I made it!

Long flights and time changes have gotten a little harder since the last time, but I survived. I’m sightseeing with extreme intensity! Hence why it’s taken me this long to finish my first blog post. This post isn’t even going to be a full wrap of my first full day in London, since there were so many photos. Most likely, content will be spaced out over the next few weeks since I will be doing much less sightseeing once I reach Wales.

Let’s get this thing started so that I can go to dinner!

I started Tuesday at Westminster Abbey, now technically a church and not an abbey (and for 16 years in the sixteenth century, a cathedral), and the site of the coronation of every English monarch since its construction.

Most of the architecture is in the Gothic style, characterized by pointed arches and flying buttresses, even though its construction lasted well beyond the 16th century.

Above the Great West Door are a series of statues representing ten twentieth-century Christian martyrs. A few might look familiar… they include Martin Luther King Jr and Óscar Romero.

Worshipers may enter from the west, but visitors must buy tickets and use the doors under the north facade.

There were no photos allowed inside, so I can’t show you the way the light filters in through the ancient glass; the tombs and dedications to hundreds of England’s most accomplished scientists, musicians, poets, and authors; the poppy-wreathed plaque beneath which is buried a single unknown soldier from World War I, to whom countless monarchs and world leaders have paid their respects; the painted screen and silvery pipes of the church’s organ, or the lace-like carvings in the Lady Chapel’s vault ceilings…

… so let’s go outside!

The walkways of the Little Cloister are full of heavy wooden doors where canons, clergy, and lay officers live and work to this day.

Beyond the Little Cloister is the College Garden, where (in the old days) the Abbey’s monks grew food, medicinal herbs, and plants for inks and dyes.

Westminster School, one of the oldest schools in London, borders the College Garden.

The garden is now more of a park, with flowerbeds, trees, walkways, and benches.

Let’s bee friends.

The exterior of the Lady Chapel makes use of Late Gothic architecture’s characteristic flying buttresses.

I walked by the Houses of Parliament, but as they aren’t in session, visitors couldn’t go in.

London pubs are always pn these beautiful, timeless corners, many with colorful flower baskets and easy-to-spot signs.

But more about pubs later…

Next up: Trafalgar Square and lunch with the dead.