Day One: Tuesday in London

We stayed in a small one-bedroom 'serviced apartment' that got new towels and light housekeeping every day. Ellie slept on a cot in the living room. With the kitchen, we were able to save money on breakfast and some suppers--besides just having a very relaxing, home-like place to return every night.

This photo, taken from our balcony, shows how close the South Kensington tube stop was; there was a grocery two short blocks away.

The road construction at the crosswalk only occasionally made it scary to cross. London helpfully paints "Look left" or "Look right" instructions on the pavement at every crosswalk, so all the foreigners know which way to look for oncoming traffic.

Ellie got to the apartment first, and we showed up about half-hour later.

























We were astounded by the number of chimneys on the rooftops of London. The tower is the top of the Victoria & Albert museum.

Gardening is done in the smallest of places, like this window across the street, with the most extravagant results. We were impressed with London horticulture.

We went first to the Tower of London. This photo is in front of the Tower Bridge. I was surprised by the baby-blue paint.

We did not take as many pictures as we might have. Much of the structure was covered with scaffolding, plastic sheeting, and a big poster advertising the armor exhibit for the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's ascension. That got to be an irritant--Henry VIII was all over everywhere, and I think he is over-rated. In my opinion, both his father and his younger daughter were better monarchs. The filled-in moat is now used for shows.

For a six-day trip, we experienced remarkably few irritants. English maps were the exception. Ellie was relentless is trying to figure them out, as you can see from her face, as we tried to figure out which way to go when we entered the Tower of London.

The Yeomen Warders show you around the Tower. It's apparently a highly select profession, but involves much more theater than history or security, as far as I could tell.

The Tower was the only place where the crowd really got in the way of seeing the sights. Of course, this was also when our jet lag was at its worst. Still, we quickly learned the English reflexive "Sorry." "Sorry." "Sorry." when you bump into someone.

Prisoners arrived by boat from the Thames through'Traitors' Gate.'

The guide and all the material stressed the Tower's bloody past, but within there were peaceful gardens, a nice chapel, and ruins of Roman walls.

Buy an Oyster card, and you can go anywhere by tube, bus, or light rail--unless you use a wheelchair. There is clearly no ADA in Britain: we were taken aback by how inaccessible everything was, from all the stairs to the uneven sidewalks.
But if you do not use a wheelchair, the tube is great. Fast, goes everywhere, easy to figure out (especially with Ellie's help to know how to know which lines are down.)

No pictures from our next stop, the Treasures of the British Library, but we got to see Alice in Wonderland written and illustrated in Lewis Carroll's own hand, a Gutenberg Bible, several Beatles songs scrawled on backs of envelopes and Julian Lennon's first birthday card and other masterpieces straight from the authors' pens:
* Captain Scott's Diary
* Handel's Messiah
* the Magna Carta
* Shakespeare's First Folio;
* the Codex Sinaiticus;
* and more.

Here is Platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross station. I think this is so clever. I need to ask Ellie how she found it; it's appropriately tucked away with no signs pointing the way there.

Speaking of Harry Potter, we arrived at rain-soaked Leicester Square just in time to catch the the end of the ceremonies for the World Premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Apparently, there had been some torrential rains while we were in the library.

Big lights, banners, red carpet, jumbotron. It was glitzy and exciting even in the rain.
We got glimpses of Rupert Grint (Ron Weasly) and Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) but did not snap our cameras fast enough.

The photo of the soggy stars is from the internet; it's the picture that we did not get. But then again, they did not get our picture, either.

On to Day Two...

Day Two: Wednesday in London

We tried to set aside pretty much one whole day for the British Museum, but this is not a joke: you could easily set aside one whole vacation and be happy with your choice. It was fabulous.

Among other things, they allow photography, and they have the cases and lighting set up so that it is actually possible. Among the three of us, we took 146 pictures, now loaded on my computer. I'll share just a few here, and I'm considering creating a separate blog for the rest.

This is the Rosetta Stone.

The displays are top notch. Perfectly lit, well-labeled. Each exhibit was a very nice mix of real things and illustrative--even touchable--reproductions, right beside each other. The next photo is Ellie and me at the Nereid monument exhibit. Some touchable reproductions are on the ground; the real things are elevated.
This is a panel from the frieze on the Parthenon. Notice the holes in the bull's nose and the man's hand. These were anchor points for a chain. The originals had metal ornamentation, long lost.I had not known that the Parthenon was largely intact as recently as 1687, when the Venetians were at war with the Turks(?) and used the Parthenon to store their gunpowder, with predictable results. The Parthenon went from a functioning, two-thousand year-old (even then!) structure to a ruin in a single blast.

The Museum has a daily program of more than a dozen free talks. We took advantage of two: a lovely Iranian lady explained ancient Mesopotamian artifacts to us, and this gentleman walked us through the Enlightenment and several instances of how and when humans went from blaming things on unpredictable gods to actually figuring out how they worked. This room was a gorgeous traditional two-story-high reading room with glass cases full of curiosities and warm and elegant wood everywhere. It used to be George III's library, and I tried not to let that bother me. Re-reading the entire Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July was not the best mental preparation for this trip.

This is a Neolithic British ax. Neolithic--do you realize how OLD that is?!?!? 5,700 years ago (3,700 BCE), a human carved and used this tool. It fell into a wet place, which is how the wood was so well preserved.

In 1939, an excavator explored some odd mounds near Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, and found an Anglo-Saxon royal burial ship. The ship had been buried whole, with a treasure on board. Here is a purse lid of beautiful craftsmanship, which was found with its coins.
These helmets show how the British museum does things right. The first helmet is made of many original pieces, partly filled in. In the same case was another helmet......completely reconstructed to show how it probably looked when it was new.

In a few cases, the original object was left just as it came out of the ground--still squashed, broken, and mashed into a solid hunk. Right beside it would be a reproduction or a similar object, fully recreated. The Museum did not pull its punches: some of these, such as this Ur helmet, were not for the squeamish.
Enough of that.

We all enjoyed the Mesopotamian talk immensely. Here is the Royal Game of Ur.It is a board game from 4,600 years ago and involves racing the game pieces around the board. The archeologists know this because they found the rules on a clay tablet. So now the British Museum can sell the same game in the gift shop, though not made of shell, red limestone, and lapis lazuli.

Much more recently--only 700 years BCE--the Assyrians recorded in cuneiform on clay tablets a story of the Great Flood--the Gilgamesh Epic. In this story, the god Enlil got so mad at humanity that he sent a rain that flooded the world. The hero Utnapishtim was warned by the god Ea to build an ark, and he took his family and two of all the beasts. He released birds to determine when and where land re-emerged. This story pre-dates the Hebrew story, and it's not even the first telling of the Great Flood story!

Arriving at practically modern times, as the story of humanity goes, we also saw some stunning Roman mosaics.I love the subtlety they could get with little chunky chips of colored stones.

Finally, we saw a fabulous Italian vase--the Portland vase--from the first century. A cobalt-blue vase was made first, then a white-glass vase was fired on top. The white glass was then carved away.The workmanship, up close, was breathtaking.

After the museum, our next deliberate stop was to be Charing Cross Road, where I could browse some old books. On the way there, Ellie led us to a place called Neal's Yard.It is a lively little shopping mall, stuffed with health-related stores and restaurants and new-agey-type things. We browsed a bead store that had some amazing merchandise.

London has a program of marking the former residences of famous people with blue medallions. The person must have been dead for 20 years to get a medallion. We saw many, most of whom I did not know. However, notice in the previous picture (near the center, just below the longest hanging ivy) that there is a blue medallion on the wall. Monty Python died! Who knew?

I got my first real sense of place from this walk. The buildings were so full of character. I took both of the following photos without moving my feet. One tour guide at one of our stops explained that the old-fashioned English pub names (i.e., "the Something-and-something") come from the days when most of the population was illiterate. Signs like this one for the Greenman and French Horn simply depicted the name of the pub.

Bookstores no longer dominate the whole of Charing Cross Road--though there were many. Ellie really wanted us to see Cecil Court, just off Charing Cross Road. It was delightful--mostly bookstores, with a few antiquities and map stores.

Ellie pointed out something I'm not sure I would have noticed otherwise: neither of us have ever seen so many advertisements for books as we saw in London. Right there, among the big posters publicizing new movies, new cars, new communications gadgets, etc, were numerous ads for books!

But back to Cecil Court: I got myself on the mailing list of one bookstore that had an entire section of books on the perennial philosophy along with other serious spiritual books, also along with books on crop circles and faeries.

We wanted to eat dinner in a real pub, and Ellie picked a great one for us.The menu of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese notes that it was rebuilt in 1667. I absolutely believe that the pub has been there for longer. It was a labyrinth of bars and tiny dining rooms and basements and subbasements.

Allegedly, Charles Dickens ate dinner in our booth. A framed letter on the wall was from someone who ate with him. I do not doubt it. Any pub that has been in business that long in that area (the old city) of London has hosted many a luminary, I am sure.

Next: Day Three...

Day Three: Thursday in London

On Thursday, we went first to Kew Gardens.
The cast-iron framework for this greenhouse--the Palm House--was an engineering marvel for its time (1844) and is an artistic marvel in ours. At the time of the worst windstorm in this building’s life so far, the glass had already been taken out and the plants protected—as part of scheduled maintenance. It was a lucky (no) break.
I found the lavender right away. It had been dry in London and grass was often yellow.Once you paid the admission, a guided tour (which was informative, but did not cover anywhere near the entire gardens) was free.
I learned some new landscaping terms, though maybe not all useful when planning our own yard. A long expanse of grass and trees that frames a view a long way away is called a 'vista.' This is Kew's "Thames Vista." However, even when you were there--not just in this photo--the Thames was too far away actually to see.

I'm going to let the photos do the talking for a bit:

Keith wins the prize for most dramatic photo of the day, taken in the Evolution House.

For all the impressive garden architecture, landscaping, and horticultural feats of daring with exotic plants, I most enjoyed the old, old trees--another thing that there is no chance of in our Waunakee garden.
During the bad storm, this tree (Turner's Oak) did not fall over, but the wind lifted up both the tree and the ground around it. Surprisingly, the old tree then experienced a burst of growth, and Kew gardeners have ever since aerated the soil around their prized trees.The graft seemed like a good idea at the time (1834.)


The tree walk was designed by the same engineers who built the London Eye.When we were done in the gardens--well, okay, when we ran out of time--we walked down to the Thames, strolled along the riverbank into the village, and had some ale, wine, and Pimm's at this little pub. Ellie ordered the Pimm's; I did not know what it was. What it was: delicious!
We had taken the tube to Kew Gardens; we returned on a Thames Riverboat Cruise and snapped these on the way back into the city.I was intrigued by the bridges. Each had a distinct and unique personality.After the boat, we took a 'flight' on the London Eye, a very large Ferris wheel with large clear pods instead of open seats. The wheel does not stop moving, but goes so slowly (a full circle in 30 minutes), people can get on and off even while it moves.
The Eye was built as a temporary attraction for the millennium celebrations, but turned out to be so popular that it is now permanent.
Views from the Eye: Parliament(above); Buckingham Palace and St. James Park (below.)


After the Eye, we took the tube to a different neighborhood. London has special crosswalks known as ‘zebra crossings,’ where cars must give pedestrians the right-of-way. The famous Abbey Road crosswalk is one of these. When we visited in the early evening, tourists were taking brazen advantage of their ability to make traffic stop while they imitated the Beatles. I feel so sorry for people who live in the neighborhood. We did not take any of our own pictures because I did not want to add to the hubbub. It was fun, though, to be near the Apple Studios, and it is touching that there is still so much affection for the Beatles.

Walking through this neighborhood, we were so impressed by the English gardening. When I’d heard of English gardens before, I’d pictured countryside cottages or large estates—something with serious square footage. However, within the city the tiniest front yards managed to grow spectacular displays. Hydrangeas, particularly, were lush and flamboyant.I think it must have something to do with the long hours of sunlight. The island is so far north that on Thursday, for example, sunrise in London was at 5:00 AM and sunset was at 9:10 PM. In Wisconsin on the same day, sunrise was 5:33 AM and sunset was 8:34. London got over an hour’s more sunlight. And boy, do they make good use of it!

Next: Day 4--NOT in London...