Today I went to Windsor. I set out early and arrived at about 11, was at Windsor Castle by about 11:15, and was in love by about 12. It was one the most amazing and beautiful historical places I've ever seen. I feel like no description can do the Castle justice, but I will endeavour to tell you how it made me feel. The grounds are perfectly kept and the buildings themselves are just so amazing and majestic, and I think it seems more magical because royalty still live there. This made it seem like I was invading, which felt a bit weird. I wandered around the gardens for a while and saw St George's Chapel, which unfortunately was closed because it was Sunday. I was asked by a little Asian woman to take her photo in front of it, and it took 3 goes until she was happy with the photo I had taken. They really are camera obsessed, especially considering all the pictures I took looked exactly the same!! But she was finally happy to let me go while I left her to inspect my work. I made my way up to Queen Mary's Dolls' House, which was built for one of her birthdays due to her love of collecting minature items. It was the most amazing minature world I've ever seen, and famous artists and designers contributed actual pieces of work and items so it is worth a LOT of money and the detail is just absolutely unreal, and it even had electricity and functioning plumbing. Because of all this, it was never intended as a child's toy, but I can't imagine what kind of refined, controlled FREAK wouldn't want to rearrange and play with everything!! Then it was on to the State Apartments, and I realised what the word awesome actually means, because for 2 hours I wandered around in awe of royalty and the complicated history. I felt very small and insignificant, but in a good way, and felt such a huge amount of respect for royalty and their lives, responsibilities, heartaches, obligations and restrictions. I felt like I'd been given a huge privilege to see inside their lives and see such an amazing place. A lot of the rooms I saw were destroyed in a big fire that broke out in 1992 and destroyed a lot of stuff, so the rooms I saw were replicas of the original, but still astounding. It made me so sad to think of how much was lost, and as materialistic as it sounds, it was such a terrible loss of of thousands of items worth so much to someone, not only in monetary terms but also sentimentally. One of the first rooms I saw was a room King Henry used to get up in. he would get up, and come into this room, and officially get up and be greeted by officials. How weird is that?! I was thinking how funny it would be to get up in that vague state and thinking "oh yeah..time to get up PROPERLY" and people pretty much watching you get up. From this side of the castle is a very nice view of the area, because this is the vantage point soldiers would watch for enemies from. So you can see pretty much the whole surrounding countryside with no restrictions, and is therefore pretty cool. All of the rooms were so over the top and almost outrageously decorated with a massive abundance of gold and intricate detail EVERYWHERE, but all of which were just indescribably beautiful. Just to point out how amazed I was, I listened to all 28 rooms on the audio tour. Usually I give by about room 5 and just wander around, but everything was just so interesting that I listened to the whole lot! Where I came out, at the side of the Round Tower (where the original moat of the Castle was), there was a hill with a little river of water running down it, and along the side of the river were little patches of ice, and bursts of spring flowers in the grass. It was like a minature picture of the winter melting and spring finally being here, and reminded me a little bit of Narnia when all the ice melted and everything was warm and magical. After the Castle I wandered down to Eton, which is about a 10 minute walk, and is also where Prince William went to college. I wondered if he got to walk or whether he had to be escorted for such a small distance... Eton College was closed though until about April, so I could only see the outside, and it was kind of ugly red brick and nowhere near as beautiful as Oxford colleges. So, Ellie, I went to Windsor, and came home without Prince William having fallen madly in love with me. I tried, but it looks like the princess life is just not what is intended for me, and I am therefore in for a life of having to earn my own money. Oh well. Also, I just can't believe that STA don't have any pictures of such a major piece of England, so I have put a picture of the London Eye (which I walked underneath when I got back to London, so has a bit of relevance...and BOY is it a huge piece of metal!!!) until I have loaded my Windsor photos on here.