London, England

I'm writing to you from London, my new favorite city! While it's still way too hot here to be comfortable, I like everything else about my journey here so far. The Tube is the city's underground transportation system, and I like it almost as much as I liked the Paris metro; it's fast, simple, not too expensive, and I also like pretending to know where I'm going like a native Londoner.

I've spent a lot of time here with my friend Holly, and we coincidentally have the same interests and accidentally lined up the dates for our London stay, so it has been nice to have a buddy! It certainly makes going out to eat a lot less awkward.

The food scene in London is great. There isn't a lot of distinctively "English" food unless you go to a place that targets tourists for overpriced fish and chips. Restaurants and cafes line every street, and there's something tasty for every budget if you look hard enough.

On my first full day in London, Holly and I went to the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. The former housed priceless works of art from medieval times until the late nineteenth century. My favorite of these, naturally, were the van Gogh paintings on display.

This is one of van Gogh's famous Sunflowers paintings.

I never knew this painting, van Gogh's Two Crabs, existed. It was painted
early in his career and, while different from the subjects that made him famous,
I found the painting to be quite lovely.

The National Portrait Gallery had portaits dating back to the 1400s with the Tudor family, so it was interesting to see a history of British royality. There was also the only portrait of Shakespeare known to be painted from life (and not just painted based off other models). My favorite room was the one with the Romantic artists, which took me back to last year's Magellan to Lake Geneva. The room had original portraits of Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Coleridge, but the best part for me was seeing the "life mask" of the poet Keats; the poor, sentimental guy had a tragic life and a premature death, so seeing his gentle face in a plaster mold and knowing that that mold had touched his face was cool. 

Then we walked down the road until we reached the Thames river, where we found the London Eye and Big Ben.

What's funny is that Big Ben, an iconic building in the London landscape, is actually undergoing construction to keep it looking fresh, so it's completely covered in layers of scaffolding. You mean to tell me that I came all the way to London and have been robbed of this opportunity? Someone please get me an appointment with the Prime Minister. Or Her Majesty the Queen.

Not really... what this is supposed to look like...

The next day, I went to see the British Museum, which is a huge museum of world history dating back to ancient times. It was really cool, if a bit overwhelming. I spent a while learning about Egyptian burial rituals and mummies as well as marble statues from Ancient Greece and Rome. The British Museum houses treasures like the Rosetta Stone, the Easter Island statue, a mask from the Sutton Hoo burial ground, and samurai armor.

I had to sit down a lot to even get through half of this museum, it was so expansive. Finally, I found a series of carved marble slabs called the Parthenon Marbles (also called the Elgin Marbles) that once inspired Keats to write his poem "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles." I learned about this poem in my Romantic Mythologies class last year, and after seeing glossy photos of the marbles in a book, it was amazing to see them in real life.

There is so much to see and do in this city, so I know I won't be short of adventure.