London!

Alright, so I've finally got around to adding a new blog post. I'm finding it difficult to motivate myself to keep this up...

So a couple weekends ago I went to London with my fellow Jesus College friends. For those of you who don't know, Oxford is not in London. It's a city that's an hour and a half outside London, which means we can take day trips in. Just wanted to clear that up.

We got there around noon and went into Hyde Park then wandered over to Harrod's, a shopping center, then Buckingham, then Westminster.

I had to get one of these photos... 

Princess Diana's Playground in Hyde Park

A lake with a bazillion birds in Hyde Park

We went into the grounds of the Kensington Palace (probably the first palace i've ever been to) and there was a nice garden outside.

The building is the palace. We didn't go inside since there was an admission, but it's nice

This was above one of the entrances to the garden area

Some bushes outside the palace

There were some huge swans hangin out with people near the lake

I fed one a cherry! But it bit me :(

Here are some gates to Hyde Park and behind them is the Albert Memorial

This is the Albert Memorial, dedicated to Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert. It's really spectacular, I think. It was one of my favorite things I saw that day

And it's right across from the Royal Albert Hall

We then walked over to Harrod's which is a big shopping center

There was a nice sunset

We came here for the French pastry shop that Dan wanted to get some cookies at. That's Dan in the picture

This was just a cool looking hotel or something

These are the gates to the Buckingham Palace

Buckingham Palace; it was dark out, so the picture isn't great, but it's good enough. I'd like to go back when it's day, maybe for the changing of the guard

Big Ben! 

I'm excited to go back there again, especially since we only saw a small part of it. We didn't really have much of a plan going in and it was nice to wander around. But there are definitely a lot of other places I still want to go. We're going on another day trip tomorrow and hopefully I'll see the London Tower and Tower Bridge.

And here's a bonus picture of Sir Ian McKellan (who played Gandalf and Magneto), who spoke at the Oxford Union last week about being acting and gay rights:

Highlights: him saying "You shall not pass!!" for us, an audience member coming out in front of everyone for the first time, a Shakespearean speech at the end, and him saying that he gave a series of talks about gay rights to schools that he called the Gandalf the Gay tour

Ok, that's all for now. Last weekend we went on a trip to Broughton Manor and Warwick Castle, so I'll have a post about those soon as well as a post on my London trip tomorrow and more Oxford stuff eventually. I'm also going to Scotland next weekend and I'm really excited for that.

Cheers