trooping the colour

today is a big deal in london, as it is the celebration of the queen's 2nd birthday. no, the queen is not 2, she literally has two birthdays and this one is commemorated with a parade, aka the trooping of the colour. i would have quite liked to watch this and if i were my friend emily, i would have learned of this event months ago and then made plans to watch. this post would then be full of interesting pictures and a more accurate tale of the celebration.

except.

i just found out about the event yesterday, since i live under a rock (a happy place to be) and never watch the news, read the paper, etc. i don't even really turn on my tv ever, so i'm clueless as to the happenings around london and the rest of the world.

so. i'm watching the event on tv, sporting rats nest hair and a giant bathrobe. i can't tell if the parade has actually started yet, but there are many guards lined up impressively wearing the bear hats. i thought they were called bear hats because they LOOK like little bears, but it turns out the hats really ARE made of bear. who knew?

the queen is wearing a violet suit with matching hat (its a nice colour) and riding in a carriage that was made for queen victoria in 1874. what's funny is that today is my stepdad's birthday, and now that i look back, he's been pointing out for years that he shares a birthday with the queen. i wonder if he knows she has two birthdays? her real one is in april, so perhaps she actually shares MY birthday.

at any rate, today's parade/ceremony remind me of the changing of the guard in washington d.c. it's cool to watch, even on tv.

i did make a rather unsettling finding though. the band kept playing a familiar tune, and memories of middle school choral concerts flooded my head, the lyrics halfway still burned into my brain "sweet land of liberty...", "from every mountainside, let freedom ring".

i always thought this was an american song, so i asked why the band was playing it. i was promptly laughed at and told "this song is called God Save the Queen". wha???

first of all, i thought God Save the Queen was a sex pistols song and secondly, it doesn't sit well with me that we stole the melody and then re-wrote the words. kind of disrespectful to the english people and anyway i feel a bit cheated. this is not unlike the horrible day when i discovered that city chicken isn't actually chicken. (it's pork) hrrrmph.