Escapades in London, Days 1 and 2

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Dear readers,

I tried to write a blog entry yesterday… and then I started falling asleep, so I gave up and went to bed. It was 8pm. I slept for 12 hours. Result: ZERO jet lag today! I’m still a little skeptical of this apparent miracle, because maybe I’ll feel jet-lagged tomorrow? But all in all, the 7-hour time difference travel change felt less like a sudden shift in my internal clock, and more like the day after a horrible all-nighter writing a paper for a class. (Which I have experienced many a time, so I know what I’m talking about.)

So! I’ll update you all on the past two days in this entry. Prepare for many epic pictures of food!

The 17th (Sunday):

I got up at 5:30am and left Missoula for Chicago at 7:15am. Then I had a 4-hour layover, had my final meal in America (hot dog and pretzel!), and after that, I left for London from Chicago, and got there at 6am local time. That airport is snazzy! I love all the glass. And I love that it was raining when I got there. Very true to the spirit of London, from what I hear. I literally couldn’t see the ground at all (due to the clouds), until the plane was 30 feet from the ground.

I was able to meet up with Amy at the airport (thank god, since that was something I’d been worried about), and we took the tube straight to Queensway, which is where our hostel (Royal Bayswater Hostel) is located. We dropped our stuff off, then had lunch at the Royal Bayswater Café (which is located directly next to the hostel; they even have an inside doorway connecting the two of them). I went for the “continental breakfast”, which was two croissants, and some toast (with either jam or cheese; I chose jam). I emailed my parents on the not-so-free hostel wi-fi, then we went sightseeing!

 

We wandered around the area where the hostel is (i.e. Bayswater), we saw lots of memorials in the area of the Wellington Arch.

 

From there, we went around Piccadilly Circus and Cambridge Circus, and saw Trafalgar Square (which I did not see for what it was until my second walk through it, later that day). 

 

The two things that we enjoyed most as we were wandering about, were definitely

1) the patriotism (due to the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee)!

and 2) the double-decker buses!

They are very handy, very fun, and VERY common. They’re everywhere! And how cool is it to ride on the upper level of a double-decker bus? (Correct answer: Pretty damn cool. It hasn't gotten old yet!)

When we were in Trafalgar Square, we stopped randomly by this nice Anglican church, St. Martin In The Fields:

which had a portrait photography exhibit in its crypt, and an excellent choir rehearsing upstairs.

(The acoustics were wonderful too. I was surprised.)

We also crossed the Golden Jubilee Bridge, and got some nice photos:

And we saw the festive town-fair-ish area around the London Eye, but the Eye itself was extremely expensive (35 pounds-ish?), and the area around it, in Amy’s and my opinion, was pretty creepy. So we left. By then it was about 1:00, and we were really hungry and our jet lag was getting increasingly bad.

So! We went from there to Chinatown, which was also bedecked with symbols of its (bi-)national pride:

and we had delicious food, which I photographed even though I didn’t remember to photograph breakfast or dinner that day:

The above is (or, rather, was) a huge but inexpensive plate of Singapore Noodles, and a pot of green tea. (Amy had sweet and sour chicken.) Fun fact: Chinese restaurants are essentially exactly the same in London as they are anywhere in America.

After lunch, we went to the British Museum, which was pretty cool.

I thought Tipu’s Tiger was there, because I think I had read in a book that it was a nationalist tool when it was in the British Museum. So, for whatever reason, I assumed that it was still there. But evidently it wasn’t, because I had a pretty embarrassing exchange with two people who worked at the museum, one of whom had never heard of Tipu’s Tiger, and the other of whom told me that it was back in India. Double Facepalm.

I had lots of fun there, though. I especially enjoyed the North American plant exhibit.

(I was very entertained by this, especially the subject of that last picture!)

We left after a couple of hours to go back to the hostel, make ourselves eat dinner at the café next door, and then find free wi-fi somewhere to email and use Facebook. I was going to post the blog that night, but was so tired that I went to bed instead.

The 18th (Monday)

After 12 hours of sleep, I officially defeated my jet lag. I woke up feeling like a stone statue that had been magically granted the ability to walk, but after another continental breakfast (this one provided free at the hotel), I felt refreshed.

Amy and I went straight from there to the Palace:

...where we saw the changing of the guard, which was (surprisingly) worth it, despite being an obvious tourist trap. Why? Because despite all of this pomp…

… it was hilariously casual. No, these serious soldiers in their ginormous hats were not playing Sousa. They were playing the Bee-Gees. And the soundtrack to “Grease”. Also entertaining was the fact that only the Americans in the audience (i.e. me and Amy and a group of American women next to us) seemed particularly shocked by this.

Yes, these men DO enjoy rockin’ to the oldies.

It was a lot of fun, though. A full concert, outdoors, for free. I paid the price later that day (with a huge sunburn on my chest and face and forearms), but it was worth it.

After that, Amy and I got lunch at a sandwich shop. She got a cold sandwich and I got a Cornish pasty:

… which was SO delicious. It was really difficult to find a trash can (or rather, rubbish bin), because we were near a lot of government buildings. We ended up having to give it to a trash collector/janitor at a tube station.

We would have gone to the Churchill War Rooms, or to Westminster Abbey, but both of those charged exorbitant entry fees, so we stayed out. We would have checked out the outside of the Prime Minister’s residence on Downing street, but it was blocked off. So we ended up spending a lot of time taking photos of the outsides of those buildings:

and also visiting the parks in the area.

We also stumbled upon a miniature parade, for soldiers who just got back from Afghanistan:

(You can see the soldiers walking behind the guards, in their fatigues.)

Finally, at 4:30, we went into Westminster Abbey, where I was not allowed to take photos of the inside, even though I took plenty of pics of the outside:

And we went to Evensong. We thought we could stop in and stop out, but it was impossible to leave without attracting the attention (and disgust) of the entire room, since the exit went directly between the two rows of choristers. So… even though I had somewhere to be, it lasted 45 minutes, and I ended up being half an hour late for my engagement. (That ended up working out, though.) But needless to say, the service was gorgeous; the acoustics were wonderful, they sang one of my all-time favorite anthems (“I Sat Down Under His Shadow”). My only complaint, besides that I couldn’t leave early, was that we had terrible seats, so we couldn’t see the choir at all. Ah well!

Once I got back (as I said, half an hour late), I met up with the two people I had the engagement with: my two friends Clarissa and Simone. We ate dinner at a pretty good Indian restaurant, and then walked around through Hyde Park, where we saw loads of pretty statues:

and I saw a swan! (which I shouldn’t have been so excited about, except that I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a swan up close before. We don’t really get swans in Montana, as far as I know. We get Canada geese.)

I was sad when we ended up parting ways, but we had a wonderful time. I had met Clarissa and Simone through an online forum that I’ve frequented for four or five years, and they’re the first two other forum members that I’ve ever met in real life. They’re great people! (I’d post the cute photo of the three of us, but I don’t think Simone would want me to.) On a broader note, I loved meeting them because it meant that the forum is made up of other real people, besides myself. I mean, obviously I knew that before, but there was always a disconnect. And I appreciated having that disconnect become connected, for lack of a better word. I would love to visit London again even if it was just to have dinner with the two of them again. Maybe that should be part of my post-graduation vacation plan!

Okay, this blog post took way longer than I thought it would. I'll have to figure out how to shorten these, later in the trip. I can't afford this kind of time-suck when I'm in Egypt! Ah well, I hope you all enjoyed it :)

More later!

- Beth C-C