May 10, 2012

 Today we met outside the hotel at 9.00 AM.  Today was a tourist/site seeing day.  We went to many different places and saw a good bit of London.  Throughout the entire day, we walked about ten miles, although it didn't seem that far.  We started the day off by going to R.I.C.S. which stands for the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.  RICS sets standards and regulations for construction and methods.  While we were here we had the grand tour and saw all of the rooms in the 1900 century building.  After the tour we went to the library at RICS, which has a great deal of information... especially on my topic, which is great.  On Monday we are able to revisit the library, which I will definitely be doing.  After visiting RICS we went to ICE which is the British Institute of Civil Engineering, which is about 100 yards from RICS.  Here we went on the grand tour, similar to that of RICS, and also visited the library at ICE.  The library at ICE was a lot more comprehensive and will also help me out a lot with my research.  After visiting these two institutions, we did a lot of sightseeing.  RICS and ICE were right near Parliament/Big Ben/Westminster Abbey so we were able to see all of these attractions before and after ICE and RICS. After we visited this area of town we crossed a bridge over the Thames (pronounced Tims) River, and walked about 3 miles down a river walk that allowed us to see the stunning skyline of London's river bank. Along the river walk we were able to see the various street performers, which are similar to ones in New York, nothing of which I have seen much of before. After the river walk we visited the Tate Museum of Modern Art for a short time, which benefited us mostly because of the adaptive reuse aspect of the building.  Then we visited the Ghuchen building in downtown London which looks like a large egg of a building... you have to google it.  After this we went back to the hotel and we were done for the day.  I had the BEST pizza I have had probably in my entire life and we visited the Rocket Pub which was a great time. All in all London has been great and I am in the process of getting cultured, can't wait for what is to come.  Dueces.

T