Wednesday, May 23
In some ways, this was a trip we hadn't expected to take. We'd been to London in 2001, 2003, and 2005. We're by no means tired of the city—far from it!--but it had been in the back of our minds that our next overseas trip would be to someplace new.
But JT's Uncle Allen gave us the plane tickets as a wedding present and, well, who were we to argue?
We got into London about 6:30 AM. We'd stayed up late Monday night and slept in Tue in an effort to start making the time change in advance. This worked quite well.
As on our previous trips, we arrived to gorgeous warm sunny weather- much better than was predicted. We had a very swift passage through customs and had dropped off our luggage at the hotel by 8 am. The Sanctuary House is in Westminster, a stone's throw from the Abbey—you could see it down the end of the street. It's perhaps the nicest of the hotels we've stayed in, plus it has air-conditioning in all the rooms, which proved to be important.
From there we walked through Pimlico and circled around the area back to the vicinity of Victoria station, and stopped for breakfast (the croissant on the airplane being more in the way of a snack than an actual meal). Pimlico is a mix—nice bits mixed with ugly post-war motel-style people-boxes. Property values in London being what they are, we wondered how long it would be before some of the latter started getting torn down and gentrified.
We then walked southwest through Chelsea. We passed by the Chelsea Flower Show on the grounds of the Royal Hospital, which looked appropriately gargantuan. The hospital is a home for old or injured British soldiers, and we saw a number of elderly Pensioners strolling around looking grave and proud in their ceremonial scarlet uniforms. There were, as well, a few young British soldiers collecting funds for the establishment. We gave them a donation: as Americans, we have a special reason to be grateful to the old soldiers of the U.K.
Our route took us up into Kensington nearly to the end of Fulham Road. This wasn't entirely random, although it's an area we hadn't explored extensively; we wanted to check out the brass hardware at a specialty ironmonger, A Touch of Brass, with an eye towards completing the heat-venting grills for our bookcases. Unfortunately, while the brass is fabulous, the exchange rate is not. Sigh.
Undaunted, we forged onward. Northeast through south Kensington, into Kensington Gardens. It turns out that being in the far northern latitudes (London, do recall, is about as far north as Hudson Bay) did not save us from sunburn.
We made a brief detour into Knightsbridge for lunch at Wagamama . (JT was once again asked for directions, and was able to give them.) Then we moved on to Mayfair and took Shaftesbury Avenue up to the bookstores near Charing Cross and Covent Garden. JT found a bunch of used paperbacks by Michael Innes at Murder One, which pleased him.
We made a brief stop at Neal's Yard Dairy to check out their fabulous cheeses- we sampled a few and resolved to return before we left as we thought having the cheese with us in the hotel room on the first day of the trip was A Very Bad Idea. (There was certain to be rather less cheese by the time we went home.) Neal's Yard itself, a cozy little alcove just off Seven Dials, lives up to its reputation as the most macrobiotic, holistic, ovo-lacto-vegano-shamanistic spot in central London.
From there we took the Tube back to the hotel to check in, dump books and do some preemptive blister care.
After that we walked down over Westminster bridge and west on the south bank of the Thames, up to Chelsea Bridge, where we crossed back over and headed to dinner at Chimes, (a restaurant specializing in English foods and ciders).
In general sleeping until past noon on the day we left was an excellent plan, and meant we were much more alert on the first day. We were "only" awake for 27 hours at a stretch!
Thursday May 24
We left London from Waterloo Station on the train to Salisbury. It was another gorgeous day, predicted to be near 80.
In Salisbury, we found that the bicycle shop that claimed to rent online did not, but there was another place that did. Salisbury proved to be a nice, not-overly-touristy little city with excellent bike access.
The ride to Amesbury was lovely- rolling English countryside, with charming country cottages (some of them rose-covered), working farms, and an occasional thatched roof.
Amesbury proved to have no public bike 'parks' (racks) but it did have an excellent bakery/sandwich shop with outdoor tables--Reeve the Baker, apparently a regional chain--so we forgave it. The lunch did much to redeem the dire repute in which we had held the English sandwich since The Unfortunate Incident in Bath, back in 2001. After lunch we continued to Stonehenge. We'd been a bit apprehensive about the last section of the ride, which was along a busy road, but there turned out to be sidewalk devoid of pedestrians the whole way, so we managed to stay out from under the tires of passing vehicles.
Stonehenge was not entirely what I expected- I'd heard about it being fenced off, but it turned out that the fence was not that intrusive- a 2-foot high cable and a few signs asking people to stay on the path. Also, the car park and visitor center were tucked behind a rise so when you stand in front of the stones, all you can see is open fields and a few bored sheep. Even so, they have plans to bury the roadway so even that isn't visible. It was awe-inspiring to think of the amount of labor that had gone into moving the stones, and that they had been a center of worship for 1500 years. JT found the stones larger than he'd envisioned, while I found them smaller.
It was quite hot, and we enjoyed another cold drink before heading back. Much of the route followed the other side of the river so we had the chance to see some new scenery.
Back in Salisbury we returned the bikes and toured the cathedral, which was magnificent. They have a complete set of original choir stalls, a huge cloister, and a magnificent chapter house with lovely stained glass. It's sobering to see both Stonehenge and the cathedral in the same day: both monuments to the same impulse, both built and maintained over many generations ... Will the purpose of the cathedral someday be forgotten and unknowable as well?
We found some fish and chips for dinner and ate it sitting in on a bench in the town square. On the way back to the train station we passed a shop selling Yankee Candles, which became much more amusing to us when we noted that they were also selling beads, incense, crystals, aromatherapy ... evidently the associations of the word "Yankee" do not translate! From there we took the train back to London- and I found that I had signally failed to apply enough sunscreen, and had become rather scorched around the edges.
Friday May 25
This was Paris, and we had a 4 am wakeup call. Unfortunately this was also the night when we had been awakened in the middle of the night by some of our countrymen who felt that it was appropriate to stand in the hall drunk and quarreling at 3 in the morning.
So we walked down to Waterloo station to catch the Eurostar in a state of rather glazed sleep deprivation.
The train ride was fast and very comfortable- most people slept, and there was a canteen on the train with drinks and snacks. Crossing through the Chunnel was cool, in a non-event kind of way: twenty minutes of darkness, and you're on the Continent! JT's reaction: "Northern France looks surprisingly like Iowa." (Don't tell the French.) We arrived in Paris in under three hours, at 9:30 a.m. local time, to find that it was not merely hot, but entering killer heat wave territory.
We walked from the Gare du Nord down to the Seine, via the Marais, with a brief stop to patronize a patisserie and acquire what were to be the first of many cold drinks. Around the Gare de l'Est we had our first encounter with the "Speak English?" brigade. These are tag-team bands of pre-pubescent girls in some kind of ethnic costume who converge, like sharks to blood, on any English phoneme that they scent on the breeze. If you are so incautious as to admit that you speak English, they thrust a photocopied note under your nose that explains that they are being held in slavery in the salt mines, their mothers are reduced to licking the gutters, their fathers are in danger of being sold for organ transplants, etc. All these entrepreneurs appear to have the same note, which possibly weakens the effect.
From there, we went to the Ile St. Louis and the Ile de la Cite. We toured Notre Dame- freed of the scaffolding that had obscured much of it during my last visit 20 years ago. It was quite magnificent—as well as dark and cool. The carvings over the front doors, originally meant to serve as an illustrated Bible for the illiterate, are now largely incomprehensible without a translation ... ironic, and a little sad. We particularly liked the well-known statue of St. Denis carrying his head, however.
We had lunch in a cafe on the Ile, From there we walked past the Louvre, whose scale—even, or perhaps especially, from the outside—is prodigious. We're agreed that given our moderate level of interest in Art, we'd never be able to "do" it all; when we finally do take an extended trip to France, we'll look at doing the Louvre by some species of special-interest tour. Then through the Tuileries, around the Opera (the building for when over-the-top is not enough!), past the Louvre, up the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe, from there along the Avenue Kleber to the Tour Eiffel. (JT very much approves of the Parisian practice of putting little explanatory notes on the street signs, as in: "AVENUE KLEBER: Generale Revolutionnaire, 1753-1800".) At that point we paused for a break, as the heat had gotten to be a bit much, and I drank quite a lot of water. We picked shadier routes to continue, walking down underneath the tower. There were more "Speak English?" commandos orbiting hungrily, as well as stern-looking French signs saying "No singers!"
Neither of us were especially interested in going up (I'd been once, and it was way too hot to climb - and elevators are for sissies). So we continued onward in the general direction of the Quartier Latin. Before we got there, JT was asked for directions again—this time in French!—and was able to give them, also in French. It must be some sort of radiation field or something. We had started looking for a place for dinner- we eventually chose one by the expedient of we happened to be standing in front of it when the sky opened up and the thunder and lightning started. The food was quite good, although we got quite tired of being chain-smoked at from three feet away. (By our provincial lights, this is a flat impasse as regards our enjoyment of the famed Parisian cafe scene—even aside from our take-no-prisoners style of tourism, which doesn't allow for a lot of leisured sitting.)
It was still raining when we finished eating, so we regretfully abandoned ideas of further exploration and caught a Metro train back to the train station. French metro trains, it turns out, have doors that can be opened manually while the train is moving—possibly the single most striking cultural difference we observed! In the interval before our train left, it continued to rain, but we acquired and annihilated a couple of chocolate éclairs by way of dessert.
Back in London it was quite a bit colder, and it felt amazingly good!
Saturday May 26
Saturday we went to the Borough Market. This is a street market under a train junction that showcases local food products, both in cooked and uncooked implementations. (For those who've been to Philadelphia, it's not unlike the Reading Terminal Market, only covering the entire British Isles.) We sampled cider, sausages, countless cheeses and various other products before settling on a pork pasty (me) and a wild-boar sausage sandwich (JT) for lunch. Our main regret was that we couldn't sample it all. It's rather a shame that there isn't such a thing covering the products of New England—we'd go there like a shot.
The setting was evocative as well- trains passed by overhead, and the underside of the tracks was supported by gorgeous Victorian ironwork. We were compelled by circumstance (tasty free samples) to acquire a Cheshire cheese.
From there we wandered up to the Thames path. We found to our regret that the only Shakespeare play available during the remainder of our stay was going to be Sunday, when it was predicted to rain heavily- not the day for seeing a play in an open-air theater! But the cafe provided us with hot drinks and we walked on up the Thames path, enjoying the coolness after the sweltering heat of Paris.
We wound up in front of St. Paul's and admired the monument to London firefighters there. This was a particularly apropos location for this, given the heroic work done by firemen and fire watchers there during WWII. A single bouquet of flowers lay at the foot of the plinth. From there we took a random bus, and eventually alighted at Regent Street. We took a quick look at Hamley's, the enormous seven-story toy store, and then headed back south-westward. Crossing Saint James's park, we found a recreation of a "Dig for Victory" garden, memorializing the British food-growing effort during World War II. We dawdled quite a bit, admiring the splendid gardens- Late May is an excellent time to look at gardens in England.
We stopped in at the Tate to look at an exhibition of photography featuring English people and their relationship to the camera. We came out with a vague feeling that the exhibition said more about the (nearly exclusively) professional photographers that shot it and the people who curated it rather than the people themselves. Heavily featured were various 'socially aware' photos. We would have liked to have seen more of both advertising and amateur photos, which we felt were sadly neglected.
We found an excellent little Caribbean place for dinner—Mr. Jerk in Soho --and then went to St. James's Church, Piccadilly, for a concert we'd noted earlier- by a group called the London Octave. They'd chosen a program designed for popular appeal with a lot of Bach and Vivaldi. We enjoyed it quite a bit, though the church itself seemed designed to let the congregation sleep soundly without the knowledge of the minister- it was quite hard to actually see the musicians over the edge of the balcony where we were sitting. Which is not to say that it wasn't beautiful-- it's a Christopher Wren church, so it went well with the music.
From there we returned to the hotel.
Sunday May 27
Sunday the predicted rain appeared, though fortunately not as heavily as they had said. We had a lovely breakfast at the Patisserie Valerie http://www.patisserie-valerie.co.uk/ in Marylebone, stopped by the Sherlock Holmes museum (touristy, but fun!) and then headed to the Docklands to see the museum there.
We had some initial trouble locating it, but once found the Museum In Docklands proved both interesting and rather larger than we had anticipated. It did a particularly nice job of fairly representing divergent points of view and complex dilemmas in its presentation of factors that influenced the redevelopment plans for the area. Possibly our favorite factoid was the story of how, during the Blitz, a warehouse full of sugar was hit by incendiary bombs. The street, in consequence, was flooded with a mixture of molten sugar and water, which hardened into candy. Subsequently, people from all over the East End came to chip off hunks of street to take home and eat ("Don't worry, we wash it off.") Funny? Yes, but remember that sweets had been largely unavailable to these folks for a year or more.
We'd actually seen quite a bit of the Docklands re-development while looking for the museum, and it was in general quite well-done- the architecture was not awful, it was mixed-use- residential and commercial with a nice leavening of restorations of surviving buildings. JT was (inordinately) amused by a sign by some kind of religious establishment, which stated: "Jesus is Reachable!" What, do they give out His cell-phone number? (No, silly, this is the UK—they give His SMS text messaging address.)
By the time we left it was three, and we were quite hungry. We opted to head for the National Gallery and had a quick snack in their cafe, and then sampled some of the art while considering the knotty and oft-debated question of What's for Dinner. Again, our medium-warm level of art appreciation led to us making only a small circuit. We did see some deservedly-famous paintings—Bellini's portrait of the Venetian Doge is especially striking. The Doge looks very much like he's wondering how you'd look head-down in the Scorpion Pit; no doubt Pratchett's Lord Vetinari would feel a kinship.
We looked first at a restaurant near Victoria- but found the menu not gripping, and the smoking environment uncongenial. (Many, many buses had big warning signs: "England goes smoke-free 1st July!" Cheers for England!) So we took the Tube into Soho, thinking of a Thai place we'd eaten at previously. But that had a long line, so instead we wound up at Soho Spice, an Indian restaurant of which we had heard good things, which was both non-smoking and nearby. The dinner there was excellent.
At that point, we were still undecided on our Monday plan. We still had a second trip on our rail passes, but the weather forecast was for more rain. So we visited a couple of train stations to gather information and deferred the final decision to Monday morning.
Monday May 28
Monday dawned rainy and cold, with a raw biting wind. The forecast was still for rain, everywhere our rail passes would take us, but the greatest potential for clearing seemed to be in the northwest.
While there wasn't anything that we were especially keen on in Banbury, the most northwesterly point we could reach, we noticed that only a couple of train stops further was Warwick, home to a fine medieval castle that is open to the public.
So we bought tickets from Banbury to Warwick, and together with our trusty rail passes, set out for the castle.
The town of Warwick proved picturesque and larger than we had expected. We started out with some nice warming tea in the half-timbered little house of Thomas Oken, a wealthy sixteenth-century merchant who left most of his money to the poor of Warwick. In the U.S., of course, the place would be a museum; it's actually quite lovely to see such an old building with so much life still in it.
The castle was fabulous. Thanks to the bank holiday weekend, they had a full schedule of re-enactors who were busy despite the occasional drizzle, doing longbow and crossbow demonstrations, jousting and firing their trebuchet (largest in the world!). The falconry demonstration was impressive- we hadn't known you *could* train an American Bald Eagle! They're very impressive birds- especially when they're flying about eighteen inches over your head.
The building is the archetype of a medieval castle, with battlements, dungeon, curtain wall and everything. Parts added later, when the castle had passed from a military necessity to purely a home, were magnificent—there's a particularly good display illustrating a Victorian house party of 1899, complete with a young Winston Churchill. It had a peacock garden, a Victorian rose garden and even mill works, used to generate electricity when the castle was first electrified. They were used up until WWII, when they connected the castle to mains (it was being used for official purposes by then), and the generator was only used as a backup. After the war it was disconnected entirely and it is now used for demonstration only.
Despite the dismal forecast, we actually had only occasional light drizzle for much of the day. We took a short walk round Warwick before catching the train back. There were a few places open, but we decided to go back to London for dinner.
We settled on the Sherlock Holmes Pub for dinner, and enjoyed the atmosphere despite its being not unexpectedly overrun by tourists. The food was quite good—English food, of course, which is not actually all that easy to get in England.
Tuesday was our last day, and it dawned clear though there were a few occasional passing rainstorms. We set out early and I grabbed a quick breakfast at the nearest Pret a Manger.
We walked up through Marylebone until shortly before the Churchill Museum/Cabinet War Rooms were due to open and then took the Tube to get there.
The Churchill Museum part of the exhibit was opened in 2005, after our last visit. We skipped most of the Cabinet War Rooms part of the tour, because we had seen it before. The Churchill Museum was very engrossing, however. It was organized deliberately out of order, starting with the famous speeches of the 1940s and then following Churchill's career both backwards and forwards from the WWII. They seemed to be running a testing ground for new sorts of interactive displays, since figuring out how the displays were supposed to operate was sometimes half the fun.
Churchill proved to be quite a bit larger than life- one of those ferociously energetic men who drives himself and everyone around him to the limits of their ability. He'd make a good fictional character—in an odd way, he reminds JT of Sherlock Holmes—except that many readers wouldn't find him believable.
The museum also filled in some interesting trivia on food rationing in England both during and after the war- fourteen years of it in all, and explained why the better part of a generation of English people grew up with quite appalling food.
Speaking of food, after we finished at the museum, we set off into the wilds of Vauxhall to seek out Hot Stuff, an Indian restaurant that JT had seen reviewed in the NY Times. This was a hole-in-the-wall, but the food was excellent, and we both enjoyed it a lot. Strongly recommended for anyone looking for Indian food on a tight budget!
The time spent wandering Vauxhall unfortunately meant we had no real time left for any of the other things we had considered, so we made a flying trip back to Neal's Yard, to a specialty cheese store we had visited earlier in the trip. After some extensive sampling, we selected a few souvenir cheeses, and then went back to the hotel for luggage and passports, and started for home.
We discovered at Heathrow that you couldn’t take more than one bag through security, no matter what the airline would let us carry on. So there was some frenetic repacking, since our cheese and book purchases wouldn’t allow us to temporarily stuff one bag inside the other.
There were minor delays in takeoff, but we had an otherwise uneventful flight. The journey took us up the spine of England, which was itself rather interesting. It was quite clear that Britain has adopted radically different land-use practices. The suburban sprawl of the U.S. is hardly evident, even though the country is densely populated. The built-up areas go out to a certain point, and then ... stop. Without knowing what it's like to live under such a set of rules, we can't help applauding the results from the purely touristical point of view!
We experienced just a tiny bit of melancholy when we left. Having taken four trips to London in the last seven years, we've built up a certain level of comfort with the city. It seems likely that we won't be back for a while—there are just too many new places to see.