London Pt. 3

Sunday morning I got a very early start, mostly thanks to going to bed at a decent hour for once. I was planning on going to the early 8am communion service at Westminster Abbey, but when my phone alarm went off at 6:45 I couldn't bring myself to get out of bed quite yet. Lauren's apartment was freezing, as her heater was broken, so it was especially painful to get out of bed in the morning. I ended up getting up about 9 o'clock, got showered and changed and headed to Notting Hill Gate to catch the Metro downtown for church. I had just finished a hefty book about the history of the Knights Templar, so I knew that I had to attend a service in the 825-year old Temple Church when I was in London.

A lot of the stations and lines on the Underground are closed on weekends for construction (to get the city ready for the 2012 Olympics), so I had to get off at Westminster and walk a little ways to get to the Temple stop. I spent about 45 minutes walking northeast along the Thames on Victoria Embankment. I was planning on getting an English breakfast, but I hadn't considered that most places wouldn't be open on a Sunday morning, so I ended up having to settle for McDonald's. The only other place open was Starbucks and they're way overpriced overseas. After breakfast I found my way into the Inner and Middle Temple yards. During the time of the Knights Templar, these cluster of buildings and grounds on the north side of the Thames were used as a monastery along with the civic buildings that the Order required. However, after the Order was disbanded in the mid-1300s, lawyers and other professionals took over the grounds as the Order of the Middle Temple and the Order of the Inner Temple. These two organizations still maintain the Templar church today.

The church itself is absolutely incredible. It was built in 1185 with a circular rotunda intended to mimick the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where the Order was founded and their headquarters maintained. In the 1200s the nave and sanctuary were added under the direction of Henry III. The fact that the church is still standing is a miracle, as well. Under pressure from Phillipe IV of France during the mid-1300s, the pope declared the Order of the Temple dissolved and encouraged Europe's monarchs to take possession of the extensive land and other assets the Order had accumulated. The majority of these monarchs laid waste to Templar churchs and buildings, but England stood up for the Order and thus have much more of their history still preserved than other nations. The church has been repaired numerous times over the years, including 17 years of construction after a Nazi fire bomb destroyed the roof of the rotunda in 1941.

After lunch, I walked around Covent Garden looking for another little gastro pub. I had a list of suggestions from a friend of my mom's, and ended up choosing one of them called the Sevens Stars. It was a tiny little place with four or five tables. I got a leventine pie (corned lamb, I believe) and another beer that I'd never heard of before. From there, I walked back up north to Russell Square and went to the British Museum again, making it through Ancient Greece, the Middle East, and Assyria. Then I went all the way back down to Westminster, attended a bare-bones evening service at Westminster Abbey, and went back to Lauren's.

We got a bunch of pizza and beer back at Lauren's to get ready for the Super Bowl party that was starting at 11pm London time. Around 10:30 we left Notting Hill and grabbed a cab downtown. The place we went to was this super cheesy American sports bar, where all of the people were wearing the wrong NFL jerseys. A bunch of teams were represented that didn't even make the playoffs this season, so it was both comical and frustrating to see the British trying to look like football fans. The game ended at about 3am, we took a cab straight to our bus stop, a bus to the airport, and then got on our 6am flight back to Paris just in time to make it to class Monday. Long day!