Bi-winning (or even multi-winning!) in London

Here begins the long-awaited, hotly anticipated London post. It shall begin with a timeline and then devolve into chronologically sketchy highlights.

5:30. Woke up. Already packed (including liberal supply of sandwiches, cereal bars, and oranges). Win. 

6:40. Caught bus to airport. Did not get off one stop early as a friend apparently did the previous weekend, thus adding significant walking time and confusion to this leg of the trip. Instead got off at the right spot and checked in without mishaps. Another win.

7:30. Me: "People are lining up..."

Kelsie: "Queuing up."

Me: "Oh, right. Do we not have boarding groups?"

Claudia: "It's like Southwest, they just have a free for all."

Me: "Ahh....Should we queue, then?"

Claudia: "That requires moving."

7:40. Claudia: "They're supposed to be boarding now, aren't they?"

Me: "Yeah...I don't see a plane, though."

Claudia: "Damn it. We're gonna get delayed."

Me: "Should we at least get in line? Queue?"

Claudia: "Mehhhhhh...."

We queued.

7:45. A little boy--three years old, max--in the line ahead of us said to his mother in his adorable accent, "Do we have luggage?" Who knew the word "luggage" could sound so cute!?! 

7:50. Yup, the flight was delayed. Queue dispersed. Everyone sat down.

8:00. Claudia: "Oranges, anyone?"

8:15. I got up to go to the bathroom. Walked into the wrong bathroom. Never done that before; most instructive.

9:00. We boarded.

9:15. We took off. 

9:16. Claudia fell asleep.

10:30. Landed. Got cash. Got really excited about British money. "Look, they have the queen on their money! Oh and wait, who's this? Adam Smith!? No way!!"

10:45. Dashed out to catch the bus that was about to leave and snagged the last seats available. 

10:46. Claudia fell asleep.

the next 1.5 hours: Looked out the window at England. Not as scenic as Ireland. But I saw a castle tower just chilling in the middle of an otherwise nondescript town, and a kite flying off in the distance, and the faraway figures of a mother and child holding hands while they walked across an open field...not all in the same place, but I can condense a little bit.

Noonish. Arrived in London. Got out booking confirmation printout from the hostel only to discover that it included neither the address nor a phone number. Fail. All we remembered was that it was by the northwest corner of Hyde Park. So we took the tube to that general area and found ourselves in a neighborhood full of hotels. The first street we walked down was dominated by a block-long white pillared building that looked like the summer home of an obscure member of the royal family. Concluding that this wasn't nearly shabby enough for the price we'd paid, we proceeded to wander around for the next hour and a half, inquiring at the reception desks of no less than four different hotels about the whereabouts of our hostel.
Concierge #1: "It's either on [insert street name] or the next one over..."
Concierge #2: (having drawn us a map) "Hyde Park, yes. Hyde Park."
Concierge #3: "Uh, it's probably on Leinster Street. There are loads of hostels there."
Me: "Ohhkayyy..." [receives weird look; Claudia cracks up] You have to understand, this is the third place we've tried and we still haven't found it, so we're just a bit trepidatious..." [yes, I used the word trepidatious]
Concierge #3: "I understand, ma'am," [I suddenly became a ma'am...scary] "but I'm ninety percent sure it's on that street..." [He was wrong.]
But concierge #4 came through for us after I asked her to just Google the hostel, click on the first link she saw, and see if it showed an address. So will call this, ultimately, a win, because we did find it. And yes, it was in the massive elegant building we'd passed up about five minutes after we got off the Tube. This settled, the visit commenced "proper."


And now for the best parts.


The usual suspects. Big Ben was smaller than I expected. Westminster was bigger and more beautiful than I'd envisioned. Buckingham Palace, dutifully flying the Union Jack, was surrounded by about as many people as will be watching William and Kate's wedding. The Tower was just really cool (it kept being expanded outward over the years, so the oldest part is the 12th-century "white tower" at the center, which isn't actually white anymore because it hasn't been painted in centuries). Trafalgar Square was lovely, especially at night with the big fountain lit up. 

Hyde Park was lovely too, full of trees that (I like to think) might've been saplings back in 1536 when Henry VIII made it his hunting grounds. Now, instead of royal game animals, the place is teeming with adorable dogs whose owners all wielded ball launchers (hooked staffs that I swear I've never seen before; reminded me of shepherds' crooks). 

The reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe (which is a tad off-target from the original location; they found this out after they'd built it) has the distinction of being the only building in London with a thatched roof. (After the 1666 fire, folks decided thatch wasn't really the way to go.)  The London Eye makes so much money from hosting weddings (!!?!?wtf!?!?) that we figured it didn't need a donation from us, and besides, we got to see quite a bit of London by other means. Specifically...


Ghost-themed walking tour. Our guide was a gregarious middle-aged man about as tall as Daniel Radcliffe, who said "innit" a lot. He showed us, among other things, the house where the famous diarist Samuel Pepys (Jana, are you listening?) once lived and where his ghost is said to occasionally look out the window chuckling to himself (doubtless in hopes of spying the specter of the naked lady who resides next door); Saint-Dunstan-in-the-West Church, which is referenced briefly in A Christmas Carol (quite a stretch from the "haunted" standpoint but still a little bit of nerds-and-fuzzies for me, thanks to my force-fed intimacy with that book); and the alleged location of the alleged bloody deeds of the alleged Sweeney Todd and his alleged lover the alleged Mrs. Lovett. We also randomly passed by the house where Ben Franklin lived during his time as envoy to London. It's now a small museum, and the young staffers were just closing up as we walked by. Our guide said, "Hello, ladies, are you in charge of running this lovely little place?" And they reolied with radiant enthusiasm, "Someone's got to do it." (I WOULD DO IT. Just pay me under the table since I don't have a visa....)


River cruise. We got to go on the Thames. On. The. Thames. Okay, either you vicariously feel the excitement, or you don't. I have this cruise to thank for the chance to sail under London Bridge (freshly repainted in a sprightly baby blue pattern), a fantastic view of the city, and a hokey scripted narration. (At least I hope it was scripted. I'd be concerned if both that guy and the guide on the bus independently came up with the same Big Ben joke--"Queen Victoria thought about naming it after Sir Benjamin Hall's younger brother, Richard, but...")

Museums. We spent several hours apiece in both the British Museum (Mummies! Headless statues! Jewelry! Small countries...well, no, but there was enough room to fit a few...) and the National Gallery. I think I've admitted before that I know essentially nothing about art and have very little appreciation for a lot of what are apparently the greatest works ever. But seeing things like Monet's water lily painting up close turned out to be very impressive. You can see the layers of paint. Paint that was put on that canvas a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years ago and is still there and still shows the same image. How amazing is that? Claudia's life was complete as soon as she saw Van Gogh's sunflower painting, but my real geek-out moment didn't come until we'd already progressed to the gift shop and I saw a postcard-version of this portrait:

Meet Christina of Milan. Based on this portrait, she was strongly considered as a candidate for Henry VIII's fourth wife. He was really into her, but he already had a bad rep thanks to his first two wives. Sixteen-year-old Christina allegedly told the English envoy that if she had two heads, one of them would be at King Henry's disposal...aka, he should back off. He ended up married Anne of Cleves instead, which turned out marvelously. Good story, tell it at parties.


Anyway, I dashed back into the museum, into an area we hadn't been through, to look at this portrait. Hans Holbein the Younger (aka the rockstar of portraiture at Henry's court) painted it after a three-hour sitting. How did he do that? How did he capture the folds of the skirt and the black threads on the edges of her sleeve ruffles? (This is the kind of stuff you notice up close.) It's, like, wow.


Anyway, we estimated that we got through about one wing of the gallery (out of about half a dozen) and I don't even want to guess at what tiny fraction of the British Museum we covered. You could literally spend weeks in there. (Entry's free, after all.) But we had other things to do....


The not-so-usual suspects. Raise your hand if you knew there was a Sherlock Holmes museum at 221 Baker Street. That's right. It's a house furnished and decorated to look as if the great detective lived there--full of items that were featured in the stories themselves. Hardcore Sherlockians (and believe me, there were people there who were unabashedly wearing deerstalker hats and matching coats) can smoke Holmes's pipe, examine his laboratory equipment, poke through his correspondence, and get friendly with some rather freaky wax figures of his clients and adversaries. (Moriarty should really blow his nose more often.) Okay, now raise your hand if you've ever eaten a pot pie. Keep your hand up if you've eaten it in London. Keep it up if you've bought it at the Borough Market from a cute English guy manning a stall that specializes in them. HA. 

Best lunch ever, and possibly the coolest market ever. Pictures do not even hint at its size and vibrancy and crowdedness and aromas...ah, food. 

And now raise your hand if you've heard of Grosvenor Square and if you know that the U.S. embassy is there (along with a small, understated, moving September 11 memorial and a random statue of FDR) and if you care that John Adams once lived in a house right next to this square, as did his wife when she joined him for the last few years of his ambassadorship, as did Thomas Jefferson's younger daughter when she stayed with the Adamses for two weeks en route to France after her father had her kidnapped. K, I think that just leaves me with my hand up, again. But here's why I was so keen to see this spot: London is a modern, dynamic city that, like most cities, is constantly changing with the times. So there aren't a whole lot of places where you can stand and say, "So and so stood where I'm standing and saw what I'm seeing now." Everything burned down in the London Fire, so there goes a lot of continuity with the pre-17th century...and things get replaced or rebuilt or or lost all the time...and even the path of the river has shifted...so despite the rich history of the city, going there isn't an automatic trip back in time. If you want to really place yourself in the past (which, being a dork, I do), you have to make an effort. So I wanted to go to Grosvenor Square--not because I thought it would be the same as it was back when the Adamses and Polly Jefferson knew it--but because it was at least still there, and still a square, not a supermarket or an apartment complex, and not something that costs money to see, like a castle. Hence, my quest. We planned to swing by there on Saturday, and at one point I even had the foresight to remark, "You know, we might want to go before it gets dark so we can actually see to look around," but of course this part of the plan was a fail. We ended up walking there after sunset, with me squinting at the map to make sure we wouldn't get lost. Once we arrived, Kelsie used the light from her phone to illuminate the inscriptions and informational plaques of the memorials, and I used my imagination to picture this little green patch of a glorified courtyard in daylight 230 years ago. So we'll call that an overall win.


And of course, the visit itself was a big win--despite several memorable and (in hindsight) amusing mishaps, of which some of you know more than others...and I think we'll leave it that way. Suffice it to say that everything turned out fine in the end, and I shall always remember, among other things, the sound of a little English toddler saying "luggage."