London Part 2

I have been so behind on keeping up with my blogging, we didnt have much access to internet in Paris. Our third day in London Katie, Justine, and myself, the three of us got up early and went to get into the queue for Wimbledon. We werent sure how it all worked, but when we got there, we were 9711-13 in terms of position in the line. 6000 were admitted to the park right away, but we had to wait for the other 3700 people before us to make it in. We were very stubborn about it and waited for over 7 hours to get into the park. We read all about Michael Jackson, completed all of the sudokos in the paper we bought to read about MJ and made friends with some very nice older travelers from Melbourne. We were very exstatic when we got in at 6:30pm. We walked around for a while and watched several different matches, most of which were mens or mixed doubles. We purchased resale tickets and got in to watch Igor Andreev and Andres Seppi. Andreev later went all the way to the quarterfinals, so a big match!

The last day in London was a partial day becauase we had to go to Paris that night. We got up early again and went to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. None of us were overly impressed. Most of the action happened insided the gates where we couldnt see. I was cool when they paraded past, but were were expecting something more like the changing of the guard at the tomb of the unknown solider in DC. We were really thrown off when the military band started to play a medaly of tunes from ABBA during it. Afterwards we went to Hyde Park and ate lunch along the Serpentine (the lake) and then went to Kensington Gardens where there is a statue in honor of Peter Pan, apparently the gentleman who wrote the story, wrote most of it in the gardens. Afterwards Justine and I went to check out Trafalger square, it was very impressive and very crowded, a bunch of people had written all over the National Gallery, it was all graffetti to Michael Jackson. Then we went and walked through Covent Garden marketplace. We went back to the hostle and headed for the train station. Kara and Justine nearly missed the train over some phone issues, but we all made it, and it turned out that the cheapest ticket available turned out to be the one that had a full meal served on it. We ate very well for dinner. When we first got to France we were all a little overwelmed by the language change but we got to Alex´s house where his family met us and got us all settled in for a week long stay at their house.