Shortest trip to London, England ever, but still excellent.
London Population: Over 7 million!!! The largest city in Europe!!!
Tales from London:
Roll into Gatwick Airport (me, Lauren, and Dave) and Tube it to our hostel in Hammersmith. Awesome British names for everything: Hammersmith, Baron's Court, Earl's Court, Southgate, Wellington, Gloucester Square, Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus, Tower Hill, Monument, Liverpool Street, Portobello Road, Notting Hill, etc etc etc. Put our affairs down in this awesome hostel that's really like a hotel, its a converted nurses quarters turned masonic lodge turned hostel, really random.
First stop, Sloane Street (haute couture as Dave says) window shop lots of fancy names and marvel at British taxis that look like their from the first half of the 20th century, the red telephone booths, the streets with Look Left, Look Right spray painted on them, the police with high oval hats like you see in films, the mantra Mind the Gap repeating over and over in the Tube underground. Up to Harrod's, dont worry, even with my cool yellow Moroccan shoes I can get in, we go to the Egyptian room and Egyptian escalator (the lamps are these huge head busts of pharoahs with big hats, and the whole thing is marble and granite and ornately decoarted but not grandiose, its very intimate wihtout being cluttered, very cool, )and fancy watch room and candy shop, toy shop, explore all the cool rooms for a while. On to Leicester Square, hot spot for theatre and movies (there were three giant movie theatres in the same square, movies for students by the way are the equivalent of $20!!) yeah, the pound is not cheap, that's for sure. It's also a really fat, really heavy coin compared to the Euro. Anyways, eat at this nice restaurant Maxwells, appetizers, main course, dessert (sticky toffee pudding, and this vanilla ice cream/toffee/caramel creation), tea and coffee, yum. We see people really dressed up, some girls dressed up as in dressed in barely anything, and we have a very cute waiter who is I'm sure making millions of girls cry as he is of the male preference...Dave learned that when asking for his recomendations for night clubs...aww Oliver. Learn that guys in suits speaking English with the British accent are practically irresistible. We were in this area that during the day is a big market, it used to be an apple market and something else not sure what, at night its a lot of pubs and restaurants, pubs where people take their beers outside and stand on the sidewalk talking if the pub is too full, so there's lots of activity and people everywhere. Walk to Leicester Square from there which is full of people, guys on bikes pulling those littles carts that'll take you around the town. Heres our consensus on Britain- not only are things expensive, people somehow manage to look good all the time, the girls are always dressed up to the nines, look very chic, high heeled boots , tights, skirt, guys sweater and jeans, but really it was remarkable they were almost more fashionable than the French. Walk around for a litte, then return to our hostel and sit at the bar for a while, play some pool and watch soccer on TV. Next day, we really see britain, we only had one day so we tried to cram as much in as possible. Up early, go to Notting Hill (like the movie!!) where there's Portobello Street Antique Market on Saturdays, browse and peruse the amazingly amazing antiques of all shapes and sizes-engraved elephant tusks, lots of silverware, magnifying glasses, pocketwatches, jewelry, handbags, handmade garments, really pretty compact mirrors, soccer memorabilia, tin plaques of all sorts, Beatles paraphernelia, old books, block print letters like they had in printing presses, and a ton of other cool stuff that I can't remember. We bought some cool going out tops that were from stores before the actual antique market-I'm excited to wear it out its this tank top with this flowery stuff on the back. We went into this one store with a rather rude woman who told us that, "If Americans have the money, they always buy from me" in reference to her one of a kind vetements, this after I commented in a fairly loud voice that one of the jackets looked like Ron Wealey sweater (HP fans get that reference bien sur!) There was also a food market after the antique market with lots of international food and of course fresh fruits and pastries and such. Also side note, learned what a cornish pasty is, its like a fast food type thing like a hot pocket filled with minced vegetables and meats. Lots of funny british names for things. Also there are a TON of Starbucks in Britain, not just one in the major plaza, no, but really maybe every four blocks instead of every one like in the US, there's a Starbucks, and they're popular, we saw lots of people with the throwaway cups. Continuing. so the antique market was awesome, if I lived there I would go every Saturday. Then we go to Hyde Park, a nice little park with the Wellington Arch in tribute to Duke Wellingont in the center, and we meet up for a tour of the city. How small a world is it that on this tour with thirty five people one of them is this girl I went to high school with?!?! So I recognized her and we said hi, she's studying in Barcelona. But really, that was quite quite quite random (quite is a very British term so we learned, in addition to right, brilliant, CHEERS!, rubbish, uni). So this tour took us to Buckingham Palace and we saw the changing of the guards, then we saw Prince Charles house, the old Palace (St James?) that is now the official residence of the queen, where you'd address a letter to, and Diana lived there when she divorced Charles. We walked down the street there that is famous because most of the houses are royal residences but I forget the name, saw Nell Gwyne's house (King Charles II most famous mistress who was loved by the people because she was not Catholic and not French, unlike his wife) who lived in the 1600s, then we went to this intersection with some big statues that our guide didn't explain but there were a bunch of Old Boys clubs there, the one we saw was Athena, and it really wasn't open to women, they couldn't even step onto the premises until last year! On to Trafalgar Square, where the National Portrait Gallery is, and Trafalgar Square has a big monument to Nelson who won at the Battle of Trafalgar with these four giant lions at the base (the sculpteur had never seen a lion before so he modeled them after his dogs, but they look like real lions so far as I know), and a big statue of one eyed one armed Napoleon, a little stab at the French (our guide pointed out a lot of these, but for all that there were a ton of French tourists there). Actually the lions are supposedly made out of melted down canons of the French artillery (Napoleon's Column is Paris is made of melted down English cannons, so it works both ways) there was also this big Arch where royal processions come through (the name's escaping me) and there was a random nose in the middle of one of the arches that legend has it is Napoleon's nose, and anytime the army marches through the arch they give it a little squeeze. Nelson died in the battle of Trafalgar, taken out by a sniper who easily saw him because he insisted on going into battle with all of his medallions and his colonel/commander gear. Anyways, his body was transported back to England in a giant barrel full of rum of some drink because it was good for preservation, but the soldiers and sailors on the ship were celebrating their victory and tapped into his barrel and drank half of what was in it, so he wasnt really preserved at all and all the guys on the ship "drank" a dead body soaked beverage, gross. That was really the only little anecdote we got on the tour, it wasn't as informative as the other one I did from the same company in Amsterdam, but still good. We ran into another funny character one of the guys who organized the tours but wasnt our guide, completely hung over, blood shot eyes, Lauren thought his long fingernails were gross, but he was actually pretty cool we offered him some of our granola. On the tour we did some French/English guessing games, its hard!! but the french do have their signature look, there was this one guy (Healy Hanson jacket) who looked so typically french (in a good good good way), but we didn't talk to him and couldn't figure him out because his friend who was clearly american was speaking to him in english, and we couldn't hear his responses. Our only interaction, unfortunately, was me brushing a ladybug off his back and saying sorry you had a ladybug on your back. Lame.
So our tour moves on, we saw Downing Street where the Prime Minister lives, the National Calvary Museum and this world war II bunker covered in red ivy next to it, St James Park which was gorgeous with this big lake in the middle of it and it used to be the zoo but the zoo was moved and they only left two giant white pelicans which are still in control of the lake and sometimes you can see them eat pigeons in the park, then we walked up to Westminster Abbey and Big Ben right on the River Thames, next to the Houses of Parliament and we heard the story of Guy Fawkes and Bonfire Night, we could see the London Eye on the other side of the Thames which is this big ferris wheel where you ride it and can see a good view of London, we also saw Winston Churchill's World War II bunker which is now part of the Imperial War Museum, and then the tour ended. So fun fact, Big Ben refers to the sixteen ton carillon bell inside the tower. From there we undergrounded it to the other side of the river (it was very complicated because there were planned engineering closures on the tube and lots of stops we wanted to go to were closed, so we had to take indirect routes) Once there we went to a fish and chips place and ate lunch and walked along the Thames, crossed the London bridge (its jsut a regular old bridge nothing special at all, it was special because the original was the first bridge across the Thames but it fell down and it was moved a little upstream, some of the original stones are still farther downstream and other parts of the original were moved to this bridge in Arizona, so the newly reconstructed London Bridge was built in 1973. Crossed that, walked around the egg building which is really pretty new glass structure that looks like an easter egg (farther upstream theres another building that is rounded and also looks like an egg, also modern but more fat and not as tall, a squashed egg maybe, also cool. Then we walked up and found the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge, which actually is decorated and has two big towers and some ornamentation on the brige in red and blue crosses. The Tower of London is not an actual tower we came to find out, it's more of an old fortress that was the London mint until the operations became too large, it was also of course a house of torture and the highest prisonary chambers, it was also and still is house of the royal crown jewels, basically, its a free for all. it's surrounded by two walls of protection, medieval style, and inside the court there are a few different buildings and passages. It's right on the border of the Thames by the Tower Bridge and you get a good skyline view of the southern half of London.
Then we searched for an open metro stop for quite a while, finally found one, and went to The British Museum!! Home to a million and one objects from the Middle East, East Asia, Africa, basically paying homage to Britain's days of colonization (Greece is still in major dispute with the museum in regards to some friezes that came off the Parthenon and the British took and refuse to give back) The museum itself is huge, it looks like the entire world. You walk in and there's this giant silver statue of a body with arms that are wings, that stretch out for maybe thirty feet like airplane wings, and then past the entrance is this grand hall with a giant circular building in the middle that's the archives and library and the ceiling is arched, way high up, it looks like the sky its a dark blue with silver railings criss crossed the length of it. So we go up to the Egyptian rooms and see all these mummies, the boxes that they were stored in, learn about how the wooden boxes all have different types of designs based on the era they were made in, there was also a cool case from when the Romans took over the Egyptians and it had the Roman leader's head with his wreath of olive branches painted on the top of the box, then we walked around the Korea rooms and some of the more modern acquisiton rooms, one of which had this giant face on its side that was oddly lifelike, with a five o clock shadow and everything, I think its famous because Lauren said she'd read an article about it and there was a big crowd of people around it, also in the mummy room we saw a fully preserved human rom thousand sof years ago, they used to bury regular people in these big sand dunes and the dry air preserved the skin and made it dry out so the body was this charred black color curled up in a fetal position but the skin was still intact...it was scary. And there was a mummy of an eight-to ten year old but the coffin/box looked like it could hold a three year old by today's standards. Then we went to the Ancient Greece rooms where we saw the friezes and some grecian and roman ruins, we also saw the Rosetta Stone (stele) which was super super cool, it was the stone that helped researchers decode hierogylphs in the 1820s, it has a code written in hierogylphic, the language that common Egyptians used (demotic) and then classical greek. Then we also saw these huge parts of anicent Egyptian statues that were giant carved stones of marble and they reminded us of that ancient wonder of the world that was a statue of a man at a port on the mediterranean with one foot on each island, so boats could pass through him (well that part's disputed)..its called the Colussus of Rhodes. Okay, so we walked around some more and then they kicked us out at 5:30 so we left, bought some postcards at a cornershop (another british term) where they had all these cool Cadbury candy bars that they dont sell in France or the states, and Toffee flavored rolos, and these bars made by Nestle called Yorkies with a byline "It's not for girls" and a picture in the O like a traffic sign with a women crossed out in red. So i go to buy it just to spite the system (female empowerment, I'm wearing the yellow shoes!) and the guy goes, "its not for girls, but I am for girls" and i go "yeah I'm for girls too! plus I like breaking the rules" and pay, then we walk out and Lauren informs me that I just declared my sexual preference as a lesbian and he probably assumes she's my partner. Awesome. It's even funnier because a similar thing happened earlier that week in Aix. But the candy bar turns out to be just chocolate made out of pure fat essentially. We meet up with Dave, go to MacDo britain (where the handwashing machines in the bathroom are super cool, its this console and you push one button for soap, another for water, and a third for the dryer, but its all from the same hole very efficient) and then head back to the hostel. We walked soo many miles we were dead tired, then we woke up and made it to Gatwick. Oh yeah, we also stopped at our fave store Harrods again (they apparently close down the whole store at a phone call's request if you're "somebody famous" though I never found out how famous you had to be to qualify) and we bought some souvenirs to say we'd been there from an extremely young but nonetheless adorable british boy with the excellent british name of Caspar (I told him we really liked his name). Excellent sejour a Londres, must go back to see a play sometime, and go to stonehenge and bath and cambridge/oxford and of course return to the antique market on Notting Hill.
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