Distance walked: 13km, Alcohol consumed: 1 large glass wine
We started the day with a visit to the Tower of London. It isn't just a tower, although the original White Tower built on the orders of William the Conqueror in 1066 (!) is still there in the centre, but a whole complex. We could have spent all day here easily but just had run out of time. The place is fabulous. We had wanted to do a 2 hour guided walk of the Tower with London Walks but they didn't offer them on any of the days we were in London, so we just got ourselves an audio guide instead. We only toured a little bit of the complex, mainly the White Tower with its museum of armoury, the medieval part including Traitor's Gate and the Bloody Tower.
We also scampered quickly past the Crown Jewels. These are not so much impressive as gaudy and rather ugly. The "please make a donation" box at the exit is a little out of place. You could lever off one or two of the thousands of diamonds on all that bling, replace them with cubic zirconia and sell the originals without anyone being the wiser. Crying poor when you have just displayed millions of pounds worth of jewellery doesn't really work.
My favourite part of the Tower are the ravens. They are big and haughty and look a little mean. They are very smart apparently and some of them like to play tricks on visiting tourists. One of them likes to steal hair ribbons from girls who dare to drink from a water fountain on a nearby lawn. Sadly there were no such girls there when were visited. I wanted to buy a raven souvenir but the gift shops were full of royal family nicknacks and had very few raven-themed items. A missed opportunity.
After spending about 4 hours at the Tower, we left and headed off to the British Museum. This was an important stop as Mary had promised to buy me a birthday present from their special gift shop which has replicas of pieces in their collection. Here I wanted something Roman-inspired but again missed out. I settled for a beautiful necklace inspired by a gold collar from (New York's!) Metropolitan Museum of Art's Greek collection.
We then did a quick scamper through some of the galleries we hadn't visited before. We went through the Assyrian and Mesopotamian sections. We also looked for their Fayum mummy portraits but they didn't have my picture on display which was disappointing.
We stayed until closing time. They were very polite as they firmly herded us to the exit. It must be a nightmare to clear the museum as it has so many floors and so many rooms, not to mention so many tourists.
We then went back to the flat and checked in. Singapore Airlines had been sending me text messages and emails telling me I could check in online for some time now but I had been ignoring them. However, I had to accept the holiday was over and took the plunge. We also packed. Even with the extra (small) suitcase, all our bags are full to bursting.
For dinner we went back to In Parma. This time Mary had the tortelli and I had the anolini. Again, both were Not Bad. I had the zabaglione for dessert. A tricky but tasty dish to make but they'd done a good job - Not Bad. The service was a little slow as they were short staffed. Our table was near the servery so we got to overhear the sole waitress talking with the maitre d'. It was all in Italian but we could get the odd word. Even allowing for the more demonstrative way Italians talk, it was clear they were getting a little frazzled. About halfway through our meal an additional waitress appeared. She clearly had never worked there before as she had to have all the processes and dishes explained to her, so the stress levels remained high. The maitre d' was very apologetic to us for the service, but we found our evening very entertaining. Also, it wasn't as if we were in a hurry for the evening to end.
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