Day 98
Friday. December 11, 2009.
We got up and ate breakfast before heading into the main area of London. We started off by seeing St. Paul’s. It was really too pricey to go in all the way, so Taryn and I chose the cheap tourist option of standing in the entry and looking from there. Honestly, after seeing St. Peter’s Basilica, it didn’t even come close! But that’s a hard act to follow.
We then headed to Parliament. The House of Lords was the only one in session, but we got to sit in for a while and observe. It was cool even though I had no idea what they were even talking about. I think all the formalities just blew things over my head.
We followed Parliament with Westminster Abbey. It was huge and packed. The most significant tomb I saw was that of Elizabeth I from the Tudor family. I was surprised to see that she had herself buried with her sister. Though they didn’t get along at ALL in life, she hoped there’d be peace in death. I thought that was sweet. One other cool thing they had there was the oldest door in England. They also had an unknown soldier buried in Westminster Abbey. The queen laid a poppy wreath on his grave. Can you imagine back in the day if you discovered that was your son? Wow, the honor.
After our little acts of tourism, we settled back into a resident mode. We went back to Hammersmith and did some shopping. We also had kebabs one last time. We made a final walk down our street and a final farewell to Baron’s Court tube stop. I thought I would have been more sad, but I think I was just ready to put that chapter behind me.
When we got back to the hotel we were getting ready for ben when Taryn started freaking out. She said there was a HUGE spider on the ceiling above her bed. She said it had its own zip code it was so big. I thought she was being overly dramatic so I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t even glance up at the thing. She kept begging me to kill it, until I finally got up to take care of it. When I looked up though, I realized she was right. It was HUGE. It was like a super species of daddy longlegs. I couldn’t kill it for a couple reasons. One, it was a little to big for me to feel okay with it. Two, it was on the ceiling, so if I missed, it’d fall right on me. Taryn said she couldn’t sleep with it there, and I couldn’t kill it so we did the only thing we could think of to resolve the issue. We went downstairs and grabbed the reception boy. He told he wasn’t a killer. So I asked him if he could just move it somewhere else. So he came in and picked it up by one of its legs and put it in a plastic bag, removing it from our room. Thank you reception boy for restoring the peace!
