Beheadings work better when the executioner is sober. No, we didn’t see any live beheadings, but we heard about lots of them on our tour of the Tower of London. The Tower is currently most famous for being the storage area for the Crown Jewels, but it’s got a lot more history than that. It was initially a big tower where the monarch lived and occasionally kept prisoners. Over time the monarchs became more paranoid and added more walls, more towers, and a moat. Since then all the waste that had built up in the moat over the previous 300 years was cleaned out, a few buildings were rebuilt, and it was opened to tourists.<\/p>\n
Our tour guide was not only very knowledgeable (there were a lot of dates to remember), but she had a really cool Scottish accent. We saw Anne Boleyn’s grave, an axe that used to remove heads from bodies, and lots of royal chainmail – some with extremely augmented codpieces.<\/p>\n
We saw the Crown Jewels – crowns, scepters, orbs, etc. – and lots of punch bowls made of gold. Let it be known that if you’d like to offer a gift to the English monarch it needs to be enormous, gaudy, and made of precious metals\/stones.<\/p>\n
We’ve also got some pictures of Tower Bridge below (the one that goes up and down).<\/p>\n\n\t\t