London (Day 13) - Changing of the Guard, British Museum, Lamb & Flag Pub

I guess we didn't time things too well because when we went to Buckingham Palace yesterday, we saw a sign that said the next Changing of the Guard would be the following day. And so, here we are again at Buckingham Palace, but for the Changing of the Guard.

If you go to see the Changing of the Guard, don't be fooled by all the people crowded around, facing the street area that we're facing in this picture. Even though there's people waiting in the far reaches, if you're gonna wait, you still want to be near the Palace gates because that's where all the action actually happens. Here on the street, you get some good views, but only when they march in and out of the Palace. And, as you can imagine, that only happens once at the beginning, and once at the end.

Not sure exactly what happens inside the Palace gates, but it's some combination of music and marching back and forth.

I think they're "Changing" the Guard.

The music...

The Queen's Guard

After the Changing of the Guard, we took another trip to Borough Market. Couldn't get enough of those pies, so we went for 2 more.

One of most popular bakeries in London is Konditor and Cook, and while there are several locations, one is conveniently located across the street from the Borough Market.

I actually don't remember all the things we got, but I would say you can't go wrong picking one of their sponge cakes. 

We then ventured off to the British Museum. 

I actually thought this was a museum focused on British history and cool British stuff. It wasn't a pretty neat museum, but not specific to Great Britain. It had something from a variety of countries.

A piece of the Rosetta Stone

Some sort of structure from Greece haha.

I don't remember exactly what structure this is above, but it was pretty cool because they basically took a whole bunch of chunks from the place and reassembled it. Of course, the interpretation or whether or not this is an accurate reconstruction is still up for debate.

Nice museum facility...

I don't know if I'd recommend spending time visiting this museum. It must have some cool artifacts, but nothing stood out too much to me. I think you can pass this up on a visit to London.

From here, we went to Covent Market. It's not quite the same as Borough that is really focused on food. Covent Market is basically like a mall, a 3rd street promenade type - an outdoor shopping area with common name brands we recognize in America.

However, one of the notable places here for us was Ben's Cookies.

Much like the cake from Konditor and Cook, their desserts have a different consistency to them that I can't quite place. Cookies were good though!

For dinner, we went to Lamb & Flag, a pub established in 1772. Apparently it was often associated with bare knuckle fights back in the day. 

I got Fish & Chips and Sophy got another Steak and Ale pie.

The food was decent, but it did help me understand that Master's Super Fish was definitely a top notch Fish & Chips shop.

London (Day 12) - Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Borough Market, Tower of London, and Fish & Chips!

Next to our hotel, (and really, just about on every corner), there is a Pret a Manger, which uses natural, preservative-free ingredients to make sandwiches. We had two small breakfast sandwiches and a coffee for 7 pounds which is about $11 for stuff that was small and not very good. I will say, however, their non-breakfast sandwiches are all very good, and worth the price. This is a UK based chain, but after looking into this, apparently it's already branched out quite a bit in America. Must be in the cool cities like NYC and Chicago. Seems like any brand or chain that comes from Europe first makes its way to New York before expanding any further.

We took a walk to Buckingham Palace. Some of the scenes along the way.

It's really only a 20 minute walk, but something about the long street just made it feel like such a long walk haha.

Eventually we arrived to find the residence of Her Majesty, the Queen...Buckingham Palace.

I believe there's occasionally tours of the inside of Buckingham Palace, but you have to time it with the queen's annual 2-month visit to Scotland. You can, however, visit the State Rooms is my understanding. Not sure if we missed out or not, but we didn't do any of those.

We did make it to the Buckingham Palace store, where we were on the lookout for Corgi memorabilia. You can go for the basic stuffed corgi (which doesn't look like a corgi) for 16 pounds.

Or, you could opt for the Limited Edition (only 100 made) for 175 pounds! (which also doesn't look like a Corgi).

We brought back no Corgis.

After that, it was time to take a walk back on that long street to head over to Westminster Abbey.

This was actually a really beautiful church. It's kind of crazy though, admission is about 18 pounds which comes with audio guide, but that's like $30 to spend about an hour inside. The worst part is they don't let you take pictures inside. The church, like I said, was really nice inside, and I would say really ranks up there with some of the nicer churches we saw in Italy. The audio guide was pretty interesting, as it gives quite a history of all that's taken place at Westminster Abbey, along with the all the royalty involved.

 I'm happy to stand corrected, but I believe the tower in the picture below with the flag on it is part of the Houses of Parliament. That's right, I think Jack Bauer ran around there during 24: Live Another Day.

If you plan on going to Westminster Abbey, make sure you get there when they open. This is the line once we got out, which is actually about 2.5 times as long as you can see in the picture.

Not far from Westminster Abbey is Big Ben, the iconic clock tower attached to the Houses of Parliament.

After a couple train transfers, we found our way to Borough Market. Apparently this is one of the oldest food markets in London. Of course, the facilities look pretty modern so I'm guessing they had some work done recently. But they've definitely got a good variety of offerings.

Although we just came from Italy, somehow we ended up at the pasta shop for some wild boar ravioli. Not bad actually.

Once you get past the permanent stands, there's actually a lot of tents in the back with a lot more different food.

Here, we found probably our favorite food stop in London, Pieminster.

Steak and Ale seems to be the most common pie, but my favorite was the Free Ranger which had chicken, ham hock, leek, and thyme. For 5,50 pounds, you get a pie, potato mash, and gravy. This was probably our favorite food in London.

From here, we made our way to the Tower of London. Below is a view of the Tower Bridge, taken during our walk across the London Bridge.

We arrived at the Tower of London. This was a pretty neat facility, essentially a fortified castle. In fact, in its early history, it was used as the royal residence.

The ceramic poppys below are located where a moat would have surrounded the castle.

Below is the White Tower, built in 1066.

From the edges of the Tower of London, you get a great view of the Tower of London.

The exterior of the buildings was actually cooler than the interiors, but that's just me.

Apparently the house below is the "Queen's House" and she could live here if she chooses.

These guys are interesting to everyone.

We also made it into the Crown Jewels exhibit. No pictures allowed in here, but it was basically a big bank vault type place. I mean, they do have diamonds and jewels of all sorts inside.

Nice lights at night...

As I mentioned yesterday, I didn't do a whole lot of research on London restaurants, but I did spend time looking for a good Fish n Chips place.

We opted for Master's Super Fish in Waterloo. This picture is kind of deceiving but the Fish is actually a really good size. The fish tasted relatively fresh, and was basically a whole cod fish.

The food was definitely pretty good, but the service leaves something to be desired. I guess in British restaurants, gruff no-nonsense service is a common theme. This place had a decent amount of locals and a couple tourists.