Below: St. Pauls Cathedral
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| London | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ... the very busy day... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Ships right on time... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The next day I discovered the absolute best way to tour London is to walk five miles in the pouring rain along the river Thames from the Tower to Westminster at night. This is usually best if it follows a day of floating down the river to towns in which one feels perfectly comfortable talking like a pirate.. Then when you get back to London, you take a detour in the up direction, some 1,000 steps and cross the wibbly-wobbly bridge twice within a half an hour. But most of all make sure it is raining � the big, fat raindrops that soak you to the bone within five seconds of exposure. And don�t bother with an umbrella. Wow, that day was swell. It still makes me giddy thinking about it. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Cutty Sark in the centre of Greenwich | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| After a splendid night�s sleep on my extremely springy bed in my tiny, smelly room, and a huge bowl of cornflakes, two of my best mates and I headed for Westminster Pier. We plunked down 8 pounds for a day rover on a little mini-cruise down the river that would allow us to get on and off at the different piers as we wished and provide a way to see London�s landmarks without stinky, loud cars, scary cross walks or getting stuck in Trafalgar Square (see Clark Griswold). We boarded the boat and rode up on the top deck in the chilly London air, fortunately it had yet to start raining, and then rode all the way to the town of Greenwich, about an hour cruise. Our guide was a bit of a goon, but he was amusing and kind enough to point out things like the spot in Wapping Dickens used as a model for his den of boy thieves in Oliver Twist� in addition to pointing out every pub that serves a decent bitter or where stars of reality television shows live. I love to travel by boat, I really do. I have always had a fondness for boats or ships, pirates and sailors, sea shanties, peg legs, you get the idea. So it�s just as well that we were going to Greenwich by boat, for as soon as you step off you are greeted by the Cutty Sark, an entire, intact, tea clipper ship from 1869 stuck right into the middle of a very nautical-themed square full of pigeons and pubs called the Crow�s-nest or the Anchormans Drift. I chose a bench directly opposite it and had my lunch, eyes fixed on the black wooden wonder before me, silently humming �Little Red Bird of the Isle of Man� in the back of my mind, whisked away, three sheets to the wind, to some magical time and place. Oh it was great. After packing up, we bumbled around the town looking for the Royal Observatory, battling fiercely with the tourist information signs and then realizing that it would probably make sense to go uphill - logical place for an observatory. I was under the impression that this, like everything else in London, would require some relieving of my wallet by a few pounds, but much to my surprise and delight was free. So happily I grabbed my ticket and then waited to stand on the official line where east meets west, where time begins, and where about 30,000 people from Bangladesh were doing the same thing. We made our way fairly quickly through the museum, as we had only a short time before our next boat would depart the pier, then had a very brisk walk down the slippery path to where our boat was waiting and decided to head toward St. Paul�s Cathedral, providing that we found it amidst the towering financial blocks that surround it. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Glee | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| This sort of urban jungle is actually a trifle fun. For example, to cross streets, you must often retreat to subterranean tunnels from which you emerge totally bewildered but safely on the other side. Also, when winding through very tall offices, the landmarks like St. Pauls sort of spring up suddenly and take you for a very pleasant surprise. That�s when you realize just how very impressive the Cathedral is� of course, you�re also wondering where the bird woman is and noting how similar the U.S. Capitol building looks. Once you enter the nave you feel extremely small and your neck very sore, as it spends a good deal of time locked in the upward-gazing-in-awe mode. It�s absolutely amazing. You then realize that the up that you are so impressed with consists of 530 steps and your knees decide they don�t like you anymore. Up to the whispering gallery isn�t too bad, some 260 shallow steps and once you are there you find yourself confused for two reasons. First, you�ve climbed half of the stairs, but remain less than a third of the way up. Second, no one is whispering. We then heaved up to the Stone Gallery and then up the final tight squeeze to the golden gallery where we were met with a somewhat impressive view of London. Probably would have been better if it weren�t raining and the 50 million people we queued with were going the wrong way around.. So you grumble at them and grumble at the rain and you grumble about heading down no more than five minutes after your arrival at the top. But when you return, tired from the climb, you are pleased to see the Nave again and spend a few wonderful minutes sitting and gazing. We bundled up and headed over the Millennium | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Above: Perfect timing, the official Greenwich Mean Time counter from which the world takes its time, smack on the Prime Meridian Below: St. Pauls Cathedral |
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| "WibblyWobbly Bridge" for it�s performance on the day of it�s opening (thank God it�s been fixed) to the Tate Modern. I have to be in certain moods to appreciate art galleries � not art, just the galleries. Especially modern art, so instead I busied myself trying to figure out how to get back to the hotel. After ten minutes or so, a pair of us headed back across the bridge to the Thames River Path.The path is great. It's wide, not too heavily traversed (at least not in the dark or in the rain), very well lit with fun Victorian lamp posts and festive strings of garden lights and offers a number of very random sites along the path for you to ogle at, in case you tire of staring in wonderment at the illuminated London city-scape in all it�s electric splendour. Cleopatras Needle | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| (a 3,000 year old obelisk), the Temple Arch, a couple of war memorials scattered along the path, glistening in their floodlights and sparkling in the rain� and you stroll along just singing and dancing in the rain, not caring how far you are from the hotel, content with the world and quite giddy when you hear Big Ben mark the minutes from down the river, and you see the glowing palace across from the Millennium Eye (giant Ferris wheel), spinning in a pale light reflected in the river, and the only thing in the world that seems slightly wrong in the universe is that they put slaw on your chicken sandwich. It was a fine day. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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