I have a good eye . . . I can see a church by daylight

Hey everyone!  So today is all about Tuesday (I'm a little behind) and Tuesday was mostly all about St. Paul's, which you may remember I had previously seen at night looking very cool when we went to the Tate Modern.  On Tuesday however I went in the daytime!  But that's a little later in the day.

I started out Tuesday morning with an eye towards homework.  I needed to go to the National Gallery for a few hours.  So Molly and I set out for the Gallery and arrived at 10:15, just fifteen minutes after the museum opened, which was perfect.  We spent the next two hours doing the audio tour of the National Gallery.  They give you these little remotes and a pair of headphones and you wander through the rooms and type in the numbers for the paintings.  It was interesting, but it was so long!  I was worn out by the end of it and so ready for a lunch break.  So we went across the street to Pret a Manger.

Yeah, basically I have a new favorite restaurant.  They had these delicious sandwiches (their big deal is that they make everything fresh every day nothing left from the day before and therefore no expiration dates) and I got one with salmon and cucumbers and all sorts of other delicious stuff and a small baguette for under four pounds, which was perfect.  Just the right amount of food too, especially considering this early dinner thing.

Then it was back to the National Gallery to do my other sketch.  That took about an hour, and we left the National Gallery with the perfect amount of time to get to St. Paul's a little early.  We ran into some other friends from the program on the way to the Tube, so we joined forces and continued down.  But we unfortunately hopped on the wrong train (we turned right instead of left when it came to the split for platforms and the train was about to leave so we jumped on real quick) and had to get off at the next station and ride back to the first station and continue on from there.  So we lost all of our getting there early time, and once we got to St Paul's we managed to circle the entire cathedral before finding our group.

But we made it!  We went inside the cathedral and got stickers to go on our tour.  The tour was pretty neat, but the best part was when he showed us this spiral staircase that led up to the library (which I didn't know that cathedrals had) which was actually used in the Harry Potter movies!  They didn't let us take any pictures inside the cathedral, but the Harry Potter part of me was freaking out.  It's from the third movie and there's that stone spiral staircase from Divination class.

After our tour ended down in the crypt we proceeded to climb all of the many 500+ stairs to the very top of St. Paul's.  It was an awful lot of stairs and they got very narrow at one point.  I was glad that we didn't get stuck on that part of the stairs.  And then the final ones that you climb (you know the final 150 or something) are these spiral metal staircases that are just in the middle of the air and therefore appear to be quite unsturdy and frightening.  But there was a great view of London from the top, and the Whispering Gallery was also pretty neat.

After St. Paul's a bunch of us decided to do the walk that started and ended there.  We managed to get lost several times, which made us a tad bit late to dinner because the approximate time that we got wasn't what we planned on.  I guess we should always add an extra half an hour for the inevitable wandering in circles.  There's a great lack of street signs in London and these walks like to send us down tiny little streets that aren't marked with names on any sort of map.

Here we are at this random pub that we found that was really pretty.  See all of the flowers?  It's called The Cockpit and claims to have been built on the site of Shakespeare's house.  True?  I don't know, but fairly cool either way.

Yeah, so fun walk.  Then that evening we went to the Royal Opera house to watch Cinderella!  (The ballet for those of you who were wondering).  It was so beautiful!  We all dressed up to go there and bought these delicious cookies on the way and our seats had a clear shot view of the stage and were much better than we were expecting.  

Here we are in our seats before the show!

Anyway, it was so cute and absolutely beautifully done.  Really made me wish that I could still do ballet and more particularly that I could do it beautifully.  The pas de deux was my favorite part, which was rather unusual for me.  (pas de deux, for those of you who aren't ballet savy, is the part when the lead boy and girl dance together, so Cinderella and the prince in this case.)  It made me so happy!