Today we went to the Tower of London. There wasn’t a line or anything, which was nice because we were able to head right in. We all went and saw the crown jewels first. There was a lot more in that exhibit than I thought there would be, I was picturing just the crown and scepter and the other few things they use in the coronations. (I just realized I was actually picturing the scene from the Sherlock tv show.) But it ended up being a variety of different things, not just crowns (though there were way more crowns than I would have thought). There were swords which were super cool, as well as a lot of gold dishes that they said have been used for coronation banquet and mass. They were beautiful and incredibly intricate, though I don’t know how they ate off some of them because they were so textured with the designs on them. There was a very large gold plate they used to use for the coronation banquet that had the last supper on it. Once I was done looking at the crown jewel exhibit, we went into one of the towers. Because the towers basically go around in a square, we were able to go up into one then cross to the others without having to get out and go back in. The towers were cool and interesting. In one they had a previous king’s room, and off his bedroom was a pretty tiled bathroom but when you stuck your head in to look you could hear what I guess was a recording of someone whispering prayer. I don’t know why but the voice was very creepy. I got a stuffed animal raven at the Raven shop, which is my first souvenir type purchase. We were sitting because we thought we had done everything, but then we realized we missed White Tower completely. We didn’t have that much time left, so we went in to see but left before going upstairs because we thought it would take to long. But then once we met up with the group we went back again and that was such a good decision because there was a lot of very cool stuff up there, including a dragon made of armor, weapon, etc. Outside I liked seeing the ravens, they were so big and pretty and didn’t care about people at all, though it made me so sad they couldn’t fly. There were animals made of chainmail that represented the animals they used to have there. Apparently, the leopards were fed soup, which seemed to make them relatively tame; the monkey smoked tobacco from a clay pipe; the zebra loved ale; the polar bear chained but could get into the water and sim; and they thought the ostriches could digest iron so they would sometimes feed them iron nails. We also saw the torture exhibit which showed some torture devices but wasn’t as much as I thought would be. They had information on some people held or killed at the tower, including Jane Grey, Anne Boleyn, and someone I was surprised to see, William Penn. I knew William Penn was a quaker who founded Pennsylvania from history class. But apparently, he was imprisoned in the tower in 1668 for promoting his quaker beliefs, which I did not know. I just researched it a bit more, and he was arrested for one of his writings being blasphemous and not supporting the idea of the trinity, though he actually said that’s not was he was saying but was just people trying to make him look bad and discredit quakers. He was eventually found not guilty and released and would later travel to North America.
Theatre in London U of A 