London, May 13th and 14th, 2007
Well, we’ve been in London for two days now, and I don’t know why I’m still having so much trouble with the whole “drive on the right” thing. I keep looking at cars, thinking “Who’s driving that thing?!”. Luckily, there are handy “Look Left” and “Look Right” markers painted onto the road in every crosswalk, just for late adjusters like me.
I swear we’ve been hearing more Italian here than English. I had no idea London was such a popular vacation destination for Italians! And folks from Eastern Europe, many of whom we’ve seen using cameras to film 360 degree views of pubs and parks. That’s going to make for enticing vacation footage later.
It’s been raining a lot, but then again – we are in London. At least it’s authentically cold and wet.
How about I make with the pictures already?
We flew Ryanair from Pisa to London Stansted on Sunday morning, an experience I was totally convinced would go horrifically awry. Google ryanair complaints to see why. Of course, all that worry was for nothing since our flight went perfectly, as did passport control. (No more thinking about the lack of a permesso di soggiorno! Woot!)
The bus into town, into Victoria Station, was fine. It was pouring and cold when we disembarked, and I was starting to think that linen-pants and short-sleeve wearing Husbear was going to be more than a little miserable – but a store appeared selling jackets for 10 pounds! Now Husbear is jacketed.
We were hungry, and decided what better way to introduce ourselves to British cuisine than through an authentic Cornish pasty? Unfortunately, our only easy nearby option was a fast-food stand called “The Pasty Shop”, which was advertising Cajun Chicken Pasties (“From the South… of Cornwall!”). We went with a veggie pasty (which was oh-so-heavy on the corn) and a traditional steak/potato/onion 1-pound dealie (Actually, it was called ‘The Big One’ and it weighed 510 grams –L. Pants). Both were good, but needed salt. Again, London.
We went and checked in to our hotel, the Caring, which is about the tallest and narrowest building I’ve ever seen. 79 steps to our hotel room! But whatever, the price was right (in London, with the dollar being where it is, read “right” as “not entirely exorbitant.”)
Then, what the heck, on to Speaker’s Corner! This is a place we wanted to see when we were last in London in 2001, but we never had the chance. There’s quite a cast of characters holding court in the Corner, from mostly sane – this man, saying that trying to exercise freedom of speech in the States gets you thrown in Guantanamo,
to this guy. The word “if” is covered by his arm, just so you know.
Next stop – a detour to and around Buckingham Palace. It looks as though there’s been a push to acknowledge contributions to the war effort made by members of the British Empire. This one’s for Australia.
Just a couple of blocks from the Palace, we saw a wonderful street sign. I guess horses have to cross at different times than humans?
And Buckingham Palace still looks sort of like a grand office building. Sorry, Queen and Royals. Though I do appreciate a good obsession with gold leaf and gilt. The shinier the better, that’s my motto! (Seriously. Please help me come up with a better motto.)
We ate dinner at a pub near the hotel called the Leinster Arms. I’d seen a cheddar and pickle sandwich on the menu earlier that I felt we really needed to try. Plus a Yorkshire pudding. And bangers and mash (which is just sausages and gravy and mashed potatoes, but bangers has such a nice ring to it.
They ran out of mash, but still had baked potatoes. And were entirely Britishly helpful about it. I can’t get used to this thing here, where it seems like people actually want to help us to do things in their city. How un-Italian.
The cheddar and sweet pickle – YES. It’s on every pub menu we’ve seen, pretty much, and it’s a good and simple combination we’ll have to explore more deeply later.
And Yorkshire pudding – is this basically a savory bread pudding in gravy, or am I missing something? It reminded me of Husbear’s past panades.
The next morning, we presented ourselves in the Breakfast Room (I think the English are even more enamored with random capitalization than we Americans are) for the promised included English breakfast, only to find a distinct lack of baked beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, or any puddings. Though two eggs, sausage, and bacon is still more breakfast than we’ve been given anywhere in Italy.
Slightly disappointed, we made our way over to the Houses of Parliament to say hello to Big Ben. Hi, clock and bell!
Then, back in the tube (and can I just mention how out-of date our guidebooks are briefly? They say that one-way Tube tickets are 2 pounds in Zone 1, the central part of town. Try FOUR. But there’s a thing called an Oyster Card where you pay a 3 pound deposit and pre-pay on tickets, and then you pay only 1.50 pounds per ride. Still expensive, but at least it isn’t eight dollars per ride!).
Our target was Smithfield Market, where we had lunch reservations at St. John Smithfield Market, a place we’ve been wanting to go for several years. The lunch itself will have to have its own post, because it was just that good. The market was interesting, though we couldn’t really see much of anything.
Plus it was raining pretty hard. Husbear remarked that this wasn’t the kind of quaint little market where you buy an eggplant and perhaps a steak – this was a pallet of eggplant kind of industrial place, as far as we could tell.
The colors were great, though. And we learned that the UK didn’t come off of meat rationing after World War Two until 1954! I had no idea.
After an oh my gawd good lunch, we started to make our way over to the Victoria and Albert Museum, a museum of applied arts which looked to be completely awesome in our guidebooks.
Why is so much English graffiti so good-natured? I mean, there’s some weird stuff, like the guy who wrote “Brooke Shields Alphabet” all over Tower Bridge for us to see today, but then there’s things like this.
(That should say… well, perhaps you figure it out.)
The Victoria and Albert Museum was great, as advertised. We spent a lot of time in the fashion through the ages exhibit. Since when does Juicy Cotoure belong in a museum?
This Charles Worth dress was more like it.
The underwear display was really interesting. I especially liked the tie-on bustles, over in the near left.
And the displays of avant-garde New York style were downright hilarious, including this Swiss dot Capri-pant suit. And the ruffly formal shorts. I’m all for men getting to break out of the mold of the traditional suit, but I don’t know about puffy shorts being the answer.
The sculpture wing was equally awesome, mostly because we got to see some sculpture that wasn’t Italian! Here’s an English Eve.
We had to go through the sculpture wing at a pretty fast clip, since we were running very low on time.
We saw Raphael’s cartoons for tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, confirming again that neither of us are Raphael fans. Tucked away in a corner, however, was a thing we may need to have commissioned, if we ever get to that point in our finances. Hah.
A fish, rampant, with the family coat of arms! I may not know too much about biology, but I know that fish don’t have hands.
Then, we went for a long walk back to the hotel, past a monument to Prince Albert – again, with the gilt!
There were friezes running all the way round the bottom of this monument, covered with great thinkers, architects, sculptors, and painters throughout the ages. There were lots of Italian names on there, of people we certainly wouldn’t have recognized this time last year...
Dinner! Indian food! I really think we came to this same Indian restaurant in August of 2001. Swear to Gd, it looks familiar. There was much gorging on Indian food. We have a pretty good Indian place in Florence, but nothing like London Indian food (which is very likely nothing like Indian Indian food).
Gotta wrap this up – we’re on our way to… really… the Fat Duck. We have a train to catch in 20 minutes, so I gotta go get a moveon!
(in a confusion eliminator, hopefully, this post was written in London on May 15th and posted from Hong Kong on May 17th. Seriously. Yeah, we're in Hong Kong. But for the purposes of the blog, let's pretend we're still in London, shall we? This is CRAZY.)
