LONDON!!!! Day 4

March 5, 2011

Jen and I slept in late this day. We like to plan off days where we can actually relax on our vacation. Later we walked over to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Lots of sculptures and paintings. Here's a picture of the courtyard with a shallow pool of water and the nice red brick of the museum.


There was a massive room that contained these impressive architecture. These are actually casts of real architecture from across the world. That means people painstakingly put plaster over the real sculptures, pulled the plaster away and put a reconstruction up in this museum. They look incredible. A nice way of seeing them without having to go to the locations. This one is the Portico de la Gloria from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.


This is Trajan's Column from Rome. They had to split the column in half because it didn't fit in the building. It's 30 meters tall.


I don't know what this one is. Looked Asian.


Lunch time! I stopped at a Cornish bakery and got a steak and ale pasty. Basically a pita pocket with steak and potatoes. It was good! Not all English food is bad. It's mostly bad but not all.


Are you ready for some football?! Soccer is the NFL over here so me being a sports fan I arranged for us to go to a Premier League game. That's the top-notch teams. We took the tube over to Craven Cottage which is the stadium and home of the Fulham Football Club. They took on Blackburn in a regular season match. Fulham is in white. Here's the view from our seats.

The guy in the middle is Clint Dempsey, an American. He also plays for Team USA. He's the favorite player of my nephew, Jackson.


I couldn't figure out what the mascot is. I'm thinking a panda/raccoon hybrid.


Soccer can be pretty boring. I was praying it wouldn't be a lame zero-zero tie waste of time. This game actually had action though. It went back and forth. We even got to see Fulham score on a penalty kick which was the difference as Fulham won 3-2. Go pandaccoons!


That evening we went for some traditional food again at the local pub. We both ordered fish and chips with mushy peas. They call French fries chips. It was okay.


Let me just say that everything is expensive in Britain. It not just because of the exchange rate either. (1 pound equals $1.62) Everything is expensive there because England is an island and they have to import everything. So even though they're money is worth more than ours, they still get screwed because everything is so expensive. Movie tickets are 14 pounds each ($22.74!)
A gallon of gas is over $5! We had burgers and fries the other day from a regular downscale restaurant and it was 19 pounds ($30.86!) Sorry Brits but you're getting ripped off.