Greetings from St. Albans

I'm sitting in an Internet Cafe in a town called St. Albans, about 50km north of downtown London. Paul & Jane, the couple I'm staying with here, moved here on Saturday from their flat in Notting Hill. It's a pretty nice little place (3 bedroom, lounge, dining, etc), although they're planning on repainting most of the rooms.

Before that though, on Thursday, I visited the British Museum, which houses artifacts from all around the world, from Egyptian, to British, to Aztec, but to name a few. It also houses the famous Rosetta Stone which was key to translating Egyptian hyroglyphs. That took up about 3 hours just wondering around. Then I wondered over to St. Paul's Cathederal, which was quite impressive. I came back later for their daily 'Evensong', which is a 45 minute service mostly in song. They had a boys/mens choir and the pipe organ leading the worship. Quite interesting.

The next day I went to the Science Museum, but most of the photos of that didn't turn out well due to bad light and poor cameramanship. It has lots of exhibits of science and technology over the centuries, from ploughs to Stevenson's 'Rocket', to space travel.

Saturday was mostly spent moving, but we did wonder around St. Albans afterwards. It's a fairly historic town, with a large Abbey (which reportedly has the largest Nave in England - I'll leave finding out what a Nave is as an exercise to the reader), an old clock tower, and several old Roman ruins which I haven't had a chance to see yet.

Then, on Sunday, Paul & Jane headed off to Copenhagen and Amsterdam for a week-long holiday. It's the first one they've had by themselves (without pesky visitors like me hanging around), so hopefully they'll enjoy themselves. They've kindly let me stay in their place while they're away, though. After dropping off the car they hired to move their stuff to St. Albans, they headed to the airport, and I headed to the Tower of London. It's a pretty cool place - lots and lots of history there. Although not a royal residence any more, it was for several hundred years from its construction in the 11th century. The tower itself, called the White Tower is the oldest structure on the site. One of it's most infamous occupants was probably King Henry the VIII, who is best known for having executed 5 of his six wives (the 6th being married to him for four years before his death). After checking out the Crown Jewels and many other interesting buildings in the Tower, I headed out and walked across the Tower Bridge (who's towers I found to be more impressive than the Tower of London - less historical though). A short walk down the south bank of the Thames brought me to London Bridge, which was very unimpressive and not looking like falling down at all.

Anyway, that's pretty much brought you all up-to-date on my excursions thus far. I'm planning on heading a bit further afield in the next few days, so we'll see what my next entry reports. Until then...