Our day started at the Goodge Street tube stop (no, that is not a bodily orafice).\u00a0 We took the northern line south three stops to Charing Cross, and jumped lines to the Bakerloo for four stops, and we had arrived at Elephant and Castle in the borough of Southwark.\u00a0 We had been warned that it was a questionable area.\u00a0 The reality was far more shocking.\u00a0 Immediately upon exiting the tube, we were approached by a man with a bloody face (no, not that kind of bloody, but a gruesomely literal\u00a0BLOODY face) asking repeatedly for help.\u00a0 After evading what seemed like a potential mugging (considering that the “victim” didn’t ask the nearby policeman for help) we\u00a0set off through Elephant and Castle.<\/p>\n
A walk through the painfully modern local University ensued.\u00a0 Being a college area\u00a0there were many take-out and ethnic restaurants.\u00a0 In fact, the\u00a0area seemed to be predominately lower class, dominated by Afro-Caribbean\u00a0immigrants.\u00a0 Their culture was further depicted by the murals painted in the subway tunnels (which are walking tunnels, not tubes).\u00a0 We continued our walk into nearby Lambeth, where we found a large obelisk dedicated to King George.\u00a0 Though hesitant to approach and take pictures of the monument as there were several\u00a0tramps hanging about, we eventually overcame our apprehension.\u00a0 On nearing the structure we were immediately greeted by the bare bum of a homeless man, having just unloaded on said monument.\u00a0 Luckily, he didn’t make it into any of our pictures, though the memory will be burned into our traumatized memories forever.<\/p>\n
After this troubling experience we decided that if we didn’t find anything nice within a block, we were returning to central London.\u00a0 Fortunately we stumbled upon a beautiful Tibetan Peace Garden, ironically adjacent to the Imperial War Museum.\u00a0 The center was dominated by a large metal Mandala design.\u00a0 However, the main attraction was off to the side.\u00a0 A pillar quoating the XIV Dalai Lama in four languages (Tibetan, English, Chinese, and Hindi) read as follows:<\/p>\n
“We human beings are passing through a crucial period in our development.\u00a0 Conflict and mistrust have plagued the past century which has brought immeasurable human suffering and environmental destruction.\u00a0 It is in the interest of all of us on this planet that we make a joint effort to turn the next century into an era of peace and harmony.\u00a0 May this Peace Garden become a monument to the courage of the Tibetan people and their commitment to peace.\u00a0 May it remain as a symbol to remind us that human survival depends on living in harmony and on always choosing the path of non-violence in resolving our differences.”\u00a0-May 13, 1999<\/p>\n
Considering its location in a diverse community it is especially prominent.\u00a0\u00a0 The message conveyed by the garden gives hope to the minorities who experience discrimination, not just in London, but throughout the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Leaving the gorgeous garden and its Ice Age Tree Path (we’re not sure either), we entered the Imperial War Museum.\u00a0 Located in the building that once housed Bethlem Hospital, it is now a wide open space filled with various instruments of destruction.\u00a0 We chose to explore the morbid and depressing Holocaust Exhibit, which was appropriately desplayed in an age restricted corridor.\u00a0 Though tastefully done it left us feeling rather sad.\u00a0 We left.\u00a0 Returning to the tube station in an attempt to figure out why the stop got its name, we asked a security person whose response was “That’s just its name”.\u00a0 The only clue was a pub located next to the station called The Elephant and Castle.\u00a0 The area was, in fact, named FOR said pub, but admittedly we didn’t know this at the time.\u00a0 We did however make up a highly amusing story to explain the name that we had only ever heard of in Harry Potter.\u00a0 Ask us about it later.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our return was made on the number 68 bus to Russell Square, and we continued on foot to our hotel, where we collapsed in heaps of exhaustion on our beds and had to be pried off our beds with a shoe horn in time for discussion.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Unfortunately, our designated camera had forgotten its memory card reader in its laptop case, so our pictures are currently marooned on said camera.\u00a0 They’ll come up sometime on Monday or Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our day started at the Goodge Street tube stop (no, that is not a bodily orafice).\u00a0 We took the northern line south three stops to Charing Cross, and jumped lines to the Bakerloo for four stops, and we had arrived at Elephant and Castle in the borough of Southwark.\u00a0 We had been warned that it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[735,739,154],"tags":[765,777,790,830,833,881],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthony","category-campbell","category-sarah","tag-blood","tag-castle","tag-elephant","tag-peace","tag-poop","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}