Day Three in London!

Hello everyone! My name is Maethe Butterfield! I just finished my sophomore year at CSS and I am a biology major double minoring in chemistry and ASL. I am very excited to be on this trip and to see everything (especially the Harry Potter stuff)!

Today was our third day in London, and it was a very busy day! We started out taking the bus to Westminster Abbey. This was our first bus ride as a group and even though it was a close call we did all manage to get off on the right stop. We also walked to Trafalgar Square, attended a lecture on Queen Victoria, explored the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, and watch the Play That Goes Wrong. Everything we did was amazing, but my favorite part of the day was definitely Westminster Abbey. We walked through the abbey while listening to an audio tour on our phones. It was an incredible experience to walk past the burial sites of monarchs buried long before any of us were born and to be able to learn a little about them and the abbey. Within Westminster, I enjoyed Poets’ Corner the most.

Poets’ Corner is in the Eastern aisle and is a place where many famous authors and poets are buried or memorialized. In 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer was the first poet to be buried there. Today, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, and Rudyard Kipling and many more are buried there as well. There are also memorials for Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, and others. This was my favorite area of Westminster because while I was familiar with some of the monarchs, I was more familiar with the names of the poets and it was really a cool experience to walk by (and over) the graves of such great storytellers. The photo below is the view from the cloisters at Westminster.