Saturday, May 18, 2013

Day 6: Parliament and Westminster Abbey

Today we toured the Houses of Parliament. It is an extremely large building. One of the first rooms we entered was the queens dressing room. It is where she gets dressed to open parliament in the begining of May. We then went into the House of Lords, which is one of the law making bodies of their legeslative branch. Lords are either heirs or they are appointed. Their camber is mostly red with the exception of the queens thrown which is gold. The queens thrown is where she gives her address to congress .We then walked across the building to the House of Commons, which is the other law making body. Their primary color was green. The building is extremely old but has twice been rebuilt. First after the Great Fire in the 1800s they rebuilt all of parliment and added the House of Commons. Then the House of Commons was destroyed in the late 1940s because of the blitzkrieg bombings. After the war it was rebuilt. One thing I found interesting was that neither on the houses had desks for their congress to work on. The reason for that is they believe that their congress should be able to defend their point without looking at information in front of them. They did just decide to let iPads and other tablets, which according to our tour guide caused a small fight, but in the end they allowed their members to use them. Another difference was that they have an adversarial system. Basically they sit across from each other to argue their point, in America we sit in a semi-circle so our congress does not face each other. Their systems similar to ours, in the fact that both houses vote to pass the bill and the queen signs it into law. 
After we finished up at congress I went with the education group to go see the Westminster Abby. It was a very interesting place. It is a church where a lot of kings and queens are buried. The architecture is amazing and the tombs were also well designed. After that Dana and I walked to Buckingham palace and she took some pictures, and I stopped at a book store and picked up the first Harry Potter book.
The reason is because it is called Harry Potter and the philosophers stone. After that we went to Camden street which is just a bunch of little markets. Honestly it was also the most creepy part of London I have been in. But they have a lot of cheap items and I may go by one more time to look around at the deals. Tomorrow we go to the Roman baths and I should get to see Stonehenge. Sorry their is not to many pictures, most of the places did not allow photos.

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