I saw the QUEEN!

Yes, that's right. Veronica saw the Queen of England in her super awesome parade Land Rover.

This morning some of my roommates along with a few more people, headed out to London to see the parade comemorating the end of WWII. In the morning though, half the girls went shopping. Since I'm not a big fan of shopping whatsoever, I went with Chris and another girl to Hyde Park to see the Speaker's Corner. We listened to some of the biggest verbal diarhea that I've ever heard in my entire life. People were just spouting things about how American's are terrible and how Jesus saves and how everyone is going to hell. This big crowd of tourists kept moving from speaker to speaker laughing and antagonizing, it was a really great time. I can't believe how stupid and closed minded some people are. This guy was talking about how the US invasion of Iraq caused the bombings last Thursday:
















Afterwards, we went through Trafalgar Square again and then to Victoria Station for lunch, and then on to the Mall to line up for the parade. The sun was out in full force and at 3pm I was already feeling it, my shoulders got a bit crisped actually but since I remembered sunscreen on my face, nothing else was affcted. We did get to see a bit of the changing of the guard and then ... came the Queen and Prince Phillip in one carriage, followed by Prince Charles, Camilla with a dead blue bird on her head, and Harry in his military uniform. Sadly for all the girls I went with, William was still in New Zeland. Since I have better and closer pictures of the Queen and Prince Phillip from later, here are the pictures I took of Charles, Camilla and Harry from accross the ENTIRE Buckingham Square. In the first one, Harry's circled in yellow and Camilla in purple. In the second it's Charles circled in purple (he was being obstructed by the dead condor on Camilla's head) and Harry again in yellow.






























Needless to say this was all very exciting. There was an hour and a half long show about WWII complete with singers and dancers and excerpts from speeches and radio broadcasts. Finally the Queen with Prince Phillip, followed by a band and honored veterans holding the 200+ standards carried during the war, made a procession back up the Mall to the Palace for a military flyover by English and American planes used in WWII. I got some excellent shots of the Queen in her Land Rover, here's just one of them:
















One of the airplanes at the end dropped paper poppies to commemorate the war, and thankfully one of the batches of poppies flew right down to where we were standing, so I managed to get one to take home with me. Here's a picture of the flyover and the poppy drop:

















After the parade we didn't do anything really special, just headed out to dinner and then back home on the train. I was so tired I totally passed out and slept the entire way back to Oxford, standing in the sun for about two and a half hours will definitely take it out of you. Well that concludes my super exciting weekend, even though I'm still sad William wasn't there, but hey... how many people can say they've seen the Queen that close up :)