Today was probably one of the most amazing days of my life. There is simply no way to put into words what I all saw today. We went on a tour of the Royal Borough today. The tour bus picked us up at 9AM and we went around town by bus and then we got dropped off and had the chance to see everything by foot. It was simply incredible. I got pictures of Big Ben, Westminster Abby, Parliament, The London Bridge (as in London Bridges falling down...), the London Towers, and countless more statues of important people that I can't remember. I paid 9 pounds for a tour of Westminster Abby. They didn't allow cameras inside to help preserve everything in there, which is a shame because there is just so much to show from inside. I got to see the spot where Princess Diana's casket laid during her funeral. I also got to see where every king and queen in the history of England was coronated. Surrounding the center of the Abby are a serious of memorials to basically the "Whose Who" of British history. Kings, Queens, Dukes, and Saints are all buried there and I got to go and see all their tombs. I even got to see memorials to famous scientists like Newton and Darwin. Just a crazy day. And that was all before 2PM.
When we came back home we ran into some trouble though. The planned protest that was scheduled for today got a little bigger than expected. In fact the crowd got to about 100,000 people, or so the estimated, I doubt it was that big. Anyway of course the street that the demonstrators picked was Hyde Park Gate....my street. And it was right in front of my house. I pushed through the crowd and got home, but as Grandpa Thein said, I always have to see whats on the other side. So, I grabbed my camera and headed back out. It was so incredible. Thousands of people screaming and chanting in support of Palestine and against Israel was just nuts. I got a little scared when they started chanting "death to george bush" "death to america". Overall it was just cool to see, and since I always take things like that with a grain of salt I wasn't really offended or anything like that. One thing that I thought was really cool was that at around sundown today many of the protesters stopped, and in the middle of the street, turned towards Mecca and started to pray, very surreal site to say the least.
Anyway, as we are walking down the street towards the Israeli embassy we see a puff of smoke and we stopped and people started running in the other direction. Turns out someone did something stupid and the riot squads released tear gas. We booked it the other direction and of course the riot police cut off the otherside as well and we were kinda trapped for a few seconds. Needless to say I made it out alive, and now we are chilling at the flat waiting for everything to calm down. Don't worry though it was never dangerous or anything like that. Overall it was just a very cool experience. I'll give more updates soon though.
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