Pigeons don't care that you're standing in their way

Or out of their way, for that matter.

On Friday night we went to a mosque close to the park where we live, and we covered our hair with scarves and entered the huge prayer room where a Muslim man sat down with us beneath the vast blue dome and taught us about the Five Pillars of Islam and what it means to believe in Allah.

Then we rented bikes in the park and rode around in the rain through the streets of London until we found good cookies and were soaked to the skin.

On Monday we went to St. Paul's Cathedral and sat staring in awe at the gigantic dome towering above us and the painted murals staring down at us, and we climbed so many stairs to the top that we could see for miles and miles in every direction.

Last week we went to Les Miserables, which is my most favorite theater production of all time, and the voices were so beautiful, and the story was so tragic that I may have cried once or twice, and I haven't been able to stop listening to those songs.

Yesterday we went to Westminster Abbey where we saw the graves of Isaac Newton, Bloody Mary, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Byron, Wordsworth, the Bronte sisters, Matthew Arnold, George Frideric Handel, Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, Edward Elgar, William Walton and tons and tons and tons of others.

On Friday we went to Kew Gardens, the largest botanical gardens in the world, just outside of London, and we walked and walked through the most beautiful redwoods and rhododendrons and waterlilies.

On Thursday, we went to a free piano concert at church where a professional Russian piano man played pieces by Franz Liszt and Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Alexander Scriabin, a Russian composer whose pieces I'd never heard before, and I couldn't believe someone so talented, with so many credentials, would play a free concert in such a small chapel for such ordinary people.

On Thursday we rode a train outside of London to Southall where many, many Indian people live, and we went to one of the biggest Gurdwara temples around, a temple where they practice Sikhism, and we ate dinner at one of the best Indian restaurants around, and the food was so spicy my stomach almost folded in on itself and defected from its duties.

A couple weekends ago we went to a soccer match--I refuse to call it football because it's just not football--at Wembley Stadium between England and Switzerland, and we were so high in the stands that we could've been in an airplane, but the field was smack dab in the middle, and the soccer players made it so much fun to watch, and it was over so fast; there were so many people that it took us an hour to get back to the train station, which had taken five minutes to walk from on our way to the game.

Now, it is the fifth and last week of London.