London...Part Two!

So after Lizzie had left, it was up to my brothers and I to do what we do best, be tourists and blend with the locals (aka drink.) We started off our day of extreme tourism by going to Abbey Road, where the Beatles wrote many of their songs. We looked around, snapped a few photos, and then tried to recreate the famous album cover from the Abbey Road album. So we propped the camera on a ledge and put it on timer so that all three of us could be in the picture. Well, let me tell you, it’s difficult to try to get the timing down of when no cars, bikes, people and walking right in the middle of the road. We must have looked like complete idiots (tourists) because after attempting the shot about 7 times, a man came up to us and told us he had been watching us for the past twenty minutes. So not only did we feel like dummys, we looked like them and had an audience…super! But we managed to get a decent picture and is in the running for the Dodge 2009 Christmas card (we will send one out this year…hopefully.) side note: sort of weird but “I want to hold your hand” just came on my itunes…freaky. Anyways, after the Beatles excursion, we went to Madame Toussads! Who doesn’t want to pay to pose with their favorite actor? (In my case I got to pose with Prince William, aka my future husband) there were a ton of people there so I felt a little odd going posing with the majority of the wax figures. Everybody sort of watches how you pose with the figures…for example, they had made a Saddam Hussein model and I don’t particularly like that fella so I gave him a piece of my mind. Then a man and woman came around the corner and they appeared to be from the Middle East and immediately turned in the other direction. Oops. But at least Saddam now knows how I feel about him. We managed to find our way through the museum pretty well, but one thing that I thought was hilarious was the torture room/haunted house. They showed many detailed mannequins being tortured (gak) and then you could get in line for this “chamber of torture” (cue creepy music.) I was all for it…but both of my strong, manly brothers somehow didn’t feel up to it. There I said it, Will and Steve were scared! I told them I would protect them from the scary monsters but neither of them were having it. So we skipped the queue and finished the museum unscared. The final excursion of the day was to a pub and back to bed. We had to rest up for our final excursion…St. Paddy’s Day!
St. Patrick’s day was an all day event of fun. (If you are bothered by drinking at noon, probably not your idea of fun.) We decided to do our own “pub paddy’s crawl.” We went to about 8 or 9 pubs through out the entire day and had a few pints. The best thing was this one owner of about 5 pubs was giving out coupons for free Guinness. (You don’t even need to go to the ‘factory’ first!) So we, by we I mean my two brothers, enjoyed some Guinness. Trust me it tastes like tar and coffee that was mixed in a garbage can. No none for me thank you. We ended at our favorite bar called the Three Tons where we had met a bartender, Narie, earlier in the week. After that we were in the mood for McDonald’s where Steve proceeded to speak French to the worker. “Est-ce que je peux…a McChicken, Large Fry, another McChicken, a cheeseburger and a large coke?” Then he proceeded to give a thumbs up to everyone on the street. Oh man, we had too much fun…or alcohol.
It was really hard to say goodbye to my brothers the next day. I really had a lot of fun with them, and it made me a tiny bit homesick to say goodbye. But what made me happy was that the day after, my really good friends, Kaytee and Kathryn, were coming to visit me in Scotland! So we said goodbye, teary eyed (me), and went our separate ways. Me back to Scotland and them to Paris…yes I was worried to leave them by themselves in Paris. I navigated through Heathrow by myself, only having an hour until my plane left (most anxiety filled underground ride I had back to the airport because oh there was an “emergency in the next vehicle” so I had to wait about 30 minutes until they cleared that up.) But I managed, fingernails intensely short, and hopped on the plane back to my love Scotland.