The Righteous Pavilion Project

I’ll get to the title eventually, there’s a reason for it…just work with me on it.

Today we took The Overground rail to Brighton, a British coastal town to the South of London.  The weather was supposed to be sunny, but as you could probably guess it was overcast and pretty chilly.  The first thing was a tour of the Royal Pavilion.  It was built by King George IV while he was still The Prince of Wales in 1787 as a seaside retreat.  It is a massive structure that resembles an Indo- Saracenic style prevalent in India at the time.  There is a grand dining room, music room, and quarters for the future Queen Victoria as well as over 30 bathrooms.  It was ahead of its time when it was built.  It was an awesome sight to see, especially its stylistic clash with most other Victorian-like buildings (couldn't take pictures in doors, so this is all I've got).  

So the title is pretty much just a reflection of what King George was trying to impress upon all of his visitors.  The King was thought to be a God-endowed figure (righteous?), he built a Pavilion, and there’s an ongoing project to sustain it and restore many of its old rooms that aren’t open to the public yet.  I know, it’s verryyy clever.  

Anyway though, the afternoon continued with a traditional fish & chips dinner at a restaurant on the Brighton Pier.  The food was awesome, the haddock was perfectly cooked and the chips were perfectly “battered” in oil.  I enjoyed it.  We had an hour to stroll around Brighton, and despite the poor weather, we eagerly proceeded to The Lanes, a rustic-looking shopping center in the middle of town.  We passed an antique shop that specialized in guns, military uniforms, police uniforms, old war manuals and other real – not replica – equipment.  The salesman tried to sell me a WWI water-cooled machine gun for 380 pounds.  He told me it was fully functional and worked like a charm.  This scared me; not only was I not in the market for a machine gun, but how would this guy even know if it worked with the very strict gun laws in England (most PC’s don’t even carry guns[PC stands for Police Constable]).  So naturally, I passed.  There were Russian hats from Stalingrad, British and American WWI helmets from the Ardennes forest and Germanic Armor from the Battle of Waterloo (which I thought was interesting b/c Germany wasn’t an organized country back then…)  It was a lot of fun.  We topped off our escapade to The Lanes with a purchase of cupcakes to eat on the train back.  Everyone envied us for that (mission accomplished).  

Overall, I loved today’s trip to Brighton, and couple that with some concrete plans to Paris for Spring Break, it’s lookin like a pretty darn good weekend.  I’ll give details about Spring Break as I get them.  Also, here’s the link to a Picasa album I set up for all the photo’s I’m taking:

(http://picasaweb.google.com/106630074594848476576/LONDON#).  

Until then,

Stay Tuned…