wind, globe theater, rain, wind, parliament, rain, puddles, wet shoes, and more rain (heads up...long one)

ok i admit it i live in london, it rains here. thank you mother nature you prove your point. it rained today off and on and i did not make the correct shoe selection this morning when i went into central london. i am getting pretty good at looking outside when it is overcast and predicting if it is gonna rain or not...but i was way off today. anyways moving...

today was my trip to the globe theater and parliament with my british life and culture class. we had to make our own way into london, which only sucked cause we had to pay for our own train ride and i thought the 80 pounds i had to pay at the beginning of class covered all transportation, but i guess i was wrong. so anyways we had to meet at shakespear's globe theater and we got to go inside and get a tour from a lady all dressed in black. it was pretty cool even though it was not even close to the original one since that one burned down like a century before the great london fire (1666). but our lady told us that the globe that stands today was reconstructed all by hand, no new technology was used to build it, so we are talking all hamemers and stuff like that. and all the wooden pegs in the building (little over 12, 000) are actually not round but an octagon and each individual peg takes over an hour and a half to make. dang. so we went inside and i took a not so good picture, shown below, of the seats inside the globe. the seats that are in the blurry picture are about 15 to 30 pounds, but you can get 5 pound standing in the front "yard" leaning up against the stage and up close like that. only problem is you cant sit, you have to stand, its under the open thatched roof and you arent allowed to use umbrellas and they perform no matter the weather. and each performance is about 3 hours. so yeah. also underneath the globe is a large exhibition about the building and shakespear, its real cool. but i saw this sweet wagon and i wanted to pull it, little did i know that it was not bolted to the ground so i actually did pull it for a sec. i know it is hard to see but my face, i am not actually pulling, that is raw facial acting...the struggle. i know you all see it.
t

ok so we had some time to kill before we had to be in parliament so we went to a pub and i had some very yummy fish n' chips. by now the wind was going crazy and blowing small children over the river, we are talking it was strong. after some tea (yeah i went the tea route to try and warm me up)anyways so we made our way to parliament and for those of you who dont know what parliament looks like in london...here you go
anyways we were not allowed to take pictures inside really so i didnt. sorry to make you sad but my words shall be enough. this place is huge and old/new. so there are three colors of parliaement. red, green, and blue. red represents the house of lords. everything is red oriented...like the seats, book, tapastries...things like that. then the house of commons is all in green in the same manner. and then whenever the queen comes to parliament blue carpets are laid out for her to walk on since the queen while in parliament cant walk on anything but blue by tradition. so we got this tour guide all of about 5'5 and very very bald. this man was filled with information and very willing to spill it all over you. so i learned a lot but all i can really remember off the top of my head that i found was interesting was that the chair that the queen sits in in the house of lords is very ornate and gold leafed with 24 carot gold... very intense. here is picture of it and you kinda get the point. so that was very cool and then we went over to the house of commons side which is not ornate and recently rebuilt under winston churchill after the heavy bombing of london during the second world war. churchill had it built very plainly so people would remember the war and not get to caught up in silly superficial things. so they commons is very well...common. and i thought the cool thing was that when ever thse two places are in session whever they refer to the other house they never say house of commons or the house of lords each refers to the other as "the other place" never has eachother's house been spoken in the other. i thought that was kinda cool.

anyways since we were already in london a bunch of us decided to go to dinner since we dont really get to go into central london a lot since its kinda pricey. well we to the underground and we were waiting for a girl to meet up with us and my feet were tired so i sat down in the lobby like area in front of the escalators to the bakerloo line. yeah people looked at me like i was homeless. i didnt think i looked homeless at all. but whatever. i was half expecting people to start throwing pence at me.at least amaya sat with me so i had a flatmate in my homelessness.so from there we went to piccadilly in the rain and found this indian place to eat at and lets just say i was less than impressed and my umbrella was stolen. oh well. well i better go pack now for prague since i leave tomorrow and its already late. great. ok well thats all for now.