shopping before telling TJ 'peace out."
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