Londontown
The weather has suddenly turned from crisp and cool to freezing and oh-my-god-I-can’t-feel-my-fingers. Fun! So no better way to warm up the digits than to write up more trip stories.
London, I love you, even though you are too expensive and there is no way a normal person of normal means could live with you. The weather was only rainy one and a half of the days while I was there, which was a miracle — when I visited in 2002, I think we had bad weather for half a week.
Highlights:
PJ Harvey at the Royal Festival Hall: My first time seeing her live. My seat was awesome, and she was amazing — warm and funny and so talented.
Design Museum London: Very cool exhibit on typography and fonts as art.
Sir John Soane Museum: This home has been preserved exactly as it was when Soane died in the 1830s. It’s a neat slice of history frozen in time.
St. Paul’s Cathedral: I climbed the 259 steps to the top of the Dome. I thought I might die.
Tate Modern: A fun and interesting space with a broad range of modern art.
Bath: I took a daytrip to Salisbury Cathedral, Stonehenge and Bath. I would love to visit Bath again some time. The Roman Baths were so interesting, it was unreal to look at these stones that were first put there in 400 B.C. I didn’t have much time to see the rest of the city, but it was very picturesque, and reminded me of my college town, Asheville, NC.
Portabello Road Market: One of the few things I repeated from my last trip to London — still crowded, still colorful, and still a great place to spend your money.
Bad parts:
Ricky Gervais live at Royal Albert Hall: The show itself was good. But my seat was absolute shit. I was in a glorified adult high-chair behind a curtain in one of the boxes. I had to crane my neck the entire time to see anything. After the amazing seats I had at PJ Harvey, it was hard to accept that lightning wouldn’t strike twice.
Westminster Abbey: Dear church guy, thanks for trying to shame me into staying for your church service and effectively ruining my whole day**. Even though I did not feel comfortable staying, and thought that I was allowed to change my mind and leave before the service actually started, apparently, you thought otherwise. Guys like you are why I haven’t been to church in 12 years.
**A downside of traveling alone is that you don’t have anyone to rant to when you get pissed off, and so it’s harder to bounce back. But I got over it by day’s end.