St. Pauls and a Food Market

Today has been one of my favorite days in London so far. I went to St. Pauls Cathedral with one of my classes and we did a little tour and learned some stuff about it. Photographs aren't allowed inside (which we aren't sure why. We talked about this with my professor and it really doesn't make sense). So instead I will link you to the website where there are some internal photographs here! It really is a beautiful place.

 This is a bit of the outside, and a small portion of the dome on top.

I was too close to the building to get the entire thing in my view finder. It really is huge.

 This has been excavated from the top part of the building for cleaning and repairs. It shows the kind of warping that happens to the stone facades when they are out in the open for hundreds of years. It took 15 years for service men to clean the outside of the building!

This is a nice monumental thing (not sure who is at the top though, but my first guess would be St. Paul)

 The Dome!

The newest addition to the courtyard: a bust of my boy John Donne! It was recently unveiled. There is a larger statue of him within the cathedral that just so happens to be one of the only things that survived the great fire of 1666.

Side note: when one of the professors mentioned that a sculpture of John Donne was just unveiled, a boy in my class asked his friend, "Do you know who John Donne is?" The other one shook his head and the first one said, "Me either." It seriously made me want to cry.

The back end of the cathedral

At this point we went inside and had a little tour. The inside is magnificent. It's not at all what I was expecting, but so much better. We climbed up a bazillion stairs to get to the base of the dome. The view was amazing.

The blue spiraly thing in the middle is what the Brits call "the gherkin", as in pickle. 

The "Shard"

Then we continued up another gazillion stairs and ended up at the very top of the bit that surrounds the dome. This view was even more insane than the first.

One of the clock towers

The Thames. The little round, white building is the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe theatre.

Even though pictures aren't allowed inside the building, I snuck a few pictures of the staircases and inner workings of the dome. It was a tight squeeze and I felt rather claustrophobic going up. 

 Hundreds of spiral stairs going up at the most insane incline. I felt sick when I came down.

Some of the stairs were even worse than the shakey metal of the spiral cases. This stairwell was just big enough fro one person to squeeze down at a time.

After class let out I went around the corner with the intention of eating at Chef Gordon Ramsay's Bread Street Kitchen. Instead, I walked right by it and stumbled into a farmers market of sorts. About 2 dozen or so stands were set up with everything from olives, to Ethiopian food, to Thai, and baked goods. I picked up the most amazing pulled pork sandwich from one of the stands and then finished it off with a slice of the most decadent chocolate cake (called a mud pie) that I have ever seen. 

I know it looks kind of disgusting, but thats because I ate half of it at the market and on the train ride home it got a little smushed in its paper cone. But let me tell you, it was the best £2 I ever spent.