OK Back to Bs As.  Even though I am desperate to get home, see my family and have some asado and mate, I'll miss all the places I have enjoyed and all the moments I spent with the team and people I got to meet.  See you soon Ireland/UK!

Great Museums to see in London:

Victoria & Albert Museum

National History Museum

Warwick Castle: Home to William I, the Conqueror

Henry VIII and his 6 wives....

Warwick town view from the castle

Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace.

Royal Shakespearean Company

William's house

Shakespeare's first compilation of works

The autoctonous William...

Stratford: cute little town

Oxford University

Harry Potter's hall at Christ Church (it's actually the basis for the hall appearing in the movie)

C. Lewis' house in Oxford. He was a professor here for more than 40 yrs. 

City of Oxford

Today: Stonehenge (which means hanging rock in old English) from different angles....

Stonehenge is probably the most important prehistoric monument in the whole of Britain and has attracted visitors from earliest times. It stands as a timeless monument to the people who built it.

The stonehenge that we see today is the final stage that was completed about 3500 years ago, but first let us look back 5000 years.

Did you know...

• Stonehenge was constructed in three phases.
• It has been estimated that the three phases of the construction required more than thirty million hours of labour.
• Speculation on the reason it was built range from human sacrifice to astronomy.

Prince Albert memorial

British Museum

Change of guards

Tower Bridge

My boyfriend and me at Mme Tussaud's...

The London Eye (once I was up there....I wanted to die!)

Camden Town  (crazy mixture of punk and hippie style market)

The Tower of London 

The Big Ben, Parliament House and Westminster Abbey

Harry Potter .....

Cambridge University  -  King's College

Beautiful surroundings at Cambridge uni.

Chelsea Stadium

(for more pics check my Facebook account)

13/02

Heading for London: It snowed almost all the way; it took us more than expected but ... well worth it.

Although we were dead tired and it was late, we had some dinner and set out for a walk around the area where the hotel is: South Kensington.

12/02

Today we walked all around Edinburgh: The Castle, the Royal Mile, etc.  It's amazing to see buildings from the 1200's or previous.  I got to learn a lot of their history and visited all the exhibits at the castle from the crown jewels to the main room where Kings used to have their banquets.

(One of the views from the Castle)

At 1:00 pm they change guards and fire the cannons to the tune of the pippers.

Some stories:

Kristie, our city guide, told us some stories about it.  It seems R.L. Stevenson based his novel “The strange tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in an actual Edinburgh person, Deacon Brodie.  He was a council man, this is to say powerful and well known, and also a cabinet maker.  He would go up to people’ houses to design pieces of furniture and at the same time look around to see what they had.  If he saw the family had something valuable, he would get ready to break in and steal it at night….. He even had a method by which he would get the key and make a model in wax to use it as a sample. After a number of robberies, he was caught of course, as an accomplice told on him, but it still remains a mystery; nobody understood why this good and helpful person by day, could have committed so many crimes by night. 

There is a monument here of a dog called Bobby.  Bobby was a friar’s dog at Greyfriars church.  When his owner died, Bobby would sleep on his grave at night.  Every night for 14 years…

Of course there is a tombstone for Bobby in the church’s graveyard, with a marble stone in honour of his loyalty and friendship.

The one I liked best was the story about the school of medicine in Edinburgh, well known in older days for its great academic discoveries.  It seems a group of doctors and students needed to experiment and analyze but did not have enough bodies to do it with, so the students and professors would go up to the graveyard as soon as someone had died and take the body up to the school.  This of course was illegal and, considering their religion, immoral.  But as they couldn’t be caught, the church decided to put bars on the graves.  Yes, yes, you read well: bars as in your windows for protection.  So, what could they do? Well, considering Scottish weather is so harsh and at the time many people would wander in the streets, they started considering killing some…. So they would get old or sick people to have dinner with them or simply have a drink as find out if they had relatives or family and if they didn’t, well, they were off for the final judgment.  When they thought they had enough men, they decided that perhaps a prostitute could be the solution to research the female body inside. But when they killed pretty Mary and took her body to the school, some of the doctors recognized her and wondered how she could be dead if they had seen her in such good health the night before …. and so the police decided to investigate why so many people were just dropping dead.

My room at Duns Castle. Incredible view; I wondered people actually live here...

Sir Hay and me: Great host, lovely place, amazing food.

The mystery was difficult to solve but the actors were fantastic. 

Our stay at the castle was great. There was a pipper playing as we started the evening and the murder mystery was performed by two actors before and during dinner. Our team lost, though.

After a two-hour drive approx. we were back at Edinburgh and back to the streets, walking up to the castle.