Day 25

Brighton was INCREDIBLE!!

I never expected to find a beautiful little beach town on the southern coast of England, and yet, I was proven wrong. I am so glad I was wrong, because it was a gorgeous day and we saw so many awesome things while we were there.

When we first arrived, we went to find the Royal Pavilion.



This place was crazy-huge! It is a palace that was built during the 17th century when King George IV was under rule. It was built to shock and awe its guests, and it totally did its job. Pictures weren't allowed (gotta sell those post cards in the gift shop), but it didn't really matter because a picture could not capture the grandeur and extravagance of this place. The main dining hall had to have ceilings that were at least 40 feet tall, if not more. The room itself was probably just as long and a had a gigantic table going down the full length of it in the center. The details were stunning, almost too much. Every wall was hand painted, gold encrusted and dramatic. There were four chandeliers in each corner of the dining room, and the main one in the center, which is the largest I've ever seen or knew existed, was 30 feet long and weighed one ton. The whole palace had a Chinese-inspired theme. All the wall paintings were Chinese art, and there were a lot of dragon sculptures everywhere. In the 17th century, King George probably thought it would show his worldliness and importance to have other areas of the world so accurately displayed in his "getaway" home, during a time when most never traveled outside of their home cities or countries. Overall, I was very glad we decided to go. It was very interesting and it's always neat to see how Kings lived back in the day.

Next, we headed down to the pier. This is where the day started to get a little interesting. The pier itself was picturesque. It reminded me a lot of the Santa Monica Pier, which was so strange and surprising to me.









Imagine, seeing a pier in southern England that looks like one in southern California!! I was blown away by the coast. The water was actually quite blue and clear. I don't know what I was expecting to see, but you just don't hear great things about England's beaches. It completey trumps the Texas gulf coast ten fold. The pier was very big, much bigger than I had in mind before seeing it. There were carnival rides on it, a roler coaster, and a casino.





As soon as we walked up to the pier and were taking in all the beauty and amazment of what we saw compared to what we thought we would see, Lauren says, "Kristina, a bird just pooped in my hair."
Yes, that's right. We were officially initiated into Brighton (or I guess Lauren was anyway). Sure enough, a sea gull had pooped on her head, and sadly, against her blonde hair, the disgusting black poop could not be hidden. I then spent about 10 minutes rubbing my hand sanitizer onto napkins from an ice cream stand to try and clean sea gull waste out of Lauren's hair (sounds really grose to say now, but at the time it was actually really funny).

Until today, I had never seen a rock beach before. The Brighton Beach, however, had no sand - just rocks.



It was kind of cool just because it was different and unlike any beach I had ever been to, and admittedly, it was nice to not have everything get sandy when we went to sit for a while. I didn't like the feeling of the rocks, though. We had towels to sit on, but lets be honest, who wants to sit on rocks?? Still, different is always interesting to me (even if it means getting rocks stuck in your filp-flops everytime you try to walk anywhere).

After we walked the pier, we went down to the beach and I ate shrimp and chips (fries) while we looked out over the ocean in the direction of France. Other than the whole sitting on rocks thing, it was really nice. The best part was when we got up to leave, I noticed a bracelet laying abandoned on the rocks, not far from where we were. There was no one around it for at least 15 feet in all directions, and when I picked it up, no one claimed it. So I have a momento from the beach, and it's a really cute cuff bracelet!! I felt kind of bad taking it, but there seriously was NO one even remotely close to it. Later, as we were walking down the sidewalk by the water, it fell out of my bag when I was trying to get something out of it, and I had to go digging though a thorny bush to get it - I'm sure it was quite funny to watch.

Then we did some shopping. There is also VERY good shopping in Brighton. When we got back to the train station to head back to London, the departure board said our train was cancelled...yeah. We freaked out for a few minutes and then someone told us that since they cancelled our train, we were allowed to take any train back to London. So, we just took a later train, but it still added another element of crazy to the trip.

The last bit of crazy, though, came with the train stop just before London. A guy who boarded the train at that stop sang and danced (and wasen't shy about it) the whole 10 minutes back to London. I'm talking he belted out Akon's "Bananza Belly Dancer" for a whole 10 minutes while doing a little jig. He was completely alone, and obviously thought he was at some sort of concert and not on a train. It was a long 10 minutes, and everyone on the train who had been trying to sleep looked like they wanted to hurt him. All we could do was laugh...at that point, it wasn't a surprise.