Despite walking by the infamous Tower of London many times during my stay, I somehow managed to completely underestimate its size and significance. Once inside the intimidating walls, a small village unfolds complete with rows of flats, guarded jewels, towered lookouts, historical landmarks, and raven lodgings. All the usual accoutrements of any medieval village…On our way to the Tower, we were stopped by a couple fellows by Spitalfields. Willa had completely caught the spirit of East End fashions, although one of these fellows apparently disagreed, as he stopped her to give her a “fashion citation.” Perhaps this was not the true reason for stopping us. After a bit of joking and a picture, they invited us to join them at the White Hart pub, which was quite obviously not the first trip to the pub of the day for them… We were not to be distracted, though. To the Tower!

We enjoyed a short tour with an animated Beefeater, checked out the Crown Jewels, and caught a guided tour of some of the White Tower. It was a cold day, which meant fewer visitors than usual, but not the best conditions to elicit the unhurried, curiosity-inspired wandering the Tower deserves. Willa and I almost immediately decided this historical site was truly worth the better part of a day to absorb, which we did not have. As such, we shuffled through some of the more obvious exhibits and tried to assuage our disappointment at not having more time with promises that we would be back!

--- back alleys at the Tower of London ---

--- the White Tower ---

We hurried from the Tower to the famous Borough food market just as the vendors were breaking down for the day. Nevertheless, we managed to scurry around for a few key finds, including black pudding sausages for Shane and Caron and did the rest of our shopping at Gastronimica, a small store next to the market that had lots of wonderful cheeses and other culinary goodies. In fact, we were in the store so long and chatting with the man at the counter, that he invited us to their holiday work party. Now, unfortunately, we had a previous date with modern art for the evening, but we salivated at the thought of what wonderful culinary delights such a party would involve. (Note, if you are keeping track - this would be the second social invite from a friendly local of the day. Clearly, an earlier visit by Willa could have resulted in a huge boon in my London social life.)

We headed back through Spitalfields with some early evening window shopping along the way. After a proper refueling at the flat, it was back out and to the Tate Modern, my second visit and Willa’s much anticipated first. This time, I swore to get one of the informational headsets, which proved to be an incredibly interesting wealth of information and cause us both to run out of time before the museum closed at ten o’clock. Luckily the top floor café is open a bit later and we still enjoyed the amazing view of St. Paul’s lit up at night and reflected upon the Thames.

--- I'll never get sick of this view... ---