Buckingham Palace and Jack the Ripper

Blog Entry Two: Buckingham Palace and Jack the Ripper

                Today was a great day, probably the best day on the trip, not only because of the sites we saw, but because of our tour guide. We had an amazing guide name Sean, and if this guy wasn’t a comedian, I don’t know who is. He was outrageously funny, and one of my highlights of the trip. He was literally the funniest person I’ve ever met, and I would love to go into further detail, but I can’t really remember many of his jokes very well.

                Regardless, we drove all over London, from things to Trafalgar Square, to famous St. Paul’s Cathedral, to the lavish and, quite impressive, Buckingham Palace.  A fun thing I noticed was that at St. Paul’s, all of the trees were painted blue with a bio-degradable paint or dye of some kind. I’d seen pictures of them before but I didn’t even know that they were in London, let alone right outside St. Paul’s. The cathedral itself was massive. Sean explained to us the architect made it a very easy to remember area; 300 feet by 500 feet. Unfortunately we did not get to go inside, but the exterior was quite impressive. Sean explained to us it was one of the only churches to survive the bombing by the Germans during WWII, whether it was luck or just a miracle, which I found pretty interesting.

                But even more impressive than St. Paul’s, was Buckingham Palace. I’d always wanted to see it, ever since it was part of a setting in a book I read many years back, and my wish had finally come true. The place was spectacular. The gates were black and covered with golden crests of the royal family, and in the middle of the round area was a gigantic statue plated in real gold leaf. It looked spectacular. I couldn’t help but admire how much wealth was in just one area alone. The flowers around were of all colors from red, to blue, to purple, and I wondered how many people must tend to the gardens there.

                We were left alone for around 15 to 30 minutes to look around, and then move to a meet up point. Soon after we met up, Sean took us to the best spot to witness the changing of the guards. However, an army truck was in the way at first, which kind of annoyed me because I could not get a good shot, but as soon as the actual changing of the guard began it moved out of the way. The guards were obviously professionals, moving in perfect unison. There was not a single flaw in their movements, and the band played loud and clear. What I noticed there was that there were actually children amongst the guards, probably being trained.

                Later on was the Jack the Ripper tour. It was dark and rainy, which some people might think helped the atmosphere a lot, but later on in the tour it began literally pouring and thundering, to the point where our guide kind of just brought us all inside of a gigantic market stall area to finish the tour. I learned a lot about Jack the Ripper, and we heard a lot about a theory called “the Royal theory,” which basically connects the killings to two or three people, including the royal family’s doctor, who took it on himself to kill four people who knew that one of the princes had a baby with a Catholic girl, which was not allowed at the time. If it were not for the killings, the queen would not be in place right now. In fact, it would be a man named King Joseph in charge of the royal family.

                Overall, today was a great day, and there was a lot of cool sites we visited, and a lot of very interesting things we learned. Although the Jack the Ripper tour was interesting, I thought it was rather bland, due to our guide. He was rather dull and boring, and there was so much rain it kind of ruined the whole thing.