So, this is going to be a fairly huge post, as I've been writing it in a word document even though I've been unable to post it. Let's get in the wayback machine and go back to yesterday (insert squiggly lines of reminiscence):
Friday 8 January
Okay, first day. It’s about 8PM and I am utterly knackered, but in a good way. My hotel roommate gets here in a couple hours and then hopefully I’ll be able to charge my machine and post.
I hopped the tube down to Trafalgar Square, where I did not find a single pigeon, but several very chilly looking seagulls. Everyone here is moaning about the unseasonably cold weather. Meanwhile, my weather widget says it’s 4c here, while in Pittsburgh currently, it’s -4c. I’ll take the 4c, thanks.
Grabbed some take away (it’s always cheaper if you take food out rather than eat in here) from Pret a Manger, which reminded me of when I was 12 and had the epiphany at a railway station here that cheese and tomatoes on baguette is very good and then I walked. And walked and walked and walked and walked. I had lunch at the little park next to the Houses of Parliament, then walked a circuit across Lambeth Bridge, down the Albert Embankment to the Jubilee foot bridge and then round and about in the vicinity of the Embankment tube station (getting slightly lost) but was able to hoof it back to Westminster Cathedral in time for 5pm Evensong, which was really lovely, and I highly recommend it and may go back for it again.
What did bug me though about that was that apparently I, the born and raised atheist, am one of the few people who actually knows how to behave in a house of worship. When you go to Evensong at Westminster, you’re participating, not just a spectator, and there are instructions for what to do that are very easy to understand. People, take your coats off, it is not that cold in there! Take your bloody hats and gloves off! Sit up straight, have a little respect. Cheezy creezy.
On my way in to Evensong I somehow found myself in the actual Westminster college (the private school) grounds. It was dusk, very foggy, and holy cow was that atmospheric! I was just looking around like, “No one would ever believe me if I told them what I was looking at right now.”
[I should note now that as I type this I’m sitting in a Starbucks on St. Pauls Churchyard. I had planned on ponying up the £11 admission to climb all the way up to the top of the dome because it is a lovely clear day here, but when I went in there was a sign saying that it’s closed up there and I don’t have enough time to otherwise get £11 worth of sightseeing out of the cathedral—I’ve got a lunch date in an hour]
Some random observations about London thus far:
• Jaywalking here is completely off the hook. It’s odd, Britons (yes, Londoners even you—go to New York or LA and you’ll see what I mean) are so in to “safety first” and doing things a certain way for the good of the group but everyone jaywalks with complete impunity here. I can understand why—the lights are really really long and don’t necessarily make a lot of sense so people just get impatient and if they don’t see any cars coming they go or it. I was just surprised.
• London seems to have a completely outrageous number of stairs. I would not fancy being disabled here.
• I picked up a paper copy of the Telegraph that had the glowing review of Hamlet in it, but also the Guardian and the Financial Times had equally complementary write-ups. What a shame that they couldn’t be written until the last week of the run, but hooray for me getting to see it! By all accounts it is one of the great Hamlets of the age and I expect Tennant will be listed next to Rylance and Branagh before too long. And I can say I was there.
• Last night I discovered an adorable Japanese take-away a block from the hotel, run by actual Japanese people, which is a bit surprising. Soba noodle soup with a slice of bean curd skin in it. It was delicious and just what I needed after my long day (days?) yesterday.
• Dad, I trod over Charles Lyell at Westminster Cathedral on my way out from Evensong last night, just for you.
• In huge contrast to Pittsburgh in the winter, it is so humid here right now, my hair is in curls!
• You know how American stars often do commercials in other countries so they can make extra dough with losing street cred? I just saw Iggy Pop shilling for an insurance company. I have no reason to lie about this.
Friday 9 January
Slept in until 9:30 this morning and it was glorious. I think I have jet lag well and truly licked. Take that, jet lag! All I needed to do was stay up for 36 hours straight! No problem!
As I hinted above, I’ve got lunch with Jen and Caro and Caz at 12:30 so we can treat Caz in thanks for her queuing to get us Hamlet tickets back in September. Having gotten up late-ish and then farted around on the computer for a few minutes, that didn’t leave much time to do something for real before lunch so I just decided to start walking and wing it. I thought I’d walk to the Farringdon tube stop and then come down to the Museum of London or St. Pauls Cathedral, but I somehow managed to walk right by the station and next thing I knew I was all the way down in the City around Fleet Street. I’ve got a little bit of video diary (which I’ll post later) from a church I found there (St. Brides). Walked up to St. Pauls as I said above and now I’m in Starbucks.
I stopped at a little bodega on the way to get some OJ, which I’m happy to report is labelled as either containing “juicy bit” or “no bits”. I’ll take mine with no bits, ta. I had to have my daily Emergen-C dose, don’t you know (normally I have it in grapefruit juice, but I have yet to see such a thing in this country so OJ will have to do) because I’m going to just be a complete pseudoscientist and attribute my extremely long streak of excellent health this year to drinking that every morning.
Another random observation, and this is extremely important and utterly dismaying: THERE IS NO CREAM FOR MY TEA AT THE STARBUCKS. I can have whole milk or skim milk. *grumpy*
I’m either rubbish as a tourist or completely awesome because really what I like doing most is just walking around. I haven’t actually been “in” anywhere really, except for Evensong at Westminster. I think I like the outsides of things more than the insides. I like architecture but I think I also just like seeing how things fit together. When you’re inside, you lose the context of the rest of the city, and really you could be anywhere. When you’re on the outside, you can’t forget where you are.
London so far is the only city I’ve ever been to that challenges my Pittsburgh-honed sense of direction and ability to deal with streets that make no sense. I’ve done pretty well though and don’t have to consult my stealth map too much (the one in my London Moleskine, which just looks like a black blank notebook).
All right, I think it’s time to suit back up and march down to Aldwych for lunch. Maybe Jen’s hotel will have internet
[Later]
Lunch was at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese with a bunch of fangirls. I made a poor menu selection (despite the name of the pub, the cheese plate leaves a lot to be desired), but I ate a lot of Caz's chips, which were glorious, and I also had a pint of cider, which was also glorious and left me buzzed and frequently in urgent need of a toilet for several hours afterwards. The pub itself is rather indicative of a problem I keep having here: to me anything that even looks Ye Olde (let alone acutally having Ye Olde in the name!) screams "TOURIST TRAP! STAY AWAY!" The problem is, here things really are often legitimatly Ye Olde, and I can't tell the differernce between the two. Everyone else's food looked (and from what I had, tasted) quite good, so it was just a poor choice on my part and not indicative of anything wrong or tourist-trappy about the pub. Anyway, it's an old haunt of both Dr. Johnson and Dickens and we had a very good time having a bit of a group squee.
I left everyone else at that point to go to the Museum of London before it closed, so back down to St. Pauls with me (and once again I walked the whole way--by 5 in the evening I hadn't set foot on the tube once today). The Museum is quite nice, and I went on a guided tour of their mid 17th century collection (encompassing the end of the Elizabethan era, the English civil war, and the Restoration). I must say, our tour guide? Adorkable. I wanted to pinch his cheeks.
My next mission was to find Forbidden Planet, which the geeks here will already know about, but which is a large speciality shop for, well, geeks. I wanted to see what Doctor Who merchandise they had, though I do plan on going to the Stamp Centre tomorrow (Jen and I popped round there before dinner after it was closed and peeped in the windows). I got hopelessly lost in that quest, however. Not in a bad way, just....lost. Coming up from the Underground just turns me around and my normal good sense of direction disappears. However in the case my lostness took me on a brilliant walk through Soho, Chinatown, and dumped me out at Picadilly Circus. It was all quite fascinating.
I did finally locate Forbidden Planet and, while I didn't get any Who merchandise there, I did get a signed copy of The Writers Tale. See? Everyone told me to get it from Amazon and that if I got it over here I'd not want to schlep it back to the states, but you don't get signed copies of it off Amazon, now do you?
I went back to Jen's hotel right in the thick of the West End (about a block from the Novello Theatre) and met her for some dinner. Of course I'd seen oodles of wonderful looking Thai, Chinese and Japanese restaurants as I'd been walking around the area earlier, but once I actually wanted to eat something, they all disappeared. Amazing how that happens. We wound up having Indian which was outrageously overpriced, but I was hungry and it was there.
The walk back to the hotel from Farringdon seemed interminable and it is now at this time of night legitimately cold (-2c by my widget) but something in me just refuses to take a cab. Though I suspect we'll have to tomorrow, as after Hamlet we're going to a party and will be out late.
Also have plans to do Tower of London tomorrow morning/afternoon with Jen. Which means I have to get to bed very soon. So, here are your multimedia presentations for the day:
And the Picasa album is updated:
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