Westminster Abbey

Our first night in London, most of the group went to a service at Westminster Abbey in remembrance of the one year anniversary of the earthquakes in Haiti. I chose not to go to that service, since there was a service at another church at the same time that I wanted to attend. However, I did really want to see Westminster Abbey, since it contains so much of the history of England, so I paid my £13.00 (fun fact: virtually every museum in the UK that's not free gives a substantial discount for students with id), and did the self-guided audio tour on Wednesday on my own.



The history of the Abbey is astounding. Every crowned English monarch has had his or her coronation there since 1066, and almost every English ruler is buried there. Seeing the tombs of the kings was an incredible experience. There are a total of about 4000 people buried within the Abbey, including pretty much every English person that I've ever heard of, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Charles Darwin to Oliver Cromwell to Winston Churchill. It was also nice that the majority of the memorials are in English (some are in Latin), so I could actually tell what I was looking at, unlike the tombs that we had seen as a class in Munich, Lausanne, and Turin cathedrals. The audio tour of the Abbey was excellent, and I also liked that the Abbey is still very much a working church, with daily services and hourly invitations to prayer. All in all, the several hours I spent wandering through history (yes, that's actually what it felt like) in the Abbey was one of my favorite experiences on the trip.

After experiencing Westminster, I went down the street to the Churchill War Rooms. This is a museum dedicated to Winston Churchill located in the underground Cabinet War Rooms, the location that the war council met during World War II. The bunker was supposed to be a bomb shelter, but it turned out after the war that it would not have survived a direct hit from a German bomb. The war rooms were an interesting place to be, especially since I've always been interested in World War II history, but the museum was a bit disappointing after Westminster Abbey. While there was a massive amount of information about Churchill, many of the displays seemed to be written at a very simplistic children's level, and the organization of the displays was, as far as I could figure out, pretty random. Still, it was a good place to visit just to experience where the Battle of Britain and much of World War II was directed from, and there was a cool sense of history just from walking in the same halls and rooms that Churchill worked from. This is probably the only post I'll make on this blog, but I have also been blogging about my entire Europe experience on my own blog, at jugglingnebula.blogspot.com, so if anyone wants to hear more about my personal experiences...