Lord's, Buckingham Palace & Italy

Hi All

Sorry for being such slackers. We've been very busy lately. I (Richard) did a tour of Lord's cricket ground and it was awesome. They took us into the visitors dressing room in the Pavillion as well as the room where the Queen watches the games from when she goes to the cricket. We saw the original Ashes (pic on right) - very small for those who didn't know. Only about 6" tall. We were also taken into the new Media centre (large UFO construction) and the view from there is almost as good as coyt cam. Unfortunately though, they wouldn't let us on the pitch for hit. Also, check out the pic on the right. They have preserved a dead sparrow that was hit by a ball in 1936. Cool hey! Okay, back to Corryn.

The day after Lord's we went & did a tour of the state rooms in Buckingham palace. The Queen spends August & September in Windsor Castle, so they open Buckingham to the public. It was a very interesting tour, however I think I preferred Windsor Castle. I don't have any photos of Buckingham Palace as you're not allowed to take any when you're inside.

Ok, so now we're up to last weekend. We went to Florence & Pisa :) We arrived in Pisa late on Friday night & caught the train to Florence. Florence was gorgeous. We were staying in the old part of town where there are cobbled lane ways everywhere and really, really old buildings. The streets are interspersed with big public squares & huge churches, gallaries & other sights (Pic on the left of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, the 4th largest cathedral in the world).

We met up with some friends from Sydney on Saturday & spent the day meandering around. First up we climbed up to the top of the cupola (some 400 -500 stairs), where we saw the amazing fresco close up, by Vasari and Zuccari with a representation of the Last Judgement (Pic on the left & heaps more on Flickr). Up on top of the cupola we had an amazing 360 degree view of Florence. Pic on the right of us with the view in the background.

We then continued on to the Uffizi gallery. On the way to the gallery we saw a fake statue of David (apparently the real one is in a museum, however the fake was was still impressive - see on right). The Uffizi gallery was huge! We saw so many famous paintings, most noticably a collection of Botticelli works (e.g. The Birth of Venus), and also some Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo & Raphael paintings. Amazing stuff. Unfortunately no photos are allowed, however you can google the gallery on wikipe

dia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffizi_gallery) to see some of the fresco's on the walls and some more information on the collections.

After stopping for lunch & drinks (pic of us on the right), we continued onto the Basilica di Santa Croce (pic on the left), which is

is the burial place of some pretty famous people, such as Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli, amoung others. The basilica has heaps of stained glass windows and frescos on the walls and ornate tombs. There are more pictures of the inside on Flickr.

Finally, we finished off the day listening to an amazing busker who had a voice which was several times larger than she was, singing operetta while we had dinner followed by an amusing performance on the street by a Charlie Chaplin lookalike (pic on the left).

On Sunday we caught the train back to Pisa where we meandered through town to see the leaning tower of pisa where we took lots of touristy photos (see example of Richard on the right holding up the tower), which kept us occupied for a few hours before heading back to the airport back to London.

It's been raining here for the past week, so we haven't done anything exciting recently, except to visit Borough markets yesterday. Next weekend we're off to Dusseldorf in Germany for the bank holiday long weekend. Will keep you posted :)

Lots of love to all.