1. The Royal Guards don't always wear those big fuzzy black hats (sad). Some of the hats are over 100 years old. They are made from black bear fur and, by law, no bears can be killed just for their fur so they have to wait till one dies for natural reasons or is killed on accident to make new hats. Hence the need to reuse them...
2. This is Picadilly Circus. What's Picadilly mean you may ask? Well, during the olden times (thats as historically accurate as it's going to get here-sorry, I don't retain dates) this is the area of London where all of the prostitutes used to hang out. These "ladies of the evening" were referred to as "dillies". So, quite literally, this is where men would come to "pick a dilly".
3. Trafalgar square has a pigeon population problem. So, they are using some pretty unconventional means to try and control it. They're putting pigeon contraceptives in the food, and, possibly even cooler than that, they've brought in this guy with a hawk to hang out in the square and HUNT THE PIGEONS!! He just stands around with that hawk and waits for it to attack a passing pigeon. I watched for about 20 minutes and never got any good hawk-on-pigeon action so i'm thinking about going back to spend a day watching. It's amazingly fascinating.
4. The name of this building is actually St. Stephen's Tower, not Big Ben. Big Ben is the name of the bell inside of it and you can only get in to see that if you have a British passport.
3 comments:
Fabulous job, Love! I learned lots and loved the pics! I do still want to hear how Bob did in his first criterion ( at least i think that's what a bike race is called) Hugs, Kim
Bob was about 80 minutes late coming to the airport to get me. That ought to tell you how his race went.
One other bizarrity that Laura didn't mention was the 4 lion statues under some man-on-a-column statue at Trafalgar. The statue-maker had never seen a lion, so he modeled the faces off of pictures and other statues, perhaps, and he modeled the haunches after his dog. Flabbergasting.
That 'man-on-a-column' guy is Lord Nelson. C'mon Mike, don't you pay attention at all? I didn't even go on the tour and I knew that.
I didn't know the bit about the lions though, that is pretty sweet.
Post a Comment