London, Baby!

So, I have to admit that today in London I was nearly as bad as Joey shamelessly stepping "into" the map to orient himself when they all (except for poor pregnany Phoebe, and lovesick Rachel, who goes belatedly to make the consummate faux-pas) go to London for Ross and Emily's (clearly foolhardy) wedding. I toured London for the very first time today, and I couldn't wipe the grin off my face any more than could an eighteen-year-old after Prom Night with the Homecoming Queen.

Yeah, you've already sat through a speech about how amazing New York was, so I won't go through all that once again. Take it as read. Today I saw more sights than I could conceivably recount: Piccadilly Circus (the English version of Times Square), Trafalgar Square and Nelson's Column (NB: How can you avoid inappropriate sniggering at a moniker such as that one?), Wellington's Arch (see NB above), Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge (perhaps my favorite sight, actually - it's amazing), the Tower of London, which houses not only an infamous retinue of former prisoners but also the Crown Jewels of England, London Bridge, the Globe Theatre, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament (nod to National Lampoon's European Vacation), the London Eye ( a giant Ferris Wheel sort of affair with glass boxes from which an intrepid observer can view the city), of course the Thames, in all of this, likewise Westminster Abbey. Don't judge me if I tell you that Westminster Abbey almost made me cry. I know that's silly. It amounts to some lovely architecture that we've all seen about a thousand times in textbooks and a great many tombs. Architecture is all well and good, and I know that at some point a tomb is little more than a (hopefully) pretty rock over a dead guy, but I have to confess to you who love me that these dead white guys - yes, they're all white guys, with the exception of a couple of incredible female monarchs, and no women at all in Poets' Corner - resonated with me in a basso measure I'm almost ashamed to admit. I've been studying these people for as long as I remember. Today, on a typically-grey-and-drizzly-English afternoon, I stood in the very same spot wherein William the Norman became William I, King of England. In 1066, nearly a thousand years ago. I saw the chair he sat in. Man. Talk about transubstantiation. I literally felt dizzy and displaced.

You guys, I saw the tomb of Elizabeth I. "Bloody" Mary I (who's buried with her sister) and Mary, Queen of Scots. Their grandfather, Henry VII, who *didn't* get divorced. Edward II. Richard II. The shrine to friggin Edward the Confessor. The tomb of *Chaucer*, kids. And *Dickens*. Poets' Corner houses not only the monument to Shakespeare but also floor-tile plaques to all the dead white guys I love best, from Dylan Thomas to W.H. Auden. I was just so shaken to be there.