Visiting United Kingdom's Capital

We are so spoiled! 

After so many months on the road, we are complaining of a little bit of deprivation of sleep due to uncomfortable chairs. Like all the night buses should have recline-able chairs with a hood to shelter your face as in Japan! Spoiled or not we are sleep-walking to our hostel, where we find out that we can’t enter our room until 3 o’clock. It looks like a dorm one... Well, we’re on a budget, it will do.

After a good night sleep we can’t wait to pick up our girls from the airport. Happy to be together, sad that they don’t have a new stamp in their passports. 

They brought bagels! 

And talked, every second until we got home, and then some more!

But we have no time for this, we’re on a tight schedule here, so it’s British Library for us to see Magna Carta and other stuff. They are guarded in a special room, with special lighting, and no pictures and we got lost in Leonardo d’a Vinci’s journal (we could flip its electronic pages) or Jane Austin “History of England” that she wrote when she was 13. In the same room there were the Bible, printed by Gutenberg, the Qumran, some Hindu scrolls, maps before Columbus’ discovery and the words for “A Hard Day’s Night” by Beatles. From Magna Carta, the famous document that limited for the first time the king’s rights, only three articles are still used.Getting out, there was a whole wall with frames, all containing stamps.

The rare Romanian stamp

Next day we go again to the airport, this time to pick up the grandparents. We didn’t see them since China, and we’re happy to spend some days together. 

Red, yellow and blue, the Romanian flag between others

Even the underground is decked for the olympics.

We catch them in our whirl, and go to Westminster Abbey. What could have been a nightmare in the morning (because of the crowds) is a peaceful visit in the evening. The church is softly lit and quiet. Ileana keeps going on long and weird ways in order not to step on the graves (Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Lawrence Olivier and many others). We take our time and visit everything there is to see, and we get to listen to the rehearsals of the choir.

A series of graceful sportive sculpture decorate the city.

The cloister of Westminster Abbey

Big Ben, Parliament Building and the Ferris Wheel

Next day the children are treated by the grandparents with Buckingham Palace, as the Queen is spending the month of August somewhere else (the parents skipped this one, as they’ve seen it and didn’t want a repeat). 

Only in UK!

Then, British Museum. 

Alaskan totem poles

Finally a place where we could take pictures inside. We’re trying to follow Rick Steve’s comprehensive tour, as we two did two years ago, but now we’re five, there is a crowd, and the tour is not the most easy to follow.

Rossetta Stone with its three writings that cracked the code.

The different types of wood used in building one sarcophagi

Hunting lions, detail of a Mesopotamian bas-relief

 In this museum are hosted the friezes of Parthenon, the temple dedicated to Athena, built on the Acropolis, Greece. They are faded, most of the faces are eroded or broken, but you feel like they are momentarily frozen, on pause, for sure they would continue to move, if let. 

There is a debate: the Greeks want the friezes back, its their patrimony; the Brits say they saved them from sure disaster, they preserved them and they have better possibilities. In Greece you have to pay to visit the Parthenon, British Museum is free. What would be the solution to this problem?

And the next day we are first in line at the Tower of London, to see the crown jewels. The grandparents are briefed, they are ready to jog and skip all the photo opportunities, 

we enter the building and... we are blocked by a mass of olympics! Fortunately they have a guide, who has to talk and show them different things, very important if you’ve never seen them, so we pass and have all the crowns, all for us (if we don’t consider the yeomen), for 7 minutes. They are not that old as other regal crowns, Oliver Cromwell had them melted, still, they are beautiful. Beside them there were trays and punch bowls made of solid gold, so much gold it almost seemed kitsch.

Then we just moved around, saw the White Tower with the armory exhibition and walked on the wall.

The next objective is just a short bus trip away:

St. Paul: we visited ground level with every nook and cranny,

 admired Henry Moore's "Mother and Child",

 underground with all the burials (Lord Nelson), whispered in the inside cupola, climbed all the claustrophobic stairs to be on top of the outside dome, took the view in. 

I talked with the pastor, asking him why do they have Orthodox icons in their Anglican church. He said that St. Paul is an international church, they would like everybody to feel included, after all they had a memorial service for a Muslim, aren’t I glad to have the icons there? 

This is actually from the airport, but illustrates their wish of including everybody.

The last day we went to the National Gallery where we split up, leaving each and one of us to view whatever he/she wanted in his/her rhythm. Having my brain in a strike, refusing to receive any more information, I just looked, for something to catch my eye, for something original, and then, and only then, I would look for the author. 

Tsk, tsk, wake up!

The rest of the afternoon we spent it with the grandparents in the Trafalgar Square, watching paralympics on a huge screen. 

I remember vaguely when they started, as olympic games for people with handicaps. It’s my first time watching it. And I am impressed: sitting volleyball, for people who have knee or ankle problems, or a kind of blind ball game where they are hearing the direction of the ball, beside cycling with a missing arm or leg, basketball from a wheelchair and so on. I realize there are so many young people with a physical handicap, I wonder if it has anything to do with wars. And that many are from the so called first world countries and none from the third world ones. This is a reality that many able bodied people are not aware of... Twenty two years ago this square was empty of commercial things. Two years ago I was negatively impressed by the huge podium, that blocked the view of Nelson’s column and it’s lions. But now my heart is warmed, the gigantic screen brings together the people that surround me. I see a little girl with Down syndrome, a woman in a wheel chair, all the tourists and Londoners waving British flags, clapping and cheering for every achievement, no matter from what country.

London! This is no longer a Londoner’s city, it’s a cosmopolitan one with Turks, Greeks, Italians. At the hostel I noticed a small group having dinner. I couldn’t figure out from where they were. They were talking in German. Then two of them started in French. Another guy joined the group and talked in Portuguese and the others understood! I presume they all knew English. I wondered what chance has an American here?  

There is much more to see in it, but we have to leave something for the children to discover by themselves, if they choose to do so. 

Good bye London! 

London in Seven

In November 2005 I asked my family a tricky question. P or L? A majority chose P and it turned into $300 plane ticket to Paris on a now-defunct airline. It was the first international trip for my children on Valentine's Day in 2006. L would have been London...

The children liked Paris and enjoyed returning there in 2009, but at least one of them held it against me for not getting to London until now.

London this summer - it's all about the Games

With the girls' break to the States, it was our reunion place and my parents decided to join us. The three of us travelled from Edinburgh by overnight bus. A horrible experience, very uncomfortable, very slow, yet a cheap solution. I booked rooms at the Generator Hostel back in March; that in itself was a save of $400 over regular rates. It had shared bathrooms, one for every floor, we had two private rooms, of three and two beds. The Generator is a crazy huge youth hostel with tons of rules, vast public places on the ground floor and people of all ages coming and going at all hours of the night. The wifi was only on the ground floor forcing people to get out of the rooms. It had a restaurant with fixed menu and a loud bar with karaoke, table tennis and Wii, until 3 am. Unfortunately for them, the children were not allowed to enter the bar premises; they would have liked to try the Wii. With tons of people lying around it was surprising that we never managed to exchange one word with any of the other travelers (first world symptom?). We slept 6 nights there, the girls had five nights, my parents had a different hotel for four nights. Overall we barely had four days of visiting around.

We saw the British Library. Just one room containing incredible history, from the Magna Carta to Beatles' songs on napkins. While there we read the History of England by Jane Austen (don't look it up, it's an opinionated school paper she wrote when she was 13), and I browsed through the last pages of Captain Scott's journal.

After my parents came, we saw Westminster Abbey, an evening visit only available on some summer nights, a magical experience. The 1000 year old church is packed with tourists during the day, but we had it all to ourselves for a couple of hours. The internal courtyard was lit only by the full moon...

The children with their grandparents visited Buckingham Palace. Ileana was upset that she was stopped from finishing the Leonardo da Vinci drawings exhibition so her siblings could watch the "stupid changing of the guards." We had no idea why they were not coming out, just spent an hour waiting for them on a bench behind the palace.

Wellington Monument

We saw quickly the highlights of the British Museum. The hostel was close to it, my family left and I remained by myself one evening, until I was the last one to be kicked out. Among a myriad of things it was funny to discover a huge board of worthless Zimbabwe bills, including the same 20 billion dollar bill that I got as a present for my birthday! The British museum houses the best of the world's three earlier civilizations, Assyrian, Egyptian and Greek and with a good guidebook the masterpieces can be seen in a couple of hours. But what else is there?

The Parthenon

Lord Elgin's marbles

Benin art

The coronation of the Emperor of Ethiopia depicted as  the last supper!!!

I got lost in the less important galleries, first going to see African art and then the Asian art gallery. The African art is interesting, there are 100-200 years old objects, some much newer than that. There are several art objects made of dismantled guns, a strong antiwar message from people who know what it means.

Some people really know what to do with guns

A tree from parts of weapons

In the Asian part I had a nice feeling seeing one after another representative pieces of all the cultures that we've encountered through our journey: China, Tibet, Nepal, India, Thailand and even one of the Buddha heads from Borobudur.

Unfortunately there is nothing even close to this to see in Nepal

Further on, incredible objects of art from the earlier Celtic and Gaelic cultures.

Goldcape, 1600 BC, from Wales

A gallery of clocks, nothing like what we've seen in the Forbidden Palace of Beijing, but impressive nonetheless. And in the end, a numismatic collection where you learn that one in 35 pound coins in circulation is fake and my 20 billions as part of the following display:

Last one coming down the stairs

We went to the Tower of London. We got there a few minutes before opening; tickets bought online, we would be the first to see the Crown Jewels. To our dismay, there was a huge group that entered the Tower before the official opening, they were all crammed in the first waiting room before the jewels. They were Paralympics and they had a special tour. Luckily they also had a guide that had a script to say, he kept them for a while and we had private time with the most famous crowns in the world. There is not much more to say about the Tower of London, there is enough to keep somebody busy for a half day and we saw it all at a slow pace. We did get to St. Paul Church after that, it was my first time there, a magnificent construction. We went all around it, in the crypt and up three levels to the top of the top to have a bird's eye view of London.

The long line to see the Crown Jewels

Recurring theme

Arms as art

Tower bridge

Old and new

The third largest church in the world

London 2012

View from the top

A nice ending to a busy day

On the last day we decided to spread out and tour individually in the National Gallery. I went ahead to check out the National Portrait Gallery and we all met at some point in the proper gallery. Everybody was happy. I first went looking for the Tizian that was missing in Edinburgh then I improvised a history of the arts course for Ioan. He diligently followed me around and helped me track aonepainter or another. The rest were also happy (to get away from me). Then we just sat for a few hours in Trafalgar Square. It was the time of Paralympics, the Londoners came out to encourage their favorites, have a picnic and concert in the square on a Sunday summer afternoon. Maria and Ioan played ping pong in front of the National Gallery!

Trafalgar Square entertainment

So this is London in a few days, not too busy if you ask me, it would be a cool place to take in slowly, a couple of weeks or a month or more. It is surprisingly affordable now, the pound is cheaper than it used to be, all the big museums are free (but you pay to visit the churches!), transportation is simple and relatively cheap. My parents went back to Romania, we will meet again in Greece in just 3 weeks. We flew off to Vienna.

My parents waving goodbye, see you in Greece!

London

Ileana and I arrived in Heathrow Airport nonchalantly. We walked (or skipped) ahead of our entire plane, then lost our lead entirely by stopping at the toilets. 

We carried our bag of bagels throughout the baggage claim area, very happy that we didn't have to stop. As we walked through the store that comes just before exiting into the wide world that is England, I looked around at the perfumes. Why would anyone shop for perfume just before exiting the airport? It doesn't make sense to me. 

As the double doors swung open, the first thing we see is Ioan jumping up and down like a Crowned Sifaca lemur, from side to side to side.

He looked much older than he had ten days ago...

He's acting like a little kid, putting on a teenage girl’s voice to commemorate the occasion. "So, like, did you miss me?"

We did, obviously. Ileana and I talk incessantly about camp over the next few hours, as we take the 'tube' from Heathrow to our hostel… which is huge.

Best friends catching up

The thing I like about the rooms here is the fact that they each have a mini sink in them. Epic.

We eat bagels, the bagels we bought in Chicago's whatever-airport.

And take a nap.

When that's finished, (I've never fallen asleep in the middle of the day so quickly), we go to the British Library.

The absolutely best part was reading Jane Austen's History of England. It is hilarious. She wrote it when she was thirteen, which I think is amazing, and, best of all, it was rather short.

I have to say that most of the nights in London I stayed up late. It's not because I necessarily wanted to, but because I had to. One reason was because I wasn't about to lose Camp NaNoWriMo. The other was that I wasn't about to lose the Rainbow Challenge because of one measly little book.

So I stayed up till one, two, three… writing and fulfilling my daily quota of book percentage or writing.

Amazingly enough, I managed to finish the 450 page book and write 19,000 words, despite the fact that I had full-day sightseeing.

One of the interesting things I found from this… 'experiment,' is the fact that my best writing is done in a dark room when no one else is awake.

Which leads to the fact that I'm going to have a secret study some day. *Nod*

Anyway.

The next day, Mom, Dad, and I went to the airport to pick up the grandparents, who flew in from Bucharest to see us and also re-see London.

Grandpa smiled the WHOLE TIME he was in London

We stayed in their hotel room a while, just talking, before heading off toward Westminster Abbey.

It was quite interesting, especially since very few of the people working there knew where Edward the Confessor's stained glass window was located.

We all found it together, thus learning a little bit all together.

The next day, waking up early, we went to Buckingham Palace with the grandparents. Trying to figure out how to get from the ticket office to the mews or the state rooms was crazy… especially since we were supposed to go see the Leonardo da Vinci Anatomy exhibit first, since that was a timed ticket.

Lovely, amazing… cool… but I wanted to get to the changing of the guard, which, according to me, was the only reason we came to Buckingham Palace.

So I scooted Ileana out of the exhibit, explaining to her that after the first part of the exhibit, she could look at any modern anatomy book and find out exactly what da Vinci drew. With the exception of perhaps reproduction stuff. But otherwise, quite accurate was he.

I dragged them all out, walked to the place where we could see the changing of the guard from, and we stood there to watch. Very nice. I liked (loved) the way they moved so well in sync, and I thought it was very nice (if a bit boring when they were just walking around without a marching band). We left a bit early, to get into the State Rooms (we'd already gone to the mews). It was, amazing.

And quite cool at one point to see all the diamonds from the Diamond Jubilee exhibition.

Some of us didn't want to leave.

In the afternoon, we went to the British Museum, where, thanks to Rick Steves, we breezed through the entire museum in a minuscule amount of time. Well, not the entire museum. Just the 'Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek' bit of it. Since they are everywhere, and we've learned so much about them.

The next morning, we headed up to the Tower of London, which is quite nice if you don't consider the fact that usually, there are huge crowds there. Without even looking at the videos put up on the wall, the seven of us went straight to the Crown Jewels, which we had all to ourselves for ten minutes. We went over the moving walkways three times each, then browsed through the rest of the gold and silver settings to see other pretty stones/cherubs, etc.

Absolutely stunning, honestly, but I wouldn't ever be able to live in a palace and be happy. I'm too much of a minimalist, and all the forks would annoy me. I wouldn't have any problem eating with them, but the excess would just… annoy me.

After the Crown Jewels was a series of exhibits on medieval life. I think that Henry III was quite handsome. I won't go into any other details, because they'd just bog this post down, since I didn't find them all that interesting.

Right after the Tower of London we went to St. Paul's Cathedral. I asked for the audio guide in English, but since it was an iPod touch, I changed it to French after about five minutes. Though I only understood about 50% of what the lady was telling me, and I think I fell asleep (but I would have done that propped up against a wall, not to mention on a comfortable chair with back support). Thankfully I managed to practice some French!

We climbed up 534 steps to reach the top. 



I didn't mind going up the cement floors that led up to the Whispering Gallery (I think that's what it was called). But when we got to the metal stairs… I don't like heights. And the entire thing was one way. *Shudder*

It was terrible.

Coming down, on the other hand, was quite nice on the metal stairs. They're straight, you see, and narrow enough that I could hold on with both hands whenever I wanted. The cement stairs were a pain in that respect, since I can't differentiate between depth if there's not also a slight color difference between step 1 and step 2. There wasn't much of a color difference, so I was constantly squinting to make sure I wouldn't slip down the entire staircase. (Quite funny, but perhaps not the best thing to happen in a Cathedral).

We had expensive pizza, courtesy of the grandparents, and then all of us went home.

September 2^nd. We go to the National Gallery, split up into 4 groups (the girls separately, the grandparents together, Dad and Ioan in their own group). It's lovely, going wherever I want and not having to worry about anything except the fact that at 3pm I'm at the exit.

I go really quickly through everything, despite the fact that it's all beautiful, because my eyes hurt and I feel nauseated from the glasses.

Honestly, why did I need glasses in the first place??

We meet up at 3pm and go outside into Trafalgar Square to get ourselves something to eat. After eating, Ioan and I go up to the ping pong tables to play. 

I think I want a ping pong table in my house. I have no idea where it's going to fit, but it's going to be there.

Yes. So that was a very quick summary of London.

My favorite part? 

Playing ping pong.

We're all kids at heart.