Day 3 in London

Today when we woke up we decided we’d have an easy morning, ie stay at home till lunch time. Then we went to an interesting pub in Fleet Street, the street adjacent to our apartment, for lunch, and carried on from there. But we learned from some writing on the wall that the first daily newspaper was published in Fleet Street in 1702 and publication of most dailies continued there till the late 1980s. .

We didn’t intend to go inside St Paul’s, but we wanted to have a relaxed look around. There was a lovely garden in the grounds, and a beautiful park across the road, and we found, quite by chance, a tourist information place nearby. The tourist buses have a stop near St Paul’s, as well as the London buses, so it made quite a spectacle to see a variety of the big double deckers lined up.

What really excited me was that we found ourselves quite close to the river. There was a pedestrian way from St Paul’s down to the river and over the Millennium Bridge. That was one bridge that I really wanted to see, because it had a literally shaky start. Of course it was opened in June 2000, by the Queen. Some of you may remember that as people started to walk across, (it’s a pedestrian bridge), it started to shake dangerously. It was closed until the engineers determined and corrected the structural problem and it was reopened in 2002. I don’t think they bothered the Queen on the second occasion, but the resultant nickname is “the Wobbly Bridge”. I can guarantee that it now doesn’t even shudder, and today being Saturday and 23 degrees there was a crowd putting it to the test. So that’s one of my “Hope I can do’s “ crossed off.

Across from St Paul’s there’s a very poignant memorial to “the firefighters who lost their lives defending London in 1939 to 1945”. Every man and about twelve women totalling 1027, had their names on it. However at a later date it was decided to include all fire fighters who had lost their lives at work, so the memorial was raised to include an additional 1192, and it is updated as necessary.

Tomorrow’s going to be 25. We’ll be complaining about the heat before too long, but Tuesday it looks like rain. Amazingly we’ve only had one wet day our whole holiday.Okumaya devam et