Day 17= Jan 20

Hey everyone again.  i am slowing getting caught back up on this.  i am sorry i have not gotten this up to date sooner.  not been feeling well and we have been pretty busy the last couple of days.  

So today we went to the National Portrait Gallery.  it was interesting.  You started at the top of the building where the oldest portraits were at, some from the early 1600's.  They were all of Kings or Queens. So you worked your way down the floors to the modern portraits.  There was also a exhibit on there right now of Annie Leibovitz.  She is one of the most celebrated portrait photographer of the time.  She does a lot of photography of modern pop culture, celebrities and political figures.  

After the portrait gallery we went and got a bit to eat and then walked to St. Paul's Cathedral.  On our walk to St. Paul's Cathedral we were shown a lot of the heart of down town London and its business district.  We walked past part of the BBC News buildings.  When we were in that part of the city it felt like, to me, that we were actually in a bigger city. There were a lot more people walking the streets and not many homes at all. 

We go to the cathedral and we were met by Sarah who would be our tour guide again. She was a really good tour guide. Very informative and liked to talk which was good.  This is the third St. Paul’s cathedral that had been built on the same site. The first two got burnt down. One was during the great fire of London.  The current church was partially rebuilt after WW II and the blitz when two different bombs hit the church. The only damaged a small part of the building.  Inside the church was beautiful. It is not a Gothic style church. It is more modern; it is still really tall and has this huge dome in the middle.  But it does not have very much stained glass in it. It also has more painting on the ceiling than what the other Gothic churches that we saw.  When you are in the church you can go up into the dome. It was 257 steps up to the top. They call this the whispering gallery because if you stand on the opposite sides if the dome and you whisper something the people on the other side can here you. It was cool. It was also a long ways up in the air. But then u could go even higher if you wanted to. You could go up another 130 or so stairs and go to the outside of the dome and walk around.  It was not as high as the London Eye but it was still a long ways up.  One interesting thing that I learned was that during the bombings of WW II they used the top of the church where we were at for look outs on where bombs had been dropped on the city.  One of reasons for this was because the bombs that were being dropped were fire bombs and they wanted to be able to put the fires out as quickly as possible. 

After that we went back to the rooms and most of us worked on our papers. We also watched the inauguration on TV.  I feel asleep during part of it.  The nap felt good.  That was the day. Nothing real exciting happened that night. 

Rick