London!

I took a day trip to London yesterday, to sightsee and to watch Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Globe Theatre. On my trip to London last year, though I saw a great many tourist sights, I still managed to miss some of the most major ones, and was glad for the opportunity to amend this error.
The first place visited was Buckingham Palace. The whole area—road, sidewalk, and driveways—around the palace (though outside the gates) is more given to pedestrians than motorists, as it is adjacent to the wide, green, tree-filled space of Hyde Park. Yet, crowded though this attraction was, it did not seem to be crowded mainly with tourists, or at least not the backpacked, camera-wielding tourists I am accustomed to seeing at other sights. Everywhere I looked people were dressed elegantly—besides the men and women I saw in their military dress, there were men in suits or some other form of dress clothes. Women wore dresses or skirts, and hats. Oh, the hats. I’d never seen such hats (at least, outside of books on the history of costume). They had broad or narrow brims, and were decorated with flowers or feathers or fruit or ribbons or all of the above. Every hat I saw looked light and shady and summery. I felt very dowdy in my jeans and sneakers, sunglasses perched atop my head, amongst all these gracefully elegant folk.
Another fashion I saw quite regularly was the scarf. Women and even some men wore light scarves about their necks, this piece of attire that I normally associate with winter somehow appearing airy and summery. They add elegance to any outfit, or so it seems over here. When I did see people wearing clothes more closely matched to mine, they wore scarves, and it brought them up to the level of the dress coats and fancy hats, leaving me down with the tourists and pigeons.
The palace itself, though huge and imposing inside its gold-painted (I hope it’s just paint) fence, was fairly boring. It seemed modern and square, for a palace, holding nothing in common with either the heavy stone strongholds of history or the light, sparkling fairy castles of fantasy. I took a few pictures and was ready to move on.
The fountain in front of the palace, a memorial to Queen Victoria, was different. Having no particular preconceived notions of how a fountain ought to be, I was able to like this one on its own merits. It was a monolith of white marble, fading and staining and rusting nearer the water level to a rainbow of colours. Statues of religious, political, and mythic figures surmounted every available surface. The water was clear and cool, and no one yelled at me for leaning over the lip to splash my hand in it. If it had been any smaller, all the carving and adornment would have made it gaudy, but as it was it could only be called impressive.
The next sight on the list was Westminster Abbey, an easy dart across odd traffic from the palace. Upon approaching, the lawn in front of the abbey appeared to be thronged with a city’s worth of people, creating the worry that the queue to get in the church would last as long as the airplane flight to its country. However, it came out that the lawn is just a popular place to mill, and the line really consisted only of one or two people purchasing tickets.
The building, more cemetery than church, is enormous. Tombs of the forgotten wealthy litter the floor—nearly every time smoothed paving stone held worn lettering to the effect that Here Lyeth Some Dead Person with Money or Status. More impressive people, of course, have sculptures and sepulchres, or even entire chapels, for their resting places. Especially important graves can be recognized by the high fence around them.
Surrounded by hundreds of tourists, I shuffled past Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I and Bloody Mary (who apparently share their tomb), Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Edward the Confessor was so important that his burial area cannot be entered by the public at present.
In the nave, I found Charles Darwin’s grave, his stone somehow having escaped being lettered extensively with Latin or poetry or proclamations of family lineage. It bore his name, and the years of his life, and was smooth all over. Not so Lyell’s, up and to the left of Darwin’s, which was cluttered with paragraphs in Latin.
The whole place was bewilderingly impressive, with artistic and architectural masterpieces, and skeletons of the important dead, every which way one looked. Hoards of tourists, absentmindedly listening to their audio tours and directing their gazes upwards to various points of interest, blundered into one another, adding to the ambience. Though it was beautiful, and contained much that at least ought o be sacred, I couldn’t work up much of a sense of awe. The simply-done (relatively speaking) University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, also containing Art, Architecture, and Wealthy Dead People, seems much holier. Perhaps I might feel differently about the Abbey if I went at a less busy time, but given the price of admission, I’m unlikely to find out one way or another any time soon.