Calling From London!

I had no idea that London still had these iconic phone booths. In fact they are all over the tourist areas of London. This one is near Big Ben and the House of Parliament. We did not try to call anyone, with London being as expensive at it is, we would have had to carry a bucket of pound coins to call New York, I

We took off for London the day after Thanksgiving. Mary Ann had two motivating factors for this trip. The first was to finally match my “gold tier” level in Qatar airlines frequent flyer program, and the second was to use up some of the vacation time she has accrued. It seems that the more we go on vacation, the more vacation days she has! Nice problem!

My motivator was history. London is plumb full of it. In all those Asian countries, guides try to tell us that a child who came back to life with the head of an elephant is somehow history. In London, there is no religious fantasy, just real history.

The oldest thing we saw in London was this remnant of a Roman wall. The Romans conquered the London area about 2 thousand years ago. I do not think there was much to conquer back then.

We arrived at Heathrow airport about noon. TWO HOURS later we were finally through immigration. Terminal4 at Heathrow is where most of the truly foreign carriers arrive. BA and US carriers land at the other terminals. Heathrow terminal 4 is not a friendly nor an attractive place. Long walks without any people movers. Missing ceiling panels expose crude neon lighting. Poor signage which even in English left you wondering if the last 1/4 mile hike had been in the wrong direction. Then, we got to the immigration line. There were 35 booths available for use. Two or three were occupied. The officials would show up, process two or three people, then go away. Another might show up a few minutes later, then one of them would go back to their break room and presumably have tea and crumpets. I have been in immigration lines all over the world now and this truly was the rudest experience I have ever had. They profile everyone with questions starting with “Why are you here?

“I am beginning to wonder that myself.”

“How long will you be here?”

“I have already spent half my holiday in this fookin line.”

“Where are you going after you leave?”

“Someplace that respects tourists.”

I am not kidding, this was almost verbatim what went down with me in my session at the desk. When I had the stamp in my passport I told the guy;

“I don’t see how you expect to handle the Olympics. People are going to be pole vaulting your booths in protest.”

He didn’t much like that and said “It takes 2 1/2 hours for me to get through JFK immigration.”

I mumbled something about payback being a bitch and walked away.

Coincidentally, as I write this on the 30th of November, England is experiencing a general strike against pension reforms imposed on workers in the public sector. That includes the immigration people. The tabloids in London were predicting 12 hour queues at the immigration lines. However, I have been watchng Sky News out of London. The government has called out the army to man the desks, and to quote one airport manager “the lines are moving faster than normal.” Not a very high bar to pass, but ironic none the less.

Things started to look up after that. The London Underground, or the tube, serves Heathrow. With one easy line switch we were at Victoria station within an hour, and rather inexpensively. The tube cost us about US$12, where as a Taxi would have been about $85, and take longer. It was a comfortable ride with a view of the suburbs.

Our hotel was a block from Victoria Station. It was an excellent hotel with excellent service.

Decorated for Christmas, the Park Plaza Victoria was a welcoming sight to behold.

Our first night there we went on a walking tour by a company that calls itself London Walks.

http://www.walks.com/

I highly recommend this company. We took the pub crawl tour at night. Unfortunately I did not bring a camera. The tour, led by a young woman was excellent. She has done a lot of research of London history, and yes, pubs. We saw many interesting places, had more than a few Ales (all of them cold, and only one “bitters”), and I learned what a Cockney really is. A true Cockney is born within the sound of Bow Bells. Both this church and the much older and prettier St Mary le Bow church in The City claim to be the centre of this folk legend. I also learned a lot about the Thames river, including the proper Cockney pronunciation…Taimes, with a slight deference to the letter I. She showed us where John Harvard was baptized in a church that makes anything in Boston look like urban renewal. I had to teach her the proper pronunciation of Harvard…Hahvahd. It took three tries to get her to drop the Rs!

We only had three days left to see all there is to see in London,so we knew we would not see all there was to see in London.

We bought something called the London Pass.

http://londonpass.com

This little credit card sized gizmo gets you into anything interesting in London for free and allows you to hop the queues. If you pay a little more you get free tube passage as well.

When they say underground, they mean UNDERGROUND. This is only halfway down into the circle line.

We also bought a 48 hour pass on

http://www.theoriginaltour.com/

This service bills itself as the ORIGINAL hop-on- hop-off bus tour, copied in many cities all over the world. We have done this in Dubai and Singapore, so why not go with the original? They use double decked busses (with no driver on the top) and have multiple lines that go all over greater London. If you pay attention to where each line goes you can see just about anything. The commentary explains where you are at any given time. You get off where you want to explore something, then hop on again to get to the next tourist attraction.

I nicked this photo from Google. The buses today are a bit more modern, but the concept is the same.

The combination of the hop-on-hop-off bus and the tube let us zip all around town, and boy did we zip.

One our first visits was The Curchill war rooms.

They did not allow cameras in the war rooms, still worried about those nasty Nazis I guess, so I stole this photo from Google. The war rooms are a part of the Imperial War museum complex with sites all over England The war rooms are an underground bunker complex located less than a block from Number10 Downing Street. This is where Churchill ran the war from. This picture is of the map room. When the war ended, the bunkers were of course closed and shut off. It was not until the 1970

Tea with milk. Quite British!

WWII is virtually yesterday in London. We had a lot more to see. We whipped out our tube cards and tourist maps and started exploring.

Standing on a street corner, I saw this kid who looked somehow familiar. I spoke with thim and he claimed to be the illegitimate son of “some rocker”.

I think I know who his pop was. Can you guess?

We were just off Whitehall, which is sort of the center of the British government bureaucracy. Whitehall intersects with Downing street. This is as close as we could get to #10 downing street.

I did not even ask if I could pass.

Just further down Whitehall is the main stables of the Household Calvary. Although largely ceremonial, they are still an elite unit. They have really nice horses.

Just off whitehall is a building I could not leave London without seeing.

During England

Just a block away at the top of Whitehall is Trafalgar Square. The square is dedicated to the battle of Trafalger where the British navy, under Nelson, defeated a much larger combined fleet of Spanish and French naval forces. Nelson died in this battle.

Nelson

One of our next stops was St.Paul’s Cathedral.

No, St Paul

St. Paul

Today, this is the site of OCCUPY LONDON. The reason for the choice of this is that the London Stock exchange is directly behind it, and the courtyard is the only space big enough for the tent city.

One of the signs posted. I like the way it combines the Cathedral and the LSX.

Part of the tent city from the steps of the Cathedral.

This is a port-a-potti paid for by the occupiers. The occupiers in Zucotti park wanted to do this, but Mayor Bloomie would not let them. Of course there are people who want the occupiers to simply go away, but unlike the ubber alles methods employed in NYC, Oakland and LA, there is not a single cop at the OLSX site. Also, the effort to remove them is scheduled for adjudication in mid December. Each side has lawyers and it will be settled peacefully, not by cops in riot gear in the dark of night.

After I had a few words of encouragement with the occupiers and made a financial contribution, we moved on.

Because of our limited time and London’s unlimited tourist options, we did not go to any of the huge gardens. London has more green space than any other city in almost the entire world. We also did not tour any of the magnificent museums which populate the London streets. They have museums to display everything from booty looted from around the old empire, to toys, fans, and probably shoelaces. Maybe next time.

It is impossible to miss the London EyeSORE. We did not do this either.

I must say that I have always heard that the food in London was akin to boiled cardboard. I also thought all the beer would be warm and bitter. Not so. We had really good meals wherever we went, and the beer was always cold. You could get “bitter” if you wanted, but…

This pub was across the street from the Parliament building. We were there at lunch, and had a great meal, and enjoyed the Tangle Foot Ale. There were quite a few men who looked like Ministers of Parliament having liquid lunches and debating the issues of the day. Interesting crowd. Maybe that is why sessions of Parliament are so much more lively than sessions in the US congress. Government fueled by Ale!

The next spot to talk about is the Tower of London. There is an awful lot of history there, and I suggest that you read up on it before you go. I will give you a quick glance at what took us 4 hours to see.

I convinced Mary Ann to occupy a guard shack at the Tower of London!

Actual Beefeaters give tours of the Tower of London. I asked one why they have the moniker beefeater, and he told me no one is sure.

The Tower of London is home to the actual, the authentic and the priceless crown Jewels of England. They are so well guarded that I gave up my plans for a smash and grab.

I included this picture taken at the Tower, but it could be from anywhere in London which is a giant panopticon. If you do not know what a panopticon is, look it up. It will astound you to know. Basically it is a method of installing fear in the populace.

This is the Tower Bridge shot from the outer wall of the Tower of London fort. Many people mistake this for the London Bridge, which is a truly non-photogenic span.

Now to the most amazing building in all of London, Westminster Abbey!

An absolutely beautiful building with an astonishing history.

If you ever go to London, do the Abbey. Even if you are just there for a day, do the Abbey. Photos are not allowed inside here either, but most of you have probably seen pictures of the recent Royal Wedding. I’ll nab a couple more from Google for you, just because I am a good guy…oh forget about that. I tried. But no camera, no photographer can capture the whole scene inside, let alone the grandeur, the history, the splendor. One word of warning, if you have a phobia about walking on graves, do not go to the Abbey. There are over 3000 people buried in this building and every time you look down you are standing on somebody’s tomb.

For more info, possibly including a list of all the Royals, prime ministers, scientists and poets buried here go to http://www.westminster-abbey.org/

We were smart to take what they call the Verge Tour. A verge is kind of like an usher for services and official events in the Abbey. Our verge was very obviously proud to work in the abbey. He possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the hundreds of years of Abbey history. He had a great sense of humor as well. He kindly laughed at my irreverent questions. For instance when he showed us the places where the Royals sit for services, I asked

“Does the queen carry a purse to a service?

“Of course” he said “her highness always carries a purse.”

“So maybe you can solve a mystery for me…what in the world does she carry in it?”

“Probably her tube pass.”

For further proof that these men with a very serious job are well rounded enough to have a very light sense of humor, go here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WUSwrJS3Ds

OK. Now for probably my personal most favorite thing we did in London. On Sunday morning we hopped the tube and found our way to St. John’s Wood. This is a bit out of central London. Beautiful homes with actual gardens.

One of dozens of beautiful homes in this neighborhood. But I was not here for the architecture.

In the middle of the St. Johns Wood neighborhood is this road. If you cannot figure out why I came here by now, you are an extraterrestrial without a guidebook.

When I think of all the music created inside this door, I am speechless.

I have wanted to take this walk since I was in High School. I do not own a white suit, and it was too cool (or I was not cool enough) to go barefoot, so I could not imitate Lennon or McCartney. But I did get to walk in their footsteps. We met a wonderful gentleman who lives in the neighborhood, and has for 50 years.He told us that there are ALWAYS people crossing here and getting their picture taken doing so. He had to go to the neighborhood council a few years back and plead with them to repaint the stripes, because they were getting worn out. He also told us that one morning, his son in grade school at the time, was waking along the street with his class and their teacher, singing a song. Paul McCartney came out and conducted them while singing along. The kids thought it was fun, the teacher was astounded, humored, and honored . Those were the days!

One more thing everyone who goes to London ought to do just because…

I waited outside, Mary Ann bought some goodies. The ultimate souvenir store in London!

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