All right.  Back to yesterday's trip to London.  Sometimes everything in the universe seems to converge for a perfect day, and that's what we had yesterday, even with one questionable allocation of our resources, which I will explain in a minute.  The weather was perfect.  Everybody in the group was rested and ready for our first real chance to explore London in depth.  (The trip to Wimbledon during Week 1 included a brief glimpse of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, but we never went into a single building except a train station.)  And we had zero problems with public transportation, despite the multiple uses we were making of it--national rail service to and from the city, and the Tube inside London itself.
     We started at St. Paul's Cathedral, where photography is prohibited inside.  I did get a couple of shots outside when we climbed to the dome.

From St. Paul's we took a quick trip to Paternoster Square, where a couple of us couldn't resist the chance for a free table tennis game:

But from there we walked across the Millenium Bridge to the Globe Theatre, where we saw a brilliant production of a problematic play, The Taming of the Shrew after we strolled over to the lively Borough Market for lunch on the wise advice of John C.   Here we are in our (good) seats just before show time.  Photography at the Globe is also prohibited once the show begins:

After the play, which received generally rave reviews from the boys, we walked a mile down the Thames Embankment, and here's where I am embarrassed about what happened next.  Succumbing foolishly to a series of pleas, I bought us tickets for the London Eye, which I consider the London Eyesore, and which until yesterday I had never been near.  After the ride, I am baffled as to why anybody would consider riding a Ferris wheel an important part of a visit to London.  Why endure long snake lines and delays (our tickets were for 5:30, and we got on about 6:15) when you could climb to the Golden Gallery at the top of St. Paul's Cathedral and get a glorious view of London without the impediment of a thick glass window in your way?  That was 90 minutes ripped from our mortal lives, but, as I said earlier, the weather was perfect, and this unfortunate detour didn't dampen the spirits of anyone except, perhaps, me. 

      From there we walked across the Hungerford Bridge to Trafalgar Square, where a large crowd was preparing to watch a simulcast of an opera from Covent Garden Opera House, and then we proceeded to Covent Garden itself, not for the opera, but for the food courts and the entertaining buskers.  

We took the Tube back to Paddington and the the 8:48 train back to Oxford, which got us happily back to Brasenose around 10:35 p.m., 14 hours after we had departed for the day.  You should be hearing more about this trip later from some of the students themselves.