Two Hours of Touring the Tower

Thursday was a terrible day to wear uncomfortable shoes. When we walked on the cobblestone streets passing the river, it was impossible to look away from the nine-hundred-year-old tower of London. With pigeons and multicolored flowers covering the grounds, this tower was an unbelievable site. We started our adventure by waiting in a nearly two-hour-long line to see the crown jewels. Once we got in, the room was completely dark, and we could barely adjust to the light before an overwhelming shine of gold and diamonds stared back at us. We stood on a conveyor belt while staring at all of the different crowns made of purple or red velvet with stolen jewels topping them off.

After that long but worth it journey, we made our way over to another tower where we encountered more than two hundred wooden stairs and an exciting amount of horse statues. We saw armor, historical facts, canons, ruins, and a whole lot of pictures of men. Once my feet felt like they got to the point of falling apart, we walked downhill to explore the torture chambers where around twenty-two prisoners were tortured to death. This, oddly, was the area that my group and I were most excited about. It was very small, and I never really understood how one could come up with the concept of a torture rack, but I guess everyone has their own creative passions.

After stopping at the gift shop and continuing our ardent but quiet critiques of the new King, we walked away from the tower and towards the view of new-age skyscrapers and the London Eye. It was great to see such a historical monument, one so old that it didn’t even feel real. Being from a country that is less than three hundred years old, seeing a building that is more than triple that age feels fake, almost like its own Disney Park made of foam bricks and robotic ravens. My feet aching from one thousand-year-old cobblestone is something I’ll complain about, but I am immensely grateful for experiencing it, nonetheless.