Sunday, May 15
We got into Heathrow at 6:30 am local time. I'd gotten 3 hours of sleep on the plane- more than I expected, less than I hoped. As usual, JT couldn't sleep, but we were set on pursuing our usual first day plan- walk 'til we drop.
After dumping luggage at the hotel, we found a shop selling homemade breads with organic free-range everything, but it was quite tasty and they did good coffee as well.
We walked from there down to St. James's, around the parks, and through several very posh areas-Belgravia, Pimlico (supposedly seedier, but it didn't look that way to us), the Strand, and Fleet Street-stopping to take a few pictures at Samuel Johnson's house. True to our luck so far, the morning mist burned off, the sun came out and the day proved utterly gorgeous.
We strolled along the Thames, took in the "Information Please" exhibit at the Design Museum (on the presentation of information-maps, signage, charts, etc.), stopped for caffeine, and went on to take the Tower bridge tour. To our utter shame, we overheard a pair of particularly ignorant tourists asking: "Is this the Tower of London?" Oy!
The Tower Bridge was awesome in the literal sense of the word- it's amazing what you can do if you're prepared to grossly over-engineer something. Nowadays the bridge is raised electrically (they pump water to raise massive accumulators which discharge to raise the bascule spans on either side), but when it was built it burned 20 tons of coal per week.
From there we strolled through St. Katherine's docks- it was completely devastated in WWII, but rebuilt into a posh marina for the gratuitously wealthy- very attractive area now.
And then we caught the Docklands Light Rail out to Greenwich for dinner. We ate Mexican at the Cafe Sol- the enchiladas were tasty but not extremely distinguished. They kind of missed the point on the Mexican Rice and beans- rice pilaf with peas and corn and spiced navy beans were tasty enough if not exactly traditional. JT's fajita was likewise not remarkable. We had the expected problem with people smoking around us-a truly vile habit, in our admittedly-parochial view.
From Greenwich, we walked through the pedestrian tunnel back under the Thames. An excellent idea- I wish that more consideration to pedestrian traffic were given in US cites. We took the Underground back to the hotel. I think having the prepaid travel cards is making us more likely not to kill ourselves walking. Not to mention that it's a lot more convenient not having to stop and buy tickets everywhere we go.
Monday May 16
Got up early and caught the train to Portsmouth. It was mostly cloudy, but not raining, and there were occasional breaks of blue sky. We brought umbrellas, but hoped that we wouldn't need them. In fact the day turned out pretty well- mostly cloudy with only a little shower in the late afternoon.
The Portsmouth Harbor museums proved excellent. The HMS Victory brought to life all the things that I've been reading about the Navy in Napoleonic times.
The Mary Rose was just amazing ... not as much for what was different but for what was the same. A sailor on the Mary Rose wouldn't have felt that out of place on the Victory. But a sailor on the Victory would be utterly bewildered by the British Navy today- a similar period of time later.
The Mary Rose generated many artifacts in an amazing state of preservation because the wreck was buried in silt. Of the many astounding things they brought up (some 19,000 artifacts) some of the most touching were the crew's personal effects. There was a recognizable backgammon board, and another game board scratched on the top of a barrel, as well as tiny bone dice. We could just see the men sitting down in their meager spare time to enjoy a game.
Many of those killed on board were longbowmen, and the museum has replica longbows for visitors to pull. It's no wonder those arrows could punch through armor plate! Trying to draw the bow all the way back to the ear (while keeping the elbow locked) was like trying to bend a crowbar. The bows themselves are almost 2" thick at the grip.
The conservation effort is amazingly complex. The wreck was floated in 1982. It took them 3 years before they were ready to turn it upright. Now they are spraying it with a water soluble wax solution and letting it soak into the wood until it can support the wood internally. Then they will finally be able to dry the wreck out ... this is going on now, and they project that they will be able to begin drying in 2009! All of the usual meticulous recordkeeping and plotting of the position of artifacts had to be done here- while underwater. They said it's the biggest underwater excavation ever undertaken and I can readily believe it.
The last ship of the day was the HMS Warrior, mixed steam and sail vessel from the Victorian era. It was interesting seeing it bridging the gap between the Navy of sails and modern ships of war. For example, all the men still slept in hammocks and ate on mess tables between the guns, but all the hardware was clearly manufactured, not handmade. And there was a ship's laundry and storage for men's kit bags. Only ten of the vessel's guns were breech-loaders- the others were still muzzle-loaders, not that different from the cannons of the Victory or even the Mary Rose. But all of the guns took shells, instead of the powder, balls and wadding being loaded separately. And there was a hoist to bring the shells up from the magazine- no more powder monkeys.
After cruising the museums, we strolled into the center of Portsmouth. The town must have been practically leveled in WWII- we saw way more modern buildings than we have observed in any English town we have visited so far.
After catching the train back to London, we had dinner at Wagamama. I must get the ginger chicken with udon noodles again sometime, it was delicious
Tuesday May 17
We took an early train to Windsor and went to the see the castle. It more than lived up to its reputation as the statliest of stately homes.
We were especially impressed with the vaulting in the chapel. The chapel was refurbished a few centuries ago with Bath stone, which we recall from our trip a couple of years ago was a rather soft limestone.
The state rooms on display were beautiful and impressive in much the same way as those of Hampton Court, but in styles a few decades more modern ... What a tremendous amount of valuable (and gorgeous) antiques, all in one place.
We found a non-smoking restaurant in town on the second floor of a department store. The food was surprisingly good. And then we walked along the Thames path to Maidenhead. We passed two locks and had lovely views of wildflowers, ducks interspersed with well-kept homes along the way. I spotted a mother duck with no less than eight ducklings- the young birds were evidently out on fleet manuevers, as they swam as a tightly bonded unit. We also saw a rabbit thoughtfully eating the grass beside one of the locks. JT thought it looked like a John Constable painting, clouds and all.
We took the train service back to London- it was a local, but even so, train service in England continues to impress me with its ubiquity, timeliness and quiet ride.
We had dinner at Busabi Eathai, a (nonsmoking!) Thai restaurant in Soho. The food was very good. We ambled back to the hotel on sore feet.
Wednesday May 18
By today, we were really feeling the burn feetwise. We slept a bit later and then walked over to the Patisserie Valerie for a quite substantial breakfast. The sausages were quite excellent, the best we've had this trip.
From there, we strolled back down to the south bank and took the tour of the reconstructed Globe Theatre. The theater has been built as much as possible to the floor plan and with the probable materials of the original. It seats fewer, and they have had to put down concrete instead of the original straw and hazelnut-shell floor cover in the standing room only area, because the level of foot traffic smashed it to powder. The roof is thatched- the only thatch-roofed building in the city since 1666, they claim, and they had to treat the thatch with fire retardants and install a sprinkler system to get permission to do it.
The stage is a three-quarter stage in the round, and--as the original was described--they have installed immense oak pillars painted with a faux-marble finish. While we were there, they had actors rehearsing for a performance of Pericles, and the guides were forced to stop their explanations while the rehearsals went on (somewhat to their chagrin- I sensed a certain amount of frustrated actor in the tour guides!).
The story of the Globe is a rather long and hard one ... conceived by American actor Sam Wanamaker, activities were started in 1949. It was not completed until 1997- four years after Wanamaker's death. At least he knew at the time that he died that it *would* be finished. The guide told us somewhat trenchantly that they did not receive any public funding from the British government. Indeed the fundraising for the theater appeared to have been quite astoundingly international.
We had lunch at a sidewalk cafe- it has been my suspicion that the French are even more dedicated smokers than the English, and you couldn't have proven otherwise by the pair who sat beside us. The lunch was unremarkable.
From there we went to the Imperial War Museum. We had previously seen one of their branches, the Imperial War Rooms. The main museum proved very interesting. It's been our impression that American museums tend to try to appeal to the lowest common denominator; they fail to reach their target audience while not giving anyone else a good experience either. British museums in general seem more willing to believe the people visiting can think, and aren't afraid to ask questions that provoke that condition.
We had been attracted by an exhibition on D-Day that was scheduled to end today. It contained a lot of physical artifacts as well as photos, film clips and recorded audio accounts from the survivors.
We also went to see their current special exhibition on Great Escapes, the accounts of POWs in camps during WWII. These focused mainly on prisoners held by the Germans. From the incredible mass of popular material on the subject you would think that there were a great many, but of over 100,000 prisoners, there were fewer than 1200 escapes; only 30 airmen, for instance, actually made it back to Allied lines.
At lunch, JT was mildly traumatized by the discovery of marmite-flavored chips. (English flavored crisps are not like your Earth snack food: they also have prawn cocktail, lamb-and-mint, curried chicken, and other unlikely tastes.) We had dinner at an Indian place in Kensington.
Thursday May 19
In the morning the weather was overcast with occasional sprinkles, so we took another crack at seeing more of the British Museum. We wound up feeling, as before, that we had barely scratched the surface.
We had lunch at the White Lion Pub in Covent Garden (near the Tube stop)--decent food, and the restaurant was non-smoking, which earns it an extra star in our book.
After lunch we cruised the bookstores in Charing Cross Road and then went to the National Portrait Gallery. It was interesting to put faces to the names of the historical figures that we have been reading about. One of my favorites was a portrait of King James II and his first wife, Anne Hyde. The plaque said that her husband had been well known to dote on her, and it showed in the arrangement of the figures. Anne was staring out at the viewer with a self-satisfied look. She held a helmet and was posed squarely over the 1/3 line of the portrait. For the figures to have been centered, King James would have had to be right next to her. Instead, he was sitting back, his eyes fixed on her adoringly, almost leaning out of the frame. It was a sly and meaningful pose on the part of the painter, Sir Peter Lely. (You can see a thumbnail of the painting at http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/portrait.asp?LinkID=mp02391&rNo=2).
We went back to Wagamama for dinner and were pleased to see that the sky was clearing as we walked back to the hotel. It never had more than sprinkled while we were out, but there was enough water on the streets to show that we'd missed some periods of heavier rain. But our weather luck held and we actually saw blue sky by the time we got up to Marylebone.
Friday May 20
Friday we awoke to steady rain, and set out a little later once it had tapered off. We took a double-decker bus to King's Cross and got down to explore the northeast of London. There was still an occasional shower, but only once did we stop under a bus shelter to let it slacken. Mostly there was only a little mist. We walked around Clerkenwell and through the City into the East End (Whitechapel and Spitalfields). The East End is clearly a non-tourist-intensive area, and very interesting on that account.
We checked out Brick Lane, home to all the curry houses that ever were, but they all seemed to open at noon and we were still too early. So we continued on toward the Gherkin, which has the distinction of being unmistakable and in general not as ugly as most of the other examples of modern architecture in that part of the city. We had lunch at Cafe Spice Namaste, a Goan-Portuguese-Indian restaruant that JT had discovered in a guidebook. It was a little more upscale than our usual fare and they were filming for some food show while we were there, so we had to sign releases in order to eat. The food was quite good, though I managed to ingest the sole really spicy pepper that either of us were served, somewhat to my discomfiture. While we were eating the weather continued to improve until we were seeing blue sky and sun by the time we left.
Despite a few puffy clouds, we had actual sunshine and a brisk breeze as we walked back to St. Paul's, past the medieval guildhall and the Tower of London. We took the Tube back to the hotel for our luggage and were still too full of lunch to do justice to a parting Cornish pasty at the train station.
The trip back was made considerably more tedious by a shrieking toddler in the seat behind us. We concluded that it ought to be acceptable to tranquilize small children for long journeys. Too many parents fail to grasp the essential fact that they are in charge, and that mildly whining 'oh, please stop that' is insufficient exercise of parental authority. I was certainly never allowed to behave that way at any age. I fail to see why I have to put up with it in the offspring of others. (JT says: "It's like bringing your pet skunk with you wherever you go. It's your responsibility to control it; if you can't, leave it at home.")