London satellite summary

View Summer ‘09 Euro trek – London in a larger map

Full London photoset (flickr)

LYS – STN (i.e. Lyon -> London-Stansted)

From the air: Lyon (above), London (below). Not the greatest photos, but you can spot the London Eye pretty easily below – white ring, along the Thames, left side. After bidding adieu to Nick in the arachnid-esque Lyon-Saint Exupéry airport, I was left to fend for myself among the Brits. From the moment I hopped on the EasyJet to London the change in tone was palpable. Peppy drink service, spunky intercom banter, and proactive on-flight bus ticket pre-sales kickstarted my “right-o jolly-good-then” spirit. Sensibly designed, highly informative GPS-based bus arrival predictions with easy-to-grok LED displays of destination details could have directed a sleepwalker to my host’s doorstep. And trust me, travel fatigue was beginning to set in and I had no real idea where I was going before I got there. Maybe, after ten days in Babylon, the mere fact that ads and instructions were in English induced a delusional sense of wonder, but I definitely felt like London was promoting streamlined efficiency at every turn. Not in an uptight way, just in a “how can we make this easy for you” way.

Home base at James’s place

All of our mainland Europe hosts had been old friends of Nick’s, but in London I reunited with a couple old friends of my own. James is an old pal who I vaguely knew from college, then hung out with quite a bit when I first moved to SF in ‘99. A native Brit, he’s been back in London since shortly after the Bay Area dot commie bubble burst. His place, stumbling distance from two tube stations and a major bus line, was an easy hop into town. I’d barely even cracked into a London guidebook before arriving, so James helped me craft my daily walkabout plans both mornings. And whipped up some damn tasty homemade lattes to boot.

Hyde Park

Started the big day 1 London walkabout with a scenic stroll through Hyde Park, one of the “lungs of London” with a long history of protection from urban development. It was hard to grasp the scale of London in two days (it’s definitely more midwestern sprawl than Manhattan skyscraperville) but in either case this still seemed like a pretty big wide-open park for as populous a city as London and as close as it was to the downtown/Soho/South Bank mix. Marble Arch Best known^ for its moment of glory in Motley Crue’s “Girls Girls Girls”, I breezed right past this landmark without acknowledging it. Luckily, google street-view post-vacation reconnaissance-processing led me to this photo, and even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time… I was definitely there. The shot also captures Hyde Park (my intended bus ride destination) where my longest single-day hike of the trip would would begin. ^ to me Serpentine From the bridge over the Serpentine lake in the middle of the park you can spot a couple of towers of Parliament…or is it Buckingham Palace? Prince Albert Monument I got a kick out of the four-corners-of-the-globe (Asia, Africa, Americas, Europe) sculptures surrounding the uber-gaudy Prince Albert monument at the south end of the park.

Tourist attractions, tourists

Buckingham Palace Poked my head into the Science Museum just south of Hyde Park, but it was too nice a day out to get pulled inside just yet. Kept walking, grabbed a sandwich, and chowed down under a canopy of huge trees in Green Park right by Buckingham Palace. The Palace was nifty-looking, though not much going on apart from a serious display of flags and shrubbery out front. Those Brits love their shrubberies. St. James Park Continuing on into scenic St. James Park, I began to wonder if I could hopscotch across London without ever leaving a park. Looking down at St. James Park and Buckingham Palace from the London Eye Trafalgar Square This place was a lively scene. Definitely touristy, but a fun pass-through. Nestled in the thick of palaces, museums, and ministries, it was on my route both days. Right behind it is the National Portrait Gallery, which sounded like an excellent exposition to check out. Unfortunately I skipped it in favor of more outdoorsy activities on day 1, and when I tried to get in on day 2 with my frame pack on they weren’t having it. “Oh, peese owff!” is what I told them, with a sniff. London Eye I’d love to back up every friend and tour book and recommend a spin on the London Eye, but I can’t. It gets a lot of positive hype for an oversized ferris wheel, so I had to assume the Eye was more than meets the eye. And it was… if by that we mean “more tourists, all meeting at the Eye for a big tourist trampling session.” And, as you might imagine, the ones with the thickest treads were… the Americans. The views are great, and maybe the whole deal is that London doesn’t have many skyscrapers to get those views from, but… I didn’t know enough about what I was looking at to really appreciate it. I did, however, learn quite a bit about how hungry the younger of two whiney kids from Chicago was, and “how easy it would be” to send him “right back to the hotel, you got that?” Got it dad. In hindsight, buying tickets in advance could’ve trimmed 30 minutes off the wait, and having a partner in crime might’ve turned tourist-induced trauma into a gold mine of spontaneous sarcasm. So if you go: buy online, and bring a friend! Nice views of St. Paul’s Cathedral and a couple of nifty-looking North Bank buildings I visited the following day.

Tate Modern

This former power station looks more like the set of a Terry Gilliam film than an internationally-renowned art museum. In addition to a stacked line-up of Picassos, Pollocks, Rothkos, Warhols, etc. there were also two featured exhibits: the Futurists and Per Kirkeby. I went straight for the Futurist exhibit, and got so sucked in by it I had to come back the next day to see anything else in the museum. This ended up being my favorite stop in London, very much to my surprise. Here’s some rambling commentary from a journal entry I made a couple days later: The Futurist exhibit in the Tate Modern was a highlight, most engaging exhibit of the trip (Roman Forum was a close 2nd) in that I definitely morphed from complete “blank stare ignorance” to “pseudo-enlightened understanding” of how the nascent forces of technology (transportation, communication), ego-ism, and cubism (Picasso) led [the early 1900s Futurists to a reinvention] of static imagery depicting a sequence, flow, or progression of moments or events, e.g. overlaid/interwoven still images suggesting directed motion, a decision-making process, or key scenes/frames building up to a (generally sorrowful) conclusion. By the end I was re-reading descriptions [of the paintings] my eyes had glazed over on the first pass and thoroughly “getting it.” No, I was not “on anything” when I wrote that.

Downtown London

St. Paul’s Cathedral Didn’t go inside, and can’t say the look of it impacted me any more/less than St. Peter’s very-similar-basilica in the Vatican or the doppelganger US Capitol in DC, but… maybe the ubiquity of this ornate domed architectural style is the interesting part? Kind of a stretch, but it is curious how “iconically governmental” these highly religious European cathedrals appear to Americans. Reminds me of how we stole the tune from “God Save the Queen” for our National Anthem. The history of St. Paul’s surviving the blitz in WW2 is compelling. From the cathedral’s website: “St. Paul’s is a lasting monument to the glory of God and a symbol of the hope, resilience and strength of the city of London and the United Kingdom.” Monument London has endured its share of mega-tragedy, and resilience seems as core to its culture as its passion for football or indifference to twisty teeth. The Monument specifically memorializes the great fire of London that happened in 1666. Towers, Bridges, Tower Bridges I didn’t get to the Tower of London till after it had closed, which is too bad cuz apparently there’s some kooky sh*t going on in there. The sideyard sampling of catapults and human cut-outs below was ominously intriguing. Also in the vicinity: the recently built Gerkin tower, and Tower Bridge – which I couldn’t stop calling London Bridge. The actual London Bridge is remarkably unremarkable, and somehow in my mind I was never able to accept that the next bridge over, the nifty-looking iconic London Tower Bridge, wasn’t the London Bridge. This made for some joking around that night… before it almost caused me to miss my train to the airport the following day. St. Helen’s Church with Gerkin behind Apparently there’s some controversy about whether the flurry of new London skyscrapers springing up in the past ten years are a good thing. Personally I think this kind of classic-meets-modern juxtaposition makes urban architecture awesome. This angle reminded me a bit of Trinity Church in front of the Hancock Tower in Boston’s Copley Square.

When in London… get bloody smashed

I met up with Andy Chen, another stateside pal via college and Bay Area friends, for a couple brews at a downtown bar called Cheshire Cheese. It was a going-away party for one of his co-workers, and there were about three platters of hors d’oeuvres – which I proceeded to single-handedly annihilate as though it was all for me. Tequila tequila tequila As soon as Andy and I met up with James in Soho, things got ugly fast. I was already tipsy from a sunny 10+ mile walkabout and a couple hearty brews at Cheshire Cheese. Then, over the phone while en route to the train station, Andy gave James some flak for nearly phoning in a flake-out, so James was compelled to punish us for making him come. It was GAME ON for some serious Tuesday night drinking. I kid you not that within 20 minutes of arriving, James had already rallied us for three shots of tequila apiece. Things degenerated quickly, leading to such notable antics as: a foolhardy effort to chat up some snooty dolled-up blonde (who turned out to be from Santa Clara, go figure) chumming it up with the bloke at the next table, borrowing then breaking his lighter, then obsessively fixating on fixing it for ten minutes a hilariously sloppy sidewalk brawl between James and Andy, which I think also had something to do with the broken lighter Kebabs and Coen Brothers Continuing the Eurotrek tradition of kebabs as a late-night booze-soaker-upper, we wandered a few blocks out of our way to Efe’s only to find them just closing up (reprising a similarly somber kebab moment in Bastille Square). Luckily James brought his British charm—which apparently works just as well in actual Britain as in America—and persuaded the owner to pop in one last batch for us. Our next move was to stagger back to James’ place through some combination of cabs, tubes, and actual staggering. Back at home base we caught the second half of the Coen Brother’s classic Raising Arizona before passing out.

Full London photoset (flickr)

Pages: 1 2