St. Paul's Cathedral

I'm sorry for having left you in suspense about the one place I actually know some history about, but there are a bunch of pictures I wanted to post and a lot I wanted to say about this place, so I decided to split it up.

Front + Lamp post. Such a majestic Building.

So here are the details on St. Paul's Cathedral.  IT WAS HUGE.  The dome stands over 100 meters tall, which is about a football field.  It was absolutely amazing and I'm glad we stopped and took our time there.

Under the Dome-view to high Altar

This is the location where the Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana took place and also, as we found out, the steps with the bird feeding in Mary Poppins.  We decided that since we hadn't really spent any money all day on attractions we were interested enough to check out St. Paul's, so we decided to pay and go in.  (One thing to note is that we couldn't use cameras in the Cathedral so any pictures of the inside of the building are courtesy of google--and also a lot better quality than I would've taken anyway).
We chose to do a virtual tour, where we got ipods and headphones and went through tracks as you walked around (or followed whatever directions it gave you).  We started at the front doors, headed through the nave, sat under the dome, learned all about the mosaics in the domes, and finally finished the virtual tour of that floor at the high altar.  It was absolutely gorgeous and huge.

The Nave

View of Cathedral Floor from Whispering gallery

We then decided to take the stairs to the 'galleries'--there are three, and they are different parts of the dome you can climb to.  The upper two galleries (The Stone Gallery and the Golden Gallery) were closed for restoration, but we climbed 257 steps (yepp, we climbed that) to the Whispering gallery, 30 meters from the cathedral floor.  (If it had been open, there are 528 steps to the upper most gallery, 85 meters from the Cathedral floor).  The Whispering Gallery was pretty cool! First, the view of the Cathedral floor was scary and amazing, but also, if you sat along the wall and whispered, a person on the completely opposite side of the gallery (about 35m in distance I think) could hear you like you were sitting right next to them. Pretty neat stuff.

Chapel of St. Faith's

 We then proceeded to go back down all those stairs, and even below the Cathedral floor, to the crypt.  Typing 'crypt' now, it sounds a little creepy, and I have to admit that I thought it was going to be creepy, but it was very nice.  If you take a look at the picture from the crypt, this is one portion of the downstairs that is called the Chapel of St. Faith's. Not creepy at all, but then if you look at the floor, the larger concrete stones all have a description engraved in them, like 'Here lies...(insert name here)', that part was a little astounding--yet not so much as some of the dates on the stones.

Side of the building--Dome!

Some of the stones dated back to the 1700's when the current Cathedral was built. There were all kinds of dedication and memorial tributes in the crypt and it took some time to look through.  In one part of the crypt, there was a timeline on the wall with historic events mixed in with the history of the Cathedral.  The cathedral has had to be rebuilt after destruction several times (I think this is the fourth structure).  The original was built around year 600 and the current building was started in the late 1600's and took many many years to complete.  All of it is quite impressive, and it was a really enjoyable experience.