Today we went to visit Westminster Abbey and the National Gallery. Both places are tied very closely to England's identity (Westminster Abbey extremely so) and both offer some enlightening attractions that really shouldn't be missed. I did not spend much time in the National Gallery because I was honestly not in the right state of mind to see more religious images. Not that they're not important to history or culture, but I've seen enough religious symbolism over the past two weeks. Instead I wanted to say a few things about Westminster Abbey. There's no religious symbolism there.
Westminster Abbey:
So I just want to put it out there that I was amazed at how many famous and important dead corpses (is that redundant?) lie within Westminster Abbey. This includes the likes of Charles Dickens, Isaac Newton, Queen Elizabeth, and Charles Darwin just to name a few. I find it really interesting that Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, is buried in an Anglican Church (which used to be a Catholic Church). It's almost (but not quite) ironic, and at the very least, extremely funny. Honestly though, what I was really impressed with was the fact that I stood less than five feet away from Isaac Newton's rotting corpse. That was really the highlight of my day. I'm not really all about royal weddings or crowning ceremonies (both interesting in their own right), but to stand next to the inventor of calculus and discoverer of the laws of motion is really something else.
I couldn't take any photographs of the actual church, but the rest of the Abbey (although it's not really an Abbey anymore apparently) is very interesting architecturally. It is based on the French Gothic Style with elements of the English Gothic Style as the building was expanded and renovated over the last 8 centuries. It really is an amazing example of 13th century architecture:
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