20110828  London  Sunny, nice, possibility of showers later.

Breakfast downstairs, ordered a taxi for transport to Heathrow on Tuesday morning – it's as cheap that way as a taxi to Paddington then the Heathrow Express. The tube would be cheaper but it's probably a real hassle with suitcases on a workday morning.

One Mr Ward of the two brothers who operate this hotel is off as of mid-day and the other will be coming on duty. They shift every 28 days. Sounds like a great way to run a business.

We loafed until time for church, then went to it in Soho Square – St Patrick's. It has masses in various languages Saturday evening and all Sunday. This was the Traditional Mass and it was all of that. A five-person choir, amplied, and echoed by the marble walls, sounded like a full choir. The organist was very competant. For instance, the Communion Motet was “O Sacrum Convivium” by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736). The recessional hymn was “O Worship The King”, which I remember from old Lutheran days.

We walked out and wandered Soho Square Garden, a small block of green in the middle of the city and across from the church. It has a small mock-Tudor gardener's shed in the center to give it flavor and statuary of four nudes lying on the grass two of each sex conversing, which the sculptor says is intended to show something or other – I've forgotten what.

We hiked back to the hotel and sat around for a while deciding what to do. D's back is bothering her today and I'm not ready to take on my weight in pussycats, either.

Owen Photos     Dolores Photos   

Well, after a while we felt better and decided to go to a place we'd seen before – Covent Garden Market. It's a former vegetable and meat market turned into shops and restaurants. It's quite popular.

We took our #24 bus to Leicester Square and walked the four blocks. Lots of people out and around in the nice weather. Crowded streets, etc.

Street performers must audition with the Market before they're allowed on the site. Not to say they're great, but they're not walk-ons. As we walked up a juggler was doing his thing in the plaza with a crowd around him. We watched until he dropped something, then went in.

We just wandered around looking at things. Then D spotted a toy store and away she went. I followed. Sure enough, she found a toy just right for Jamie at Christmas, so we took it. We wandered some more and did the whole building.

One set of performers (a string quintet playing light classical music) was great, and we put something in the hat.

Around the building are others and their fronting faces are also shops lest a tourist still have money after the Market. We found a man with a bunch of posters of London scenes. In fact, he was the artist of the original paintings from which the posters were taken. There were two that included many of the things we've seen. We finally chose one, signed by him, and rolled into a tube to protect it in our suitcase.

Our feet were hot again, so we looked for a place for an early dinner. A place called Boswell's was there, advertising the British Sunday Roast, so we went in. We ordered drink before we found out the roast had been consumed. We decided to stay anyway. The place's name comes from the fact or legend that Boswell first encountered Dr Johnson here one night in May, 1763. He went on to write Johnson's biography. The food was ok; the London Pride ale was great.

We hiked back to Leicester Square, grabbed the bus back toward our place, and walked. We stopped at a small store to get cokes and nibblies and ¼ liter bottles of wine for the evening, then went to the room.

We have no intention of going out again. Our bodies are weakening. We need the whole night to recover enough to do the one day remaining in London.

British TV is strange.

20110829  London  Sunny, nice, possibility of showers later.

Wow. We started with breakfast and wondering if we'd do anything today that required effort.

We decided to take a long bus ride to a museum so we could look at the areas of London we hadn't seen. The 188 bus came along and we hopped up into the upper level in the front seats where you wonder if you're going to run into the tree limbs ahead.

We came to Greenwich and the dry dock containing the famous clipper ship “Cutty Sark”. We could see the timbers making up her hull but the whole superstructure is masked in a reconstruction effort mostly caused by a 2009 fire. We'll have to do with pictures.

We entered the Greenwich grounds – home of the former Naval College till 1997 and the observatory south of it on a hill. Since the British were there at the time, and were observers of the stars and earth's relationship to them, they could name Greenwich as the Zero meridian, that point east and west from which all points are measured.

The place is all sorts of historic. We hiked all over it (most of the buildings are Sir Christopher Wren designs, again) and took many pictures of it. There was, of course, another pictorial of Sir John Franklin's hopeless penetration of the Northwest Passage. There's a memorial to them all in the chapel, since they all died. There are other memorials, one of them to the officers and men who died in convoy work in WWII.

We walked then to the museum part of it and entered through a fully modern wart stuck onto a beautiful old building. Something called Sammy Ofre sponsored the wart. We saw the uniform Nelson was wearing at Trafalgar, complete with the hole in it where the bullet that killed him entered him. The waistcoat he was wearing was stained with blood, also in the exhibit. He was not a large man.

I've seen enough superficial demonstrations of old-time shipboard life, so we were disposed to get out of there, but there was one exhibit that raised our curiosity.

There was an interactive art and multimedia room that billed itself as the “high arctic”. I nibbled, thinking I'd see something with facts and figures and pictures. Nope – it was a reaction-to-UV-light torches that we were issued – various displays showed the interaction of shapes with each other under stimulus of the UV flashlites we showed onto the surface. Very abstract, very avant garde.

We departed out the back gate and walked through the town of Greenwich. D was looking for a book for Jamie and we found it in the local Waterstone bookstore. Coming out of the store, we came across the fire dog.

Turns out the local Fire Brigade had a truck and persons in a corner soliciting funds. One fireman had on a dog's face and was the fire dog, answering questions and so forth. Others were walking around with buckets hoping for the best. We threw a few pounds into the bucket and were rewarded with a small key-chain attachment with the London Fire Brigade logo, and a fire safety book for children we'll pass on to a certain child. Then we gave them all our change.

We went on, to the Thames Clipper service that acts as the “river bus”. It's a high-powered catamaran that runs up and down river stopping at various piers or wharfs. Commuters use it as well as tourists.

We decided to hop off at the London Tower stop. When there, you must take pictures of the Tower of London, so we did. Then up the hill to a bus stop where we planned to take the bus to Trafalgar Square to change to go to home. Along came an old-style two-level bus from the 50's. It happens they've all been retired but for a very few. The route #15 bus has a few of them for PR purposes and we happened to hop onto one. The “conductor” came along and asked for tickets but was happy to take our “Oyster” card good for transport all over London.

So now we've used the various forms of transport: the Tube, bendy-bus (articulated), normal double-decker bus, Harrod's open-top bus, the river Clipper, the black taxis, and probably more.

The bus dropped us at Trafalgar Square in the heart of the city. We walked around for a while taking pictures until we found our bus headed to Tottenham Court Road. We decided to hike to our “local” for a pint/glass before going home.

Sure enough, there was Graham (see previous entries). He hadn't met D before, so introductions were made. We stood at the bar of the Museum Tavern exchanging thoughts with Graham through three pints of ale for me and several glasses of Pinot Grigiot for D. She had a great time talking with the scot and listening to him explain things London. She insisted on a picture of Graham and I before we left; we wished each other well and went to the room.

We rested a bit, then got hungry. We decided to brave Leicester Square again and came into Browns for dinner. It being pre-theater time, we knew things would be confused, and they were. The service-persons were running as though chickens, and the maintre'd was going nuts trying to get people seated so they could eat prior to curtain time. We'd said up front we weren't going to theatre, so we got casual service. We spent the time with our wine and people-watching. Bleeping zoo.

The high giggle of the evening came when we commented to our waiter that a certain female waiter who had been litteraly running across the room serving people was highly motivated; he replied that she was Eastern European and “barking mad”.

We took our usual bus back home.

Then came the shuffle of packing for the morning. We finally got things stuffed well enough to travel.

Now to bed for tomorrow's trip.  Owen Photos     Dolores Photos