Last Day in London

The Crown to Couture exhibition was advertised in the cafeteria of the Tower of London. I looked it up and it was free if you had the London pass but you still had to email for a ticket because it was a timed entry and the website said it might take 2-3 days to get a response.  I took a chance that it would all work out, so I emailed them on Tuesday that we wanted tickets for Thursday and I got a response back that night.  We took the Tube to Kensington but then had to walk through Hyde Park and then Kensington Gardens all the way to the Palace.  I didn't remember the walk being so very long to get there.  Plus it was hot that day, even for a Texas girl.  We had to stop a lot and rest.  When I got home I looked up the blog I'd written about our last trip, which you can read here and we didn't get to Kensington that way.  We did the Royal Albert Hall tour first which put us halfway there already.  We should have gotten off one Tube stop later. Anyway Kensington Palace is wonderful all by itself.  Last time there was a Diana fashion exhibition that we also went to. I was hoping to get two more Cornettos like last time in honor of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but we couldn't find anyone selling them this time.

"CRown to Couture" Kensington Palace

Here's a video reviewing the exhibition.

Big Ben

Big Ben was being renovated last time we were here and was completely covered in scaffolding.  It was really nice to see him all shiny and new this time.  Here's a documentary that the BBC did on the renovation project, full of interesting facts and behind the scenes stuff.  For example, I did not know that Big Ben is actually the name of the largest bell in the tower, whose name is actually The Elizabeth Tower.

Parliament

There was a protest going on right in front. We saw a couple of the guys with their drums on the Tube from earlier in the day, who were participating. I looked it up when we got back to the hotel.  It was the 14th anniversary of the Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka.  Here's an article from the Tamil Guardian where you can read all about it. Although Parliament officially recognized the human rights violations committed by Sri Lanka as genocide in 2019, four years later the Tamils have yet to receive justice for their families.