London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down...

Okay. So we start the day early again. Voice still gone. Ate many pieces of bread (not a laryngitis cure, as it turns out). Then we set off! Down to Clapham South, get off at Kennington to switch trains, off to Tottenham Court Road (I think). We went to the National Gallery first, and spent a long time wandering through the portraits. I only made it through half the rooms...but it was amazing. And there was Van Gogh! Yay!!! I saw the Bathers at Arsenieres in person...which was eerie. It's weird seeing a rather famous artwork in person....and it was definitely weird seeing all of these pieces. In Malaga, we had just gone on Wednesday to a contemporary art museum with a room of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, and a few Andy Warhol's, and random contemporary art. But the art in the National Gallery...is old. Really old. Some pieces had explanations about how the reason the sitters were so ghostly was because the all the red coloring had faded...some had eerie remnants of things painted on the canvas before....so cool. I saw so many paintings that I feel like I should have run into before this too. But yeah...amazing. I'm hoping to go back there for a little bit on Monday.

From the Gallery we went to lunch...we had amazing burritos. Which was shocking, because Europe doesn't really know how to do Mexican food. Then it was wander Britain time. We went to King's Cross...so that I could visit Platform 9 ¾, because I'm a huge nerd (but it was so worth it). I saw the London Bridge, which is highly unexciting as it turns out. It fell down so many times that now it is a completely plain, boring concrete bridge that could withstand the apocalypse. We saw the Millenium Bridge, which I suppose they reconstructed after Voldemort destroyed it...and passed the Globe Theater on the way (not where the original Globe was, but it is a re-make of it). Then we walked down to Tower Bridge, which is what the London Bridge should look like. We stopped at the Tower of London, and I really wish we could have gone in, but everything's horrifically expensive. Maybe I'll consider it tomorrow. We were going to cross the bridge, but they brought the bridge up to let some kind of Brazilian military through. Everyone was so excited that I took a video, but it's really anticlimactic. After that we got some tea, and sat at Caffe Nero, which is basically Starbucks' rival here (It has no rival in the US). Then we went home to change, got some dinner, and went out....except that I'm super lame, and I left before we went in anywhere so that I could go home and sleep a little (just a little).