Busy day today! First we walked around Paternoster Square, and got a good look at The Monument and Temple Bar, then went inside St. Paul's Cathedral. Unfortunately, no pictures could be taken inside (a new policy since the last time I was there). We went down into the Crypt, which I hadn't done before. The few lonely effigies which had survived the London Fire were on display.

Then we walked over the Thames, across the Millennium Bridge, to go see the Globe Theatre. We looked for the brick bought by Severin and Lisa, but didn't see it. I did, however, see the brick bought by Dora and Jack Black.

The tour was interesting; we visited the Gentlemen's box on the second level, and then up to the third level where the "Winchester Geese" plied their trade. I noticed that while the banister supports on the second level were lathed, the ones on the third level were square-cut, with the fronts and backs flat, and the sides cut into the silhouette of the others. I asked about that, and the embarrassed guide admitted that because the lathed ones took so much time to create, they'd had to make the square-cut ones so the Globe could open on schedule.

Then we walked over to the Golden Hinde, a full-sized replica of Sir Francis Drake's tiny little ship (upon which he packed sixty to eighty men). Naval technology clearly didn't change much until the nineteenth century; apart from the scale, it was little different from the replica of the Bounty in Tampa Bay (though presumably nobody's filmed a cheesy porn movie on the Golden Hinde).

Sadly, the second memstick for the camera had fallen out of my bag when we got the camera out to take pictures of our car after the accident, so we had to stop back at the hotel to move the pictures off onto the hard drive. I had been looking for a shop which sold memsticks, but hadn't found any.

Thence out to Trafalgar Square, and the National Gallery. It was amazing to see so many of the pictures we've seen in books, only up close so we could see all the details that don't reproduce (like black-on-black ornamentation on clothing). Also, despite what I said earlier about details being rough up close, there were some large-scale pictures with exceptionally fine details. But not Rembrandt's paintings, which looked very rough in person.

Finally we both got art overload, and found ourselves just wandering around aimlessly, so we decided it was time to go. (All those portraits of Hapsburgs tended to look alike anyway.) As we tried to find our way out, we came upon an a capella quintet giving a performance. It was absolutely beautiful -- Italian from the early 1500s, it sounded like -- but by that time my knees and ankles were throbbing so badly I found it difficult to stand still (naturally all of the seating was taken).

On our way to look for a restaurant, we walked by St. Stephen's bell tower, all lit up in the dark. Not finding any restaurants in that area with reasonable prices, we came back and ate at a Thai restaurant between the Tube station and our hotel, then called it a night as everything was closing down.