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bigmacbear) wrote2003-09-24 11:00 pm
bigmacbear) wrote2003-09-24 11:00 pm
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England Trip, Part III
Saturday, August 16
The three of us (our helpful tour guide and friend from Manchester, Tim; Gary; and me) traveled to London by train -- or we would have, if they hadn't been working on the tracks. The train stopped at Milton Keynes; anyone going on past there had to get off the stop before and board a shuttle bus to Hemel Hempstead (incidentally, home to Kodak Ltd.), where we boarded the train going on to London.
We got around that weekend mostly by bus and the tube, filled in with a few cab rides and a lot of walking. We got a weekend pass for two zones for 6.10 pounds per person, which covered both the bus and the tube.
(Note to
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beardoc: you may or may not need more zones depending on which zone Fulham is in.)On arrival at Euston Station we went to find our lodgings -- a dormitory for the London School of Economics that operated as a bed and breakfast during the school holiday. We weren't able to check in right away, but we found a place to stash our bags.
Our next stop was the tour of the Houses of Parliament, which is only open to non-British tourists when Parliament is not in session. For something this important I felt it necessary to wear long pants, specifically a pair of khaki slacks I'd purchased for the occasion. Unfortunately they were a bit too big, and having forgotten my belt and borrowed one of Gary's which was also too large, it was a struggle to keep my pants up. Hence the title. ;-)
After visiting Parliament we checked in to the dorm, then checked out the Tower of London and Tower Bridge (for these we thought a once-over on the exterior would suffice, rather than taking the tour.) From there we took the London Eye (observation wheel) trip and thought it well worth the price.
Later Saturday evening, after dinner at a steakhouse in Oxford Circus, we visited the King's Arms (a pub, which closed at 11 PM) and from there we went to XXL. XXL is a club that caters to, as the proprietors put it, "fats and smalls". We had to pay a cover charge and state for the record that we were not members of law enforcement to get in. Apparently it is not permissible for actual police in England to lie when asked this question, and if they do any evidence gathered on that particular visit is thrown out of court. That is most definitely not the case in the US.
The place was formed from four arches of a railroad structure approaching London Bridge Station. The first and last contain bars and restrooms, the second in is a large dance floor, and the third is divided into a second smaller dance floor and a dark "playroom", which I will leave to the imagination of the reader. I spent much of the evening in the back bar or on the patio outside it. I met a very nice bearish gentleman named John (a friend of Tim's who moved to London) and a German fellow named Oliver who tried desperately to leave behind all things German and become thoroughly English. It therefore torqued Oliver off to no end to hear Tim speaking to him in fluent German, and therefore Tim kept right on doing it. ;-) At the end of the evening (3 AM) I was mildly pissed (ok, drunk) which I haven't been in a while; fortunately, it was a short stumble back to the dorm, and cider leaves very little in the way of a hangover.
Sunday, August 17
Sunday morning we took a walking tour of Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Horse Guards parade ground, Whitehall and Downing Street (the general public is not allowed on Downing Street for security reasons but you can at least see the famous door of #10 from a distance).
We then picked up a picnic lunch from a grocer in Whitehall and caught the tube to the pier, from which we embarked on a Bearhug cruise down the Thames. This allowed us to meet some fascinating people, such as Adam, a curious fellow who sported a long beard and seemed to really enjoy running his fingers through my hair, but couldn't strike up a conversation to save his life. It also allowed us to see such places as the Battersea Power Station (which looks rather like an upended pool table), MI-5 (in a gleaming new building; someone mentioned that this building was sometimes referred to instead as MFI, a reference to a department-store chain), the Greenwich Observatory (where the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time are based), and the Millennium Dome (aka the "Millennium Cock-Up" or the "White Elephant").
On our return from the cruise we decided to take a "disco nap", which turned out to be somewhat of a mistake, as we didn't get up until 9 PM. It was, amazingly, still half-light out at that hour; given that England is actually quite far north in latitude (about on a level with Newfoundland and Labrador), it actually makes sense though.
We carried on with our plan to take the tube to Camden Town, which is the "bohemian" district of London, to eat at a Vietnamese restaurant Tim knew of there. Unfortunately it was closed by the time we got there, so we found a place called Arizona that served very good Tex-Mex food. (We took care to avoid eating at places like Burger King, KFC, and McDonalds, all of which are in evidence all over the parts of England we visited, on the theory we could always eat that stuff at home. ;-) By the time we finished eating the tube was about to close for the night. We caught the last train to a stop fairly close to our next and final stop for the evening, and hailed a cab to get us from the tube station to the club.
This club was WOOF!, next to Smithfield Meat Market, which featured (top-to-bottom) a disco, lounge bar, dining room, and the bathrooms in the basement. WOOF!'s motto is "Hunky Funky Music for Hairy Horny Guys". Gary was in the mood to dance; I wasn't, and stayed in the lounge listening to the conversation and generally "chilling out". Here I tried Cronenbourg beer from France. It's a decent beer, but a bit bitter for my taste and I had some difficulty finishing my second bottle. This evening also ended around 3 AM and we caught a quick cab ride back to the dorm. On the way out it was remarkable to see the business of preparing meat for sale going on in and around the street at that hour of a Monday morning.
Monday, August 18th
First thing Monday, after breakfast and checking out of the dorm, we took in a small part of the Tate Modern Art museum across the street from the dorm, concentrating mostly on an exhibit of nudes and related artworks on the fifth floor in addition to the architecture of the building (a converted power station, it features a seven-story atrium in the space that formerly housed the generators, with a working crane and winch at the top).
From the Tate Modern we headed for Victoria Station and a side trip to Rochester, Kent. At first I was just going to make sure we got a picture with the "Welcome to Rochester" sign at the train station, but Gary and I decided to climb the medieval Rochester Castle and take in the magnificent view of the River Medway, Rochester Cathedral, and the high street which included the house (Eastgate House) in which Charles Dickens spent the latter part of his life. Tim decided to wait for us on a park bench and have a nap, but some German schoolchildren kept pestering him with questions. The train ride back was a bit faster than the ride out had been since it made fewer stops.
On our return to Victoria Station we went to the nearby Stag, which is an architecturally interesting octagonal bar (complete with rainbow flag painted over the entrance) where John, the fellow I'd met at XXL, works in a management capacity. We had a few drinks at the Stag and then hurried to Euston Station to catch the train back to Manchester. This time the train ride was not interrupted by a bus detour.
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