London, Part 2

I highly recommend bringing in the new year in a foreign country. We went as a group to see Boeing, Boeing on New Year's Eve. Afterwards, my roommate and I went to St. Paul's for the New Year's service. We took the tube to the Embankment station, but as soon as we stepped off the train, the police closed down the station due to overcrowding, and we couldn't make our connection for the train going to St. Paul's. No station closing can thwart my English holiday plans, though, so we walked! The service was gorgeous, the Cambridge Brass provided the music, and right at midnight we were standing at the west doors of St. Paul's looking out toward the Thames.

This is me on the Wobbly Bridge in front of St. Paul's Cathedral on New Year's Eve around 12:15 am. You probably can't see it, but there's a Christmas tree lit up in front of the cathedral and the guys walking past me are wearing crazy hats. I am, in fact, wearing my favorite boots. If I'd known how much I'd be walking on New Year's, I'd have worn different footwear, though. (They're blister-producing boots.)


The next day I was so exhausted that in the middle of the V&A, I grabbed a guard and demanded that he find me somewhere to sit down IMMEDIATELY. (Actually, demanded might be too strong a word. I politely requested directions to the nearest bench, because I didn't think the museum staff would be down with me napping on the Great Bed of Ware.)

St. Paul's in Daylight

A few more details about my New Year's Eve--

Number of people I saw vomit in the street: 1
Number of police officers consulted for directions to St. Paul's: 4
Time it took to walk/run to the cathedral: 45 minutes (we got there one minute late, so we were walking up the nave just as the clergy entered)
Number of times I feared we would be trampled to death by a crowd: 3
Number of people in the streets: 12 billion (I saw on the news the next day that the official count was 700,000)
Number of people in the streets who were drunk: 11.75 billion
Number of fireworks I saw over the Thames: .75 (We went down to the bridge to see the fireworks, but there was a building between us and the London Eye, so we only saw the sparks that made it past the edges of the building.)
Number of times I thought, "Yay, London!": 12 billion