hey something Free in London

Hello again okay so my good friend Allison was supposed to come to London but due to a lot of bad luck on her part...I'm serious she's cursed....she couldn't make it..so I had some time to kill and so I decided to take the free tours that We were going to go on...This one is the Royal tour basically going through a bunch of royal people but there were some very good stories along the way. I didn't take that many pictures because it's all stuff I have seen and put pictures up of before. So I tried to either put pictures of only new stuff or stuff that I learned more about....here we go.
This is wellington Arch...apparently the Duke of wellington was a great war hero and a crappy Prime Minister.
some people were protesting about Hungry I'm not sure why? Anyone have any idea?
So this is a monument for....New Zealand ( I think) the whole point of these crazy things is that they point in the direction of New Zealand.
Okay I know I have put a picture of Buckingham Palace already but now I have two really good stories....okay story #1 well more like a fact but did you know that you can tell if the Queen is at the palace (or anywhere) because of the flag they fly over the place...if they fly the union flag the Queen isn't there but if they fly the Royal Standard (I think thats what it's called) then the Queen is there. Oh and the Queen was not there today....okay story #2 My tour guide told us a story about his favorite break in at Buckingham Palace....so Apparently this Irish guy came into London and got very drunk at a bar down the street from the palace. After he was completely intoxicated he decided to go exploring and walking down the street he saw the palace and decided he wanted to look inside. So he climbs the fence...then realizes he's forgot his cigarettes on the other side so he climbs back over gets them and climbs back over once more. He successfully enters the palace and begins drunkingly staggering from room to room. he set off every alarm in the place and the main guard thinking that the system must be malfunctioning because there is no way all the alarms can go off at once so he deems it a malfunction meanwhile this guy staggers into the kitchen and proceeds to drink half of a very expensive bottle of wine...he continues on his drunken tour of the palace and stumbles into non other than the Queens bedroom....oh yeah and the Queen is very much at home....So the Queen sits there trying to keep this guy talking about his wife and job while continuously pushing this button to call the guards over and over again....you see the thing is is that this all happened during a changing of the guards and the guy who was supposed to be watching the signal was out on a smoke break...needless to say he got in trouble...it was only when the drunken guy asked the Queen if she had a light that she was like no but I bet my guards do and she took him down to the guards that he was finally apprehended....The best part of the story is that at the time there was no real procedure on what to do with him and there was no law against it or something (I can't exactly remember the reason) but he ended up only spending like 2 nights in jail and having to pay for the bottle of wine he drank....haha....anyway that was pretty muchmy favorite story of the day.
So apparently Britain is trying to build relations with Malaysia and so there are Malaysian guards instead of the normal British ones....unfortunately that means I missed my chance at taking a picture with the real English guards...however I did learn that the big tall fuzzy hats that the English guards wear are made out of some sort of bear skin and it costs 28,000 pounds to make them and there is a bit of a controversy because they could make them with cheaper and animal friendly synthetic which is exactly the same but they rejected it because it wasn't shiny enough...I bet they'd change it if they could link it to C02 emissions....crazy...
we were there while they changed guards





This guy could not hold a straight face....he totally needed more discipline...lol
Apparently this is where Nell Gweyne lived she was a mistress of one of the kings (I forget which one) Anyway they had a kid together and here in this apartment she held their son out the window and threatened to drop him if he wasn't given his birthright or something and so the king not wanting that came up with the title Duke of Astor on the spot and it is still a real position today....now thats history...
In Trafalgar they had this Screen set up where you could watch a ballet I think that was live...there were a lot of people there.
So I learned that these lions were made out of all the melted canons from the French army after they defeated them...I just can't remember what the battle was called...
um...self explanatory...
This was my tour guide Craig....he was pretty funny...here he is telling us about the gunpowder plot where these Catholics were tired of being persecuted so they decided they were going to blow up the parliament buildings on a day when all the members of parliament and all the Royal family and a bunch of other people were going to be there....so they rented out a room in the bottom of the building and loaded it up with 36 barrels of gunpowder and thats how they were going to blow up the building however they were afrraid of hurting any catholic people so they sent a letter to this one catholic guy who held some position warning him not to go and detailing the plot....this guy however was lazy and had his letters read out to him and so they were discovered like 20 hours before it was to happen (I'm not exactly sure of the timing but it was like less than a day) and they arrested that guy and tortured him until he gave up all the people involved and then they were tried in a one day trial and they were found guilty of high treason and were to be hung, gutted and quartered...which is a very gruesome process which I am not going to relate on here...anyway at the end he asked us to think about whether we thought this plot was considered a terrorist plot of the act of a freedom fighter....the building they were going to blow up in the gunpowder plot.
Oh he also told us how they passed a law that no one was allowed to start a protest in this square...why then is this protest here you may ask...that is because the law was made in 2004 and this guy has been sitting here protesting for peace since 2002...that is crazy...

Anyway that is the end of this post...man that was a lot of reading but they were very good stories so hopefully you enjoyed them....I still have more posting to do but I am going to go to bed now so....I will save that for another day...

Okay so I came back to edit this post because I forgot two stories....
#1-The road that leads up to the palace..(you can see it in my first post called we finally made it about Buckingham Palace)...if you take out all the lights can be turned into a runway it is just in case the Queen ever needs to escape quickly and go into exile which I also found out would be Canada because apparently Britain and Canada have very good relations
#2-Apparently in the park outside the palace there are these Pelicans who started eating pigeons and there is now a study going on to find out why....here is the link to the video you can watch on youtube....be careful though it is not for the faint of heart.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=PO5ifLzLYiU&feature=related