Around 2/3 of the Northern Hemisphere in 98 days...: London Calling

Sitting on a train hurtling through the English Channel I think it is time to reflect on our time that was London. In short, I LOVE LONDON!! The parks, the history, the public transport, the crowds – LOVE IT!!

So we arrived early Sunday morning to my dear friend Kate’s welcoming face! Had a rest, a shower and then headed out for a walk through a park in Richmond where they (Kate & Lydia, her sister) live. And this is where my love for London begins.

We had lunch in a local pub (Sunday roast of course!!) that fronts onto a park. This park was full of life. Children playing, chasing pigeons, families enjoying picnics and playing soccer. This was also the story on Monday in St James Park and again on Wednesday in Hyde Park but this time to a much larger degree. We could have counted at least 20 soccer games being played, at least 100 families enjoying the open air, and at least 10 softball games, all being played by amateur locals in shirts on/shirts off competition. Around the outside edge of Hyde Park, under a canopy of old tree’s, hundreds of people running & cycling. But when I say hundreds remember this park is so huge that there isn’t a crowd at all. Just a beautiful, open aired arena for the locals to play in. One event I have to mention, we were sitting on a bench in one of the parks when a women ambled past, looked at me, and then proceeded to flip me the bird while she kept walking on. We couldn’t stop laughing – it was so random!

From the locals – to the tourists. CROWDS of tourists, of course us being two of them! What no-one told us before we arrived is that we have arrived in Europe right on school holidays. So there are lines and crowds at every single touristy place you can think of. During our three full days here (Sunday not included) we hit up Trafalgar Square, Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, St James Park, the London Eye, Buckingham Palace, Covent Gardens, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Madame Tussauds, the British Museum, Hyde Park & Leicester Square.

Most places you just look at from the outside, take your photos and move on. The London Eye was cool, gives you a birds eye view of the whole city. It’s interesting to note that most of London is only 5-6 stories high, the massive buildings are the newest, probably a symptom of the Americanisation that has grasped half the world. Covent Gardens is an outdoor mall with café’s & street performers everywhere. Leicester Square the heart of the theater district, very cool!

A couple of places deserve a slightly larger prose. The Tower of London is potentially my favourite place in London. Building started in 1060 and continued in stages throughout the following couple of hundred years. The outer walls look like any old castle but inside is absolutely stunning. Lawns, century old tree’s, terraces and incredible architecture. It’s a place that oozes with history. For 600 years it was the home of the kings & queens, the final destination for some of England’s most famous, a place of torture, execution, pomp & ceremony. Today it houses the crown jewels (STUNNING), the armour of the kings, the Queens house (still kept ready for her if she ever decides to pop in) and the guards who act as tour guides by day and guards of the tower by night. They and their families actually live in the outer walls of the tower. It was so amusing to see washing lines on the thousand-year-old walls.

The British Museum is absolutely incredible. The second highest visited museum in the world, the Louvre being first, I had no idea what to expect. Incredibly, the first door we walk through and there before us is the Rosetta Stone. The ACTUAL Rosetta Stone that opened up Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Absolutely amazing! Further along a massive statue of Ramesses II, one of the Easter Island statues, the oldest ivory carving in the world – carved on a Mammoth tusk!!?! – and room after room of ancient history. One display that was incredibly daunting was a timeline in pills from cradle to grave for a man and a woman. Every prescription pill that the average person would take in their lifetime, displayed in a long glass cabinet that stretched from one side of the room to the other.