And therefore haste I to the Parliament

Alright, so now for Saturday!  We started off by doing another very important London sort of thing.  We went to Parliament!  They only have tours on Saturday, because they're in session during the rest of the week.

Okay, so to be quite honest, I'm having trouble deciding whether the Tower of London or Parliament was more cool.  They're definitely in my top five favorite things that I've done on this trip.  It was really neat.  Because I've read a bunch of books about the history of England, they were telling all these stories that I'd read about, things that I'd heard about or seen on T.V. and I was there in real life!  It was also pretty cool when our tour guide would mention something like the crown jewels that were kept in the Tower of London and I could think oh yeah, totally saw those yesterday.  Old news.

Big Ben and part of Parliament.  Oh, and me.

So the tour was awesome.  They took us right through where the queen goes when she opens Parliament, and then I stood literally four feet away from the ultra fancy throne that she sits in when opening Parliament.  That was another one of those really neat and surreal moments.  Oh, and they totally had us file into the benches and stand, no sitting allowed of course, where the members of Parliament sit.  We did that in the House of Lords and in the House of Commons.  Torture not to sit of course, but really cool.  We couldn't even get lower than the visitor's gallery when we had our tour of the Capitol.  Another reason to love England.

Anyway, we grabbed some lunch from across the street and then wandered around a bit to find the Cabinet War Rooms.  We thought they would be neat to go through, until we learned that admission was 13 pounds.  They suddenly sounded less cool.  But rather conveniently, the war rooms were located right next to the Trooping of the Color, so we wandered over to check it out.

For those who don't know what the Trooping of the Color is, a little explanation.  The queen's birthday is in April or something like that, but as the weather in April isn't nearly as nice and because she's the queen, she's declared that the second Saturday in June is when her birthday celebration shall take place.  Perks of being the ruler of a country you know.  So Trooping of the Color is lots of troops marching about for the queen's birthday.

We had known that the Trooping of the Color was happening, but we hadn't made plans to go.  But since we were there and there was a crowd to follow, we did.  We stood at the side of the road and watched all the troops go by (kind of the like the Royal Wedding, except that I could see better this time and got better pictures) which was pretty neat.  So we're thinking, okay, well that was cool when all these bobbies start going down the middle of the road with a crowd of people behind them.  So we're thinking that it's obviously not over and that we want to be at the front of that crowd.  So we join the crowd, snake our way up to the front, and end up at the gates in front of Buckingham Palace.  You know, the front ones that are the closest that you can get.  And then this cannon starts firing (it fired 40 or 41 times I forget how many) and the queen and the whole flippin royal family walk out onto the balcony.  I know.  What the random, oh look the queen's waving at us, we'd better wave back.  Then there was a really neat flyover (including these planes that spit smoke in red, white and blue for the colors of the Union Jack) and the royal family went back inside and we're sitting there going oh yeah.  We were randomly in London one morning, followed a crowd, and saw the queen.  No big.

Redcoats!  And British flags!

Yeah, so that was pretty neat.  It was at this point that I realized that we were already a good way through the Central Parks walk, which is what Amy and Sydnie had to do that day.  So I decided to go along because I wasn't sure where the nearest Tube station was, and why not spend a beautiful day walking through London parks?  I don't have much time left to do that.  We ended up finding Hard Rock Cafe (tis the original you know) and this protest rally thing that was, as far as we could tell, protesting the fact that prostitutes get raped.  So that was interesting.

When we finally reached the Center (we were all really tired by this point) we all went and collapsed for a bit.  But then we decided that hours are too precious to waste, so we pushed ourselves up and went to Camden Market.  Amazing place I tell you.  I found a really nifty little bag to give to my youngest sister, so that was a bit of a relief to finally get something (I can't say that I've gotten stuff for everyone in my family yet, unfortunately).

Anyway, then we headed back to the Hard Rock Cafe.  We were hoping to eat dinner there, but that didn't work because there was a great big line and we didn't want to wait, as we all had tons of homework to do.  So we just went into the Rock Shop, or the gift store basically.  Still, it was pretty neat to see the original.

We went to the Creperie for dinner, which was actually really excellent.  I got a Ratatouille crepe, which was absolutely delicious and so warm!  Anyway, after that we just headed back to the Center and spent the night doing a bit of homework.