Tate Modern and a Great Walk Around London…

Me in front of Big Ben!

Yesterday was the touristy day and it was jam-packed with excitement! I woke up to a snowy morning and the snow was actually sticking, unlike the other day when it snowed and turned into slush within an hour… But yesterday the snowflakes were substantial and it pretty much snowed all day. I planned on going out early with Katie and Mo (Hampshire flatmates… and to avoid further confusion, my flatmates are Katie, Mo, Maggie, and Grayson from Hampshire and Samantha who is also a visiting student from the U.S.) to go sightseeing in London today and even though it was snowing, we still wanted to do something fun so we decided to go to the Tate Modern museum. The Tate Modern is cool because it’s all modern art and has cool exhibits, but most importantly it’s free! It’s also in South Bank, which is on our side of the Thames River, so it was a short tube ride away.

One of the many John Heartfield collages commenting on the Nazi regime in Germany

“Variation on the Form of An Anchor” by tristram Hillier

It took us a little while to actually find the museum after exiting the tube, but we’ve pretty much lost all sense of embarrassment about asking for directions in our ignorant American accents, so we got directions and found it soon enough. The museum was huge! Each floor had different collections and there were three floors open to free visitors, so it took a while to get through it before we got too hungry and tired. I really enjoyed a lot of the art (although with modern art some of it is a little unimpressive for me sometimes…). Here are some pictures of things I liked…

Shakespeare’s Globe

After walking through the galleries, we stopped for a hot chocolate break in the cafe at the museum and got some really good hot chocolate with marshmallows and whipped cream– crazy! Then we left the museum and walked along the river to see the view and look for a place to get lunch. We saw Central London across the river and passed by multiple bridges, including Millenium Bridge, Southwark Bridge, and London Bridge in the distance. We also walked past Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (which isn’t the original Globe because that one burned down, but is a recreation of it and a museum) along the river.

At this point, we were starving so we found a burger place that looked nice and got fantastic food there. They had a good discounted lunch menu so we all got burgers and fries for a good price. I got a BBQ burger and a side of fries, which turned out to be really really skinny, but really really good. They even had malt vinegar to put on the fries!

Southwark Bridge

After lunch, we decided to suck it up and do some more sightseeing in the snow. We crossed Southwark Bridge in hopes of ending up by Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, but unfortunately we realized that we were definitely not in the right place once we had crossed the bridge. We ended up by St. Paul’s Cathedral (which is cool too) and we were supposed to be much farter west. We weren’t quite sure how long it would take us to walk there, so instead of hopping on the tube, we decided to chance it and ended up walking a longgg way. It was fun though, because we got a good mini walking tour and saw some more of London

Somerset House

that way. We passed by the Royal Courts of Justice, King’s College, Somerset House, Trafalgar Square, and finally made it to Westminster.

When we finally saw Big Ben up ahead, we knew it was worth the walk. All of the buildings were beautiful and the walk up to the Houses of Parliament was beautiful too. We passed by the Guards Museum and many statues. Everything looked nice in the snow too! Big Ben was the first thing we saw and it was definitely something to see, it was all lit up since it was dark when we got there, and the Houses of Parliament were lit up behind it too. The buildings were so old and beautiful and really big! We had a good view of the London Eye, which was lit up in blue behind everything. Westminster Abbey was also magnificent and a lot to take in. It was huge and had beautiful stained glass windows and very ornate old architecture. I don’t really know what else to say, but I took a lot of pictures so here are some of them!