sunday in the park with adrian

Sunday, I met up with an old pal of mine, Adrian, who I hadn't seen since my junior year at IA. He was in London for the day and asked me to show him around, so I gladly obliged.
We started at the National Portrait Gallery, just because I think it's sweet, and it totally was.
Then we popped into Trafalgar Square, where they were having some sort of steelband festival. There were at least three of these groups that we could see.
I got a longer distance shot of Nelson's Column so you can actually see the whole thing, with the lions at the base, and Nelson way up there.
Walking down towards Buckingham palace, we passed by this concert going on in St. James Park, where a constabulary band was playing some real classics. It was nice to sit there and listen to the music playing, a real summer treat. They played Elgar, and something we recognized as Russian but couldn't figure out, and some kind of shanty medley.
After some walking, we wound up right by Winchester Abbey, which is honestly amazing looking and really impressive. I had to take about a million pictures of the building.

Carvings over the door, quite nice
One of the cool gargoyles. The tongue is a separate piece of metal.


Just spectacular. One of these days I'll have to actually get there in time to go inside.
Outside the Houses of Parliament, they have this great statue of Oliver Cromwell. I suppose as a warning to Elizabeth every time she comes in, that she might leave without her head...
Nearby, by Winchester Bridge, there's a cool statue of Bodicea. She, of course, was one of the first female rulers of Britain (sort of, more like the first female ruler in Britain), and she led a revolt against the Romans, and she became way more popular in Victoria's time mostly because then people could make this connection between the two queens.
The London Eye. I was sort of avoiding it; I'll be honest: not my thing. In fact, it seems almost like more of a cheesy American thing to do, to put a giant Ferris wheel in the center of your city, but I will admit it would probably be pretty cool once you got way up there. But at 17 pounds a person, who can afford it?
Right near the base of the Eye, there's a small museum to Dali - with this pretty awesome statue out front. I'll have to check that out as well.
We walked over to Victoria Park, where they had the usual gang of crazy street performers, including this interesting headless couple.

And finally, a great view looking over at the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben once more, across the Thames, reminding us that London is indeed a great city and you all wish you were here to get the Ian Pylvainen tour for yourself.

(quick sidenote: this is the sort of thing, I think, that's a great testimony to the powers of Facebook. Really! Thanks to technology, I was able to make a connection with a person I hadn't seen for some 5-6 years, meet up with them in a foreign country that neither of us were from, and spend a great afternoon just hanging out. Really a triumph. Mark Zuckerberg, you've done it again.)