12 May (Friday) continued.

After resting for a little bit, I walked back out towards the Jubilee Bridge and got two Chinese artisans to fashion these wire "stands" as souvenirs for my mum (as 2 days later, it was Mother's Day) and I figured I needed to get something for my boss, so these were things I bought that were special and had their names on them. I dropped this stuff back in my room, along with a sky blue baseball cap with a Union Jack design on the front of it, and then headed out to the tube to go to Covent Garden.

I wondered why the line for the lift was so long, and made the very bad mistake of taking the stairs. Note, do not attempt to scale the staircase at the Covent Garden tube stop, unless you are in shape to run a marathon. It has, as a local pointed out, 192 steps. It also helps not to try and exit via Covent Garden if it's rush hour time. By the time I got to the top, I was out of breath and wondering if I could even find Belgo Centraal, a restaurant Rick Steves recommends in his London guidebook as being good for the money and interesting for the ambience (the waiters are dressed as Trappist monks, and they have a wide range of Belgian beers and Belgian-style food, like mussels and frites. I had a quicky meal of "Beat the Clock" (where the price of your meal, during what Americans call "the early bird special," is priced at the time you order) of mussels and really good mayonnaise with frites. I looked at my watch and decided that I could probably catch the "Haunted London" London Walk, so I headed back to the tube.

FYI: the area of the Monument/Bank/Cannon Street is very confusing, Tube-wise. The particular map I had bought at Barnes and Noble before my trip, a Streetwise London foldout one, made it look like Bank and Monument were the same station, or that they were actually connected. I got confused - was I supposed to get off at one station and somehow get to the other one by underground tunnel? I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. There's this weird "transfer" blob thing on my map. I asked information how to get to Bank, and they were clueless. Or not willing to help. However, it's my lucky day when a tube security guard leaving for the day says he's on his way home, and he'll take me to Monument. He was a large, burly, Anglicized African, but nice as a teddy bear. A teddy bear that needs to light up a ciggie as soon as we step out of Bank station, that is. With a bit of walking, he gets me to where I need to go. Thank goodness. I thought I was going to be stumbling around the station trying to figure out where the heck I was going.

The tour started at the Monument (which I'd seen in the previous walk I'd taken earlier in the week) but I had a better appreciation for it the second time around. To save time on descriptions, the pictures are now going to come fast and furious. The first three in the next bunch are close-ups of the base of the monument The fourth is another view of London Bridge. The fifth is just a photograph I took because it's outside a church named St. Mary.

(4c)

posted 12/04/06
London photojournal index

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