We went to the Primark for half an hour (utterly boring in my opinion, but a couple of the others seemed to enjoy it) and then we went on to the Tate Modern. After we'd gotten off of the Tube stop at St. Paul's and were walking to find the museum and all of a sudden there was St. Paul's perfectly framed in an alley. We took a bunch of pictures, and it looked really cool at night. Then we continued on to Millennial Bridge, which if you remember is the bridge that the Death Eaters attack at the beginning of the sixth movie to show the spread of magical terror in the muggle world.
This is me so excited to be at another Harry Potter site.
Then we went to see the sunflower exhibit, which was amazing and mind-blowing and also a story for another time. We left the Tate when it closed without seeing anything else (it's alright, I'm going back in a few weeks for my Arts class) and decided it would be nice to walk along the river. Little did we know that we were following nearly the precise path of the Bankside and Southwark London walk. There was only a small deviation, and I'm so glad that we did it at night, as it was beautiful!
This is me on London Bridge with the Tower Bridge in the background.
I was so happy that we got to walk across London Bridge. Of course it's been rebuilt (we've all heard about it falling down) but it was still really cool. It's a fairly simple bridge now, except that the side of it (off the edge from this picture) lights up neon pink at night, which is really neat. I was very happy to be on London bridge, but it was also cool to visit the Tower Bridge.
Here I am on Tower Bridge, which is the really famous one that you see pictures of now. This is NOT London Bridge (see above) but the Tower Bridge, which is quite different.
We also walked past the Globe Theatre on our walk, where we could see that they were performing a play (I'm very excited to go there later to see one) and the Tower of London and a replica of Sir Francis Drake's ship. When we studied explorers in elementary school I did a report on him, so I always have remembered him and his ship. And we took the river path right next to the Thames, and it was so beautiful with the city all lit up. It was so warm too, so it was just this really peaceful walk along the river even though it was ten at night. Don't worry, we had two boys in our group of five, so we were totally safe.
So then we walked to the Tower Hill Tube station to go home, which is incidentally the end of the walk, unbeknownst to us, but it was closed! Construction and such, so it's closed for quite a while. So we're thinking okay, we've got maps, we'll just walk to the next closest stop. We walk to the next closest stop, which is about ten minutes away and just as we're approaching it we were talking about how far we were from the Centre (from one end of the map we were using to the other was us and our destination) and I said, "now wouldn't it be funny if we kept having to go from Tube station to Tube station because they were all closed?" and I didn't knock on wood. So of course two minutes later when we arrived at Aldgate, we find out that it's closed just for that day. It was so bad that it was funny. The station master came out and directed us to the next closest station (we're now looking at station number three) which would take us right to one of the stops by the Centre. Thank heavens the third time was the charm and we made it home safely, stopping briefly at Subway (the only thing open that time of night) for some food since dinner didn't really happen for most of us.
And that concludes the nine hours of walking that I did on Saturday. Loved every minute of it though, mainly because of this fabulously beautiful city that I'm in! And the next two walks that I've done will have to be posted tomorrow.
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