"Not All Who Wander Are Lost"

The name of this blog post is a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien, and we thought it fit us well today! We started off taking the Tube to King's Cross/St. Pancras Station, and so of course we searched for and found Platform 9 3/4! So that was exciting. We took pictures. It's a thing.  Then we walked past St. Pancras International Station (which I'm obsessed with, it's so gorgeous) on our way to the British Library.  We got lunch at a place called Pret A Manger and ate it it the library courtyard!  After we finished our delicious lunch, we went inside to see the library's treasures.  The building is huge! I just looked it up and apparently it is the largest library in the world in terms of how many items are within it.  The building was finished in 1997, so it is a fairly new building, and pretty nice inside.  We saw some pretty sweet documents, such as Handel's Messiah, works of Mozart, Beethoven, and the Beatles, the Gutenberg Bible, and the Magna Carta.  We were two days late from seeing J.K. Rowling's original Harry Potter manuscripts, and we were very sad.  After we finished the "treasure room," we roamed around the library exploring.  They have a 50-foot tall book case called The King's Library that stretches across a few floors that is FULL of books. It was very cool.  I would have taken a picture of it if photography was allowed!  We also found these really cool "chairs" that you stood on and leaned back against.  I would totally go study there if it wasn't so far away from me.  There were so many cool little couches, chairs, and areas to sit and chill!  There is even a cafe and a restaurant.  We went up a few floors and found a terrace, which led to a Conservation Room that explained the process of conserving books and audio, and had some activities we tried out.  After that, there was not much we could do without a membership or that was free, so we headed back to the train station.  From there, we went to London Bridge (which doesn't actually exist anymore) and it started to rain on us! But we came prepared with umbrellas and trudged through to Tate Modern (a museum for modern art).  It was a very strange building.  It was very large and empty, and of course modern art is strange anyway.  We decided to do a guided tour of one of the exhibits rather than just wander.  It was interesting to hear the back story of some of the pieces, but I got pretty bored after a while.  There was one piece I did enjoy, but only because the artist had plastered paint-filled balloons onto a board and then shot at them with a rifle to burst them (which reminds me of Princess Diaries, only more violent).  I just don't understand modern art. We walked through a few more exhibits and decided that we were done.  We had a few hours to kill before we were supposed to meet up with our friends, so we found this Starbucks in a hole in the wall (literally) and had tea!  We figured out our means of travel to our next destination and then read our books for a while.  We then ventured out to find the Southwark Cathedral, which we found out was free to go into (one of the few churches in London that are free!).  We happened to walk in on an Evensong service (which was kinda cool) that we listened to as we walked around.  And you had to pay to take pictures there (must be why it's free!) so I didn't get any pictures of the inside.  But it was a cool building!  We wandered through the Borough Markets on our way to meet our friends, and were watching all of the locals going out to the pubs on a Friday night.  We walked through the Southwark area, which was different from touristy London, and seemed a lot more authentic, which was cool, and found our restaurant: The Charles Dickens Pub and Restaurant.  It wasn't quite what we expected (though I'm not sure exactly what we were expecting) but the food was decent price and tasted pretty good!  By then we were exhausted and set off to find the train home.  And thus ends another London adventure!
Now I am going to take some medicine for this stubborn cough I have (I hope it isn't anything worse) and catch up on my TV shows online!  Tomorrow we head to Greenwich, and I will be back to tell you all about it! :)