Going going going

Day 29

"Ladies and gentleman. Due to a person under a train, service on the eastern line is temporarily suspended".

Right. Now I'm not worried about the tube at all. Although I'm told that they actually have an anti-suicide lane you can hide in.

Friday we went to the Tower of London. It's something of a fortress. The White Tower, the oldest part, was built in the time of William the Conqueror.
Here's the portcullis, with variable water levels depending on the tide (the Thames is a tidal river).
There's a superstition at the Tower that if the ravens ever leave the tower, London will fall. During WWII, all the birds but one died, and gimpy little fellow. And obviously, London is still around. The British seem to take this supersition rather seriously though; they have a number of "pet" ravens in the grounds.
The guards at the Tower are affectionately called Beefeaters. They have to meet a whole bunch of requirements, including having served in the military for 30 years. Which explains why they're all old.

We also stopped by the Bloody Tower, which has been home to a number of prisoners over the years. The two missing princes were thought to have been imprisoned/murdered here. This is a restoration of the room as it would have looked while Sir Walter Ralegh was kept prisoner.
The window in Beauchamp Tower. Distinguished prisoners in the Tower didn't have it too bad.
However, they did have a lot of time on their hands. The walls have quite a bit of "graffiti" on them, carved into the stone by the inmates, or possibly someone hired to do it for them. This particular work bears the inscription 'my heart is yours till death'.
These guards are very young guys, but they stand all over and they're fun to watch march around at the changing of the guard.
The Crown Jewels are kept in here. Very. Sparkly.
I don't know if you can really tell... but this lance is really, really long.

After the Tower, we went to go see Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor at the New Globe theatre. It was fantastic. Absolutely hilarious, with an excellent cast. They had a semi-circle of stage built that actually came out into the groundlings, so I ended up watching the show from the inside of the wooden walkway.
Friday night there was a Young Single Adult (YSA) dance. We only got there an hour late, so the party hadn't started yet, but we crazy Americans singlehandedly began the dancing, and half an hour later, when people actually started showing up, it was really swingin. The Brits dance rather similarly to the Americans, but in a much more reserved, controlled fashion. I was actually walking back into the dance once after a short breather, and I thought, where are my friends--oh, the ones throwing their arms in the air and jumping up and down. The music was pretty similar too, though less hip hop and more techno feeling. Maybe a bit older too. I met someone from Ireland there, though it was so loud, I couldn't really tell he had an accent with him yelling in my ear.