A lot of walking...

Yesterday afternoon, Rachel and I (a Penn Student who is also taking some of the same courses that I am taking) had a walking tour along the southern bank of the River Thames. To get the place that we needed to get to we decided to walk as it was sort of a nice day. However, that would change. First, we needed to get lunch and we ate at Trafalger Square on Nelson's column. Here is a picture for proof (NOTE: Big Ben in background):

And here is a funny picture of Rachel acting like a lion:

After lunch, we continued walking to the River Thames. Taking lovely pictures of cool buildings and of the historic government part of London. But it started to rain. At first, it wasn't too bad, but it was not fun walking a mile in it.

When we met up with the rest of the group who we were taking the tour with. We found out that we were going to be walking all the way to city hall. Making a one way trip around 4 miles! Whatever, it was fine. We would just feel it in the morning.

On the way there we saw a lot of cool buildings and bridges. This included the Tate Modern Museum (an old power plant turned museum), London Bridge (which we would later walk across) and OXO apartments (an old warehouse that got away with advertising there properties using windows at the top of the building, instead of a normal neon sign like in the states).


We also saw the Globe Theater and an old shipping wharf turned office complex. Eventually, we got to city hall which has a great view of Tower bridge.

And City Hall was also a modern work of art. It is a very eco-friendly building that does not have AC or heat (only at the front entrance because of the cool breeze from the River Thames).

At city hall, we had a boring (but informative) PowerPoint presentation of the structure of planning institutions of London. We decided to walk back to campus via a downtown route which would take us through the business district and past historic and architectually-interesting buildings. Here are a few pictures with captions:

I thought that this was a cool building with an awesome exterior.

Here is St. Paul's Catherdral. A huge building with soo many details and interesting forms.

Here is a circus that we ran into on the way back.

The place on the right reminded me a little bit of the restaurant Parc in Philadelphia.

Eventually, we got really hungry (about 8 out of 10) and after a very long day of walking Rachel and I ate a five pound ($9) all-you-can eat Chinese buffet right near Trafalgar Square.

It was a great day, but it just had a lot of walking (more than 8 miles total)...

Tomorrow, I am going to Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Bath. So expect a rundown in the next few days.