Was another rainy day... Well, it started out just being overcast and it wasn't supposed to have a chance of rain until around 16:00, but this is London and it started raining about noon. The stinky part about this was that we had gone out to Hampton Court today (the estate that Cardinal Woseley "gave" to Henry VIII) and we didn't get to walk arrouond and enjoy the Gardens because of the rain.
The actual palace was great! We got to go through the whole Tudor era kitchen complex where they were actually preparing a meal for that afternoon so we got to watch them and see things like the roasting rack in use (picture to come later). Learned lots of cool stuff too, like approximately 70% of the court's diet was meat (because meat was expensive and Henry VIII had to impress the foreign dignitaries)! The court had to travel around the country and spend time in various places because it would literally consume all the areas resources, and they paid for it too, so nothing so the king didn't get any freebies. And did you know that the pies (a meat pie for example) were just another method of cooking? That is to say that when you got the pie, you cut off the top, ate the insides, and discarded the dough shell (which was just flour and water anyway). It was a very education experience learning about the dietary and culinary practices of the time...
The Tudor part of the palace was really interesting and it was great to see a lot of Tudor era architecture, furniture, and tapestries in person (and many pictures we taken for source material).
The Georgian era additions were pretty interesting as well. The layout was very familiar having already been to several royal palaces in St. Petersburg, Russia, but it was nice to see the darker, wooden textures used more at Hampton Court as opposed to lighter, plastered textures Peterhoff or the Winter Palace in the Heritage. All in all, it was a designer/architecture lover's paradise...
Following that, I went back to St. Paul's Cathedral tonight to hear an organ recital to began the celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee year. It was a pretty interesting concert, although I personally felt that the acoustics hurt the softer sections of the music because it just kind of got all muddled together and the delicate details got lost in the vastness of the space. Oh, we'll... It was a free concert and it was enjoyable overall.
Alas, the alarm clock will be sound off in just shy of seven hours so I suppose I should go to sleep... Tomorrow, we are off to Windsor Castle!
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