Okay, that title warrants some explanation… we had high tea in a low crypt… is that better?

I am not going to go into the history of the term ‘high tea’, because it has diverged from its original meaning. Suffice it to say that ‘high tea’ is now just a fancy way of saying tea time with snacks. So we had high tea in London after our tour of the Tower… because we come from good English stock and that is what we do. Only this time we had high tea in the crypts under St. Paul’s Cathedral. How cool is that?

No, I don’t mean that we ate little finger sandwiches and tasty little pastries in a musty tomb surrounded by interred corpses… okay, well, there are still interred corpses down there, but they are neatly tucked under the floor stones and behind walls, and the space is now open and airy and contains a few little restaurants and a souvenir shop.

St. Paul’s… and once again, I encourage you to Google it if you are interested… is where you have seen all the famous weddings of the Royal Family. Unfortunately, they do not allow photography inside the church,  which is a shame, because we went to the Evensong Service and sat in the choir seats and the inside of that building is freekin’ gorgeous.

Go back and watch some of the Royal weddings and you can see right where we sat. I was raised Episcopalian… which is really the same… almost… as the Church of England. I might have fallen away from the notion of organized religion, but I still felt right at home during the service.

My mom is a trained opera singer… purely amateur… and she has been singing in the choir at my family’s church in Berkeley since before I was born. She goes on these trips to Europe with the choir where they sing in cathedrals all around England and on the continent.

So my mom has actually sung in services inside St. Paul’s.

I suppose some of you might remember the picture of me wearing a nice button down shirt I posted earlier. I hope this explains the anomaly.

I couldn’t very well go to high tea looking like a scruffy vagrant… which reminds me… you should really see my beard now… HA!

Anyway, between the Tower of London and our trip to St. Paul’s, that accounts pretty much for the first full day of our trip to Europe…

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