Well we left London today but I'll give a recap of our last day.

We started out with breakfast, which is free in our hotel. They offer two breakfasts, English Breakfast and Continental Breakfast. English breakfast consists of an egg, either scrambled or poached, sausage, bacon, grilled tomato, and baked beans. Continental breakfast consists of your choice of corn flakes, fruit and fiber (raisin bran), or Meusli. But just in case you didn't have enough fiber with the continental breakfast, you also get hot porridge, fruit cup, natural yogurt (plain unsweetened yogurt) and breakfast croissants and your choice of tea or coffee. Word to future London travelers, the English are known for their tea, remember this when offered coffee.

We headed out to see the Tower of London, which is actually a castle, and houses the Crown Jewels. These were absolutely stunning. Royal crowns from way back when were displayed and let me tell ya, they just kept getting better and better! The current Queen has her crown on display there as well. Everything is heavily guarded and enclosed in plexiglass. Apparently the queen just checks out her crown when she needs to use it, which is only for coronations and commencement of Parliament.

We then went on a tour of the "tower" with one of the legendary "beefeaters" as our guide. These guys are great and very entertaining. They know TONS about the history of the castle and shared some pretty incredible stories, some great, some not so great. Many prisoners were kept in this castle and were executed, so as you can imagine some stories were very sad. The beefeaters actual title is Yeoman Warders and they used to be the guards of the prisoners held at the castle. Prisoners such as Anne Boleyn were brought here before their execution. Now these warders care for the castle and occasionally are called to protect members of the royal family on outings.

After the tower we headed to lunch at a cool open air market, suggested to us by the nice chap at the front desk of our hotel. We crossed the Tower Bridge to get there and walked along the Thames. Really pretty view and the sun finally came out during this walk, so that was nice.

After this we went to Westminster Abbey. This is my favorite thing I've seen so far. It is absolutely beautiful. There is an incredible amount of history within the Abbey and it actually houses many smaller chapels within. Once an hour they come over head and ask everyone to stop and be still while they offer a prayer. The Abbey was crowded as you'd expect, being the tourist attraction it is, but when they asked for people to stop and be still, almost every single person in that place stopped while the prayer was being read. It was very cool. This is a must see if you are ever in London.

Next we headed to Kensington Palace so I could see the Fashion Rules exhibit which displays beautiful gowns worn by Queen Elizabeth, her sister Princess Margaret, and Princess Diana. The gowns were lovely but the exhibit was sort of a let down because there just wasn't very many gowns to see, so it was a quick walk through in less than 5 minutes. However there are other rooms to explore and they are all very beautiful. We walked around outside which is actually a park and has a great large walkway for runners and walkers (like Central Park). It was clear that locals come to Kensington Palace to relax and enjoy the beautiful scenery. That was intriguing to me because I wouldn't expect a place where the future king of England is to be residing, to be that open to the public. In case you don't keep up on royal news like I do, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have an apartment there and Kensington Palace is to be their permanent home.

After KP we headed back to our hotel to get ready for dinner and the 1975 show. Dinner was great yet again at Thomas Cubitt. However, we got off on a shaky start as I had booked reservations not figuring in that the reservations were for the first floor, which to us yanks means the FIRST floor, but to English people, this is actually the second floor. So I had inadvertently booked reservations in the hoighty toighty private upstairs dining room...oops. No worries though, they sat us downstairs in the gastropub area.

We then hitched a cab to the 1975 concert and it was great! They put on a good show. One thing we found funny was how well behaved the crowd was. It was mostly comprised of college aged kids who we would normally expect to be rowdy. However this wasn't the case. If someone bumped into you they immediately said sorry, they were all just so darn polite! These English people have manners for sure!

Today we checked out of our hotel in London and made our way to the train station to head out to Paris. During the couple hour ride I took the opportunity to learn some French with a handy dandy Rick Steves phrase book. I knew our first order of business, once getting off the train, would be to hail a cab. So, I made sure I knew how to greet the cabbie, (bonjour), ask him if he accepts credit cards (carte de credit O.K?) and made sure to know how to ask for an ATM (distributeur or automatique) in case he didn't accept credit cards, as well as making sure I knew how to tell him where we need to go (Nous allons a Hotel Aiglon) and to thank him for his hospitality (Merci). Well, I didn't get past bonjour. When I asked him, in what I thought was pretty good rookie French, if he accepted credit cards he looked at me like I had three heads and said, "eh?" So I asked if he speaks English, "parlez vous Anglais?" , to which I got "No!" So I repeated my credit card question in French and the cab driver said, "no understand". The whole while Tony is sitting next to me with a cheshire cat grin on his face, I think he was amused by my floundering. I hadn't expected a French person to not understand my French! Tony put the credit card in front of the man and said "credit card" in English and the man says, "No" but starts to drive us anyways. So about halfway through the drive Tony again shows him his card and says "ATM" to which the cab driver looked slightly confused and said "no" but then repeats ATM in French back to Tony to confirm he understood that we needed an ATM. So apparently all you need to do to communicate with French people is use sign language and English, French doesn't work. I checked my usage of the credit crd question with the guy at the front desk of our hotel here in Paris and I really was not off! I mean I sounded like an American saying the word but it was still recognizable. Sheesh. I didn't like that cab driver at all and he is not going to be filed away in my memory bank of fun experiences for this trip. So there.

Tonight we are going to venture out to dinner then go on a "Paris car tour" which shows us the city at night!

I'm sure there will be more interesting exchanges to report in the days ahead, so I'll keep you all updated!

Au revoir!