London, Day 2: Tower of London and British Museum

Monday was a bit colder than Sunday, but we persevered. It's the wind chill factor, we told ourselves. Nothing but the wind chill factor.

Thankfully, London has a lot of fun things to look at, so we were able to distract ourselves from our increasingly-numb faces as we walked to the subway station and hopped on a tube train. What a fun system. The lines split off here, there, everywhere. You scan your card as you go in, but also as you come out. Sometimes a train comes in at one platform, sometimes it comes in at the opposite platform, who can say which it will be? Certainly not I, maybe not even the station employees. Also, it costs dramatically more than the Paris subway system, for which I am starting to feel a creeping nostalgia. But thankfully the Tube did its job and got us to London's oldest fortress without exposing us to too much of what we naively supposed to be nothing more than "wind chill factor." (Even if it did expose us to some horrific seat cover fabric choices. Uuuurgh.)

Ah, entrance lines. Really, once your fingers lost all feeling, it wasn't too bad. We spent far less time in line than we did at Versailles, with the added benefit of having the Tower right there to look at. The Tower of London is actually a sprawling complex of many towers and buildings and even townhouses, interspersed with lawns and gardens and surrounded by one huge castle wall and a former moat. In the Victorian age they drained the moat (it was getting mucky and pestilential), filled it half full of dirt, and planted a lawn there.

This year, they've got an ice skating rink in one part of the moat. I don't know if that's normal or what, but it was kind of funny watching ice skaters cruise around underneath the imposing fortress where so many people died.

Okay, okay, enough morbidity. The grass was really green, ooh yay! (Better?) I wonder if it was well-fertilized by human flesh. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Here's a picture of Dustin in front of the Tower. He loved seeing a medieval castle.

They had steel sculptures of archers on top.

Here's the tower where famous prisoners like Princess Elizabeth Tudor and Thomas More were locked up. Also known as the Bloody Tower because of the murder of the two young princes.



I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside the Tower's small chapel, but it's probably just as well, because that was one of the most chilling parts for me. We walked into the small room decorated with tapestries and crosses and sat down in one of the pews--and right away I noticed this faint odor. I don't really know how to describe it...a little bit of old musty smell, and something like meat. I guess if I had to describe it I'd say it was similar to the way a deli sometimes smells. Hardly even noticeable.

Next thing you know the Yeoman Warder leading our tour stands up and possibly explains everything. The Tower registry lists around 3000 prisoners admitted during its use as a federal prison. Of those, only 360-some odd were officially executed. Their headless bodies were all buried in the chapel floor, one on top of the other and next to each other like sardines. Well, time passed and the chapel sort of went to ruin; hundreds of years later, Queen Victoria decided to renovate the whole thing and restore it as a national heritage site, so she sent workers in to clean things up. When they got inside the first thing they noticed was that the floor was literally rolling and heaving with mounds. Any guesses what those were?

So, they dug everybody up and tried to identify them. One example: they knew from historical records that Anne Boleyn was buried in an arrowbox with her head under her arm, and that she always wore green. They found a skeleton that matched the description and moved on. They dug up Thomas More, Margaret Pole, Queen Catharine, Lady Jane Grey, all kinds of people. Despite official records placing the death toll at 360, they dug up more than 1500 bodies. More than half the total prisoners!

Well that's what happens when you go about torturing people and whacking their heads off for the slightest offense. Totalitarian pigs!

In any case, there's really no amount of airing out that will help such a small chapel now, but the Victorians did what they could about the other problems. They equipped all the bodies with coffins and re-buried them in the floor and also the walls, to make a little space for each one. They also put in memorial plaques for Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Margaret Pole and some others. All I know is that even though it wasn't a terribly scary-looking place, there was just something weird about it that creeped me out. I couldn't wait to leave.

Here's a picture of the chapel:


Here's a quick shot of Tower Green, where prisoners of high rank were beheaded in private. The Yeoman Warder, or queen's guard, pointed out that they'd put the Christmas tree right where the scaffold would have been. Happy Holidays, right?
On a brighter note, here's Baby Henry having a romping good time at the Castle of Grisly Death, as I've decided to call it. Sorry if he looks a little evil, it's probably the atmosphere.
We were running a little short on time--and quite frankly I have no desire to see torture instruments or prisoners' last words carved into walls--so we skipped the Bloody Tower and its heinously long entrance line. Instead, we went to see the Crown Jewels.

The Crown Jewels are so ostentatious it's unbelievable; more gold and jewels than you can shake a stick at. But of course don't even think about shaking a stick or anything else at them, otherwise you'll probably be arrested by the guards. The jewels are kept inside a huge vault in the basement of one of the towers. They were pretty cool, but also kind of overwhelming in their complete richness and uselessness, you know? I wasn't allowed to take pictures so I can't really explain...let's just put it this way, the Queen of England owns the largest diamond in the world, it's bigger than a chicken's egg, and it's stuck in some golden scepter in a dark vault in the Tower. Yes, that was amazing to look at. But come on, Your Majesty, don't you want to put that sucker in a ring setting and see what happens to your finger? I mean seriously.

And the crowns. Oh, don't even get me started on the crowns. They were lovely, of course, but there were sooooooo many. It seems like the royals had a new crown made at any excuse: one for the conquest of India, a little baby one for Queen Victoria, one to showcase a huge irregular ruby, y'know, any old thing will do. One or two just aren't enough. We must have crowns out the wazoo. All this despite the fact that according to King George V, they're an absolute nightmare to have on your head! Turns out a million pounds of gold and diamonds gives you a nasty headache after three or four hours.

Sinister as it was, I'm glad I came to the Tower. It was fascinating and eerie and good fun. We went through one last display, which housed the massive collection of Henry VIII's armor (he was a regular medieval jock and almost every weapon he owned also doubled as a gun.) Finally, an exhibit that Henry and Dustin can really sink their teeth into! Henry thought the shiny weapons and armor were great. He woke up from a deep sleep, found himself face-to-face with King Henry's helmet, and this huge smile spread across his face. He was still delivering his "pleased to be here, love your armor" speech an hour later, when we left the building.

I will admit one thing--the armor collection was good for a little comic relief. I share Rabelais' opinion of codpieces. (He felt noblemen tended to have air between their ears and air in their codpieces.) However, words fail me when it comes to Henry VIII's personal take on the traditional codpiece. For a suit of armor? Um, really? Doesn't it get in the way?! Now that I think of it, the whole dang suit sort of gets in the way.

For those of you wondering, I guess I'll go ahead and say it...a codpiece is akin to the medieval version of a jock strap. And just to show you what I'm talking about, here's Dustin and Henry standing proudly next to a suit of armor whose codpiece, by comparison, is on the smaller side.



Henry VIII cracks me up in that horrible are-you-for-real/who-do-you-think-you-are kind of a way. Everything he owned had to be the biggest and best and he had to have ten copies of the same thing, because this guy was the KING. And as if to try and make himself look slimmer or at least proportionate, the bigger he got the more his codpiece grew. By the time his last suit of armor was made he was a legitimate tub o' lard, but at least he could pretend like he was still the potent womanizing rock star of his youth. Or whatever he took himself for. Hey, at least he wasn't writing "Sun King was here" everywhere like Louis, right?

I'm kidding, Louis was an absolute teddy bear next to Henry. This holds true for our Henry as well, since it turns out he can get quite vicious when it comes to fish and chips. We got lunch right after the Tower and Henry had zero complaints about English food.

Note the savage bite marks. Henry is getting more fearsome and Nordic by the minute and has now graduated to a whole new level of bossy; he feels perfectly entitled to grab huge chunks of other peoples' food and shove it into his tiny baby mouth. If we try to stop him, he sassily pushes our hands away and gives us The Look. It's adorable, but troubling.

At this point we had 90 minutes left to go before Britain became the dark side of the moon in terms of light and warmth, so we decided to hit up the British Museum on our way home. The British Museum is happily situated right down the street from our hotel, so we'll be making periodic stops there to fill in any little gaps in our schedule, and do the Museum piece by piece. This particular evening we started with the Egyptian Room, since that exhibit was closed in the Louvre and I love me some Egyptian.

Nothing like a little Ramses, or should I say BIG:

This reminds me of The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Dustin checking out the Shabaka stone. Hugh Nibley what what

Best buds
One word: headache.
Well, that's about it for Monday and I know I still have Tuesday and Wednesday to blather on about, but actually we're going to Stonehenge tomorrow after minimal sleep so I better get snoring. Ciao!