Tower of London, Rugby, Pub crawl

I've been pretty slack in updating the blog so this is from a couple of days ago (18/8/12).

In the morning Grant, Bea and I went to check out the Tower of London. We aimed to get there at 9am (when it opens) so that we could make it to the rugby at 11am. So we were up at 6:30 am, which I thought was quite early. I can't quite figure out where we put all the time but we only got to the tower of London at 8:45. Maybe the subway system sucks up some time tax or something, which might explain why everyone wants to get the hell out of it so fast. We hunted some food down at Pret a Manger (which I can't pronounce, ask Hayden) and went into the Tower. We bought some audio tour thingamy jiggers that gave us a commentary. The whole place was pretty amazing. Pic below is taken of tower bridge from one of the walls.

Very hard to get your head round how old it is and that it was once used as something other than a tourist attraction. Apparently the White Tower (below) was once the tallest building in Europe so it is hard to imagine it standing in its full majesty when there are now 20 story buildings all around the tower.

Inside the White Tower was pretty awesome. It was huge and we kept wandering from massive room to massive room where all sorts of museum artifacts were, such as suits of armour, swords, muskets, ponies (horses) and whatever the hell this guy is:

I guess he is some sort of Dagron, but I'm not really sure what he has to do with the price of fish in China on a weekday, let alone the Tower of London. Maybe I should have read something about him. We were kinda hurrying at this point as the rugby match was pretty close to kick off, I don't know where the two hours went while we were there (maybe the subway has some remote time sucking ability as well). So we quickly had a look around the Crown Jewels collection (which was very impressive, I don't know who the hell needs a giant golden mace but there was about 6 of them) and the Torture chamber (which wasn't quite as impressive) and headed out. At the gate we were greeted by about a million people queueing to get in and we were happy with our choice of time of day to walk round. Now the long set of queueing barriers at the entrance to the Crown Jewels exhibition made sense (we just walked straight in) and we decided that queueing in the sun (it was meant to get to 30!) would have been bloody awful. We definitely picked a good time of day.

We made our way to "The Walkabout" at Temple to meet Hayden and Ji to watch the second half of the All Blacks vs Australia match. Interesting that it was about 70/30 NZers to Aussies but not that surprising I guess. All Blacks won, Hooray.

I then went to catch up with Jess and Jesse for a Reddit pub crawl. For those of you who don't know what reddit is: it is an online social community, so I find it kinda hilarious that they organise real-life events. Pretty cool though as it is an interesting cross section of society. It was so damn hot we pulled out of the pub crawl early (apparently it was going to go until 5am or something) to go back to Jess and Jesses to have cold showers and drink some cheaper alcohol.