Schmap London Guide

A few weeks ago I received notification that three of my London photos had been nominated for inclusion in the 10th edition of the Schmap London Guide. I have no idea how this happened, and I assume that someone must have search for photos tagged “London” on Flickr and come across mine.

Anyway, I just heard a couple days ago that all three of my nominated photos had been approved and included in the guide. You can view them by clicking the links below:

• British Museum
• Big Ben
• National Gallery
  

I don’t know why they picked the photos they did, because they’re not amazing pictures and really weren’t even some of my best ones.

Still it was flattering, and I was able to pretend for about 30 seconds that I was a real photographer.

London Pictures

I finally uploaded pictures from the London trip to my Flickr account. I let my Pro account lapse, which means I’m limited to just 100 MB worth of photos at a time, so I’ll have to upload more later.

Here’s the link for the full set, and here are some of my favorites.

London

So there are several reasons why The Doc File has been pathetic lately, but one of the major ones was that for the week of Thanksgiving I traveled to London with my family (the week before London I was busy trying to get things done so I could be gone, and the week after London I was busy catching up with work that I missed).

It was an incredible trip. I had never been to London before, but it was quite a bit like I expected. One thing I expected but still couldn’t really get over was how much history there was all around you.

In the town where I live, buildings from 1900 are preserved for historical value and schoolchildren visit them on field trips. In London, we randomly stumbled upon a cathedral that none of us had ever heard of which dated back to the 12th century.

A non-exhaustive list of places we visited and things we did:

• St. Paul’s Cathedral
  
• Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and Mueseum (not the original, it’s been rebuilt)
  
• Southwark Cathedral
• National Library (Codex Sinaiticus and two 1215 copies of the Magna Carta)
• Natural History Mueseum
• Edinburgh Castle (we took a train to Scotland one day)
  
• The Royal Mile in Edinburgh
• Jack the Ripper walk (this was really cool; I’m kind of obsessed with Jack the Ripper)
• City of London walk (Big Ben, House of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace)
• Trafalgar Square
• National Gallery (Rembrandts and Van Goghs)
• Evensong in Westminster Abbey
• Tower of London and Tower Bridge
• Harrod’s
• Stonehenge
• HMS Victory in Portsmouth (Admiral Nelson’s flagship from the Battle of Trafalgar where Napoleon was defeated)

It was kind of an exhausting trip with all the stuff we squeezed in, but you don’t get to go to London whenever you want to. I hope to upload some pictures to Flickr later this week.