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UK archive
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.
I stayed in three hostels during my trip, and had varying experiences. Some things are the same regardless of what country you are in though — the noise, the drunk frat guys stumbling in at 3 am (”Duuuude, I can’t find my keeeys”), the breakfast (bread, cereal and coffee, maybe fruit), and the weirdness of sharing a few days with complete strangers in an intimate setting.
In London I stayed at the Astor Museum Inn. It’s located in a converted house with four floors; I, of course, stayed on the fourth floor. My room was a 4-bed female-only dorm, with two bunk beds and a sink in the room. Two shower rooms and a toilet were down the hall. Here’s a tip for staying in budget hotels: take your shower at night, because there will be no hot water in the morning (and it may not reach the 4th floor, either). I met some really cool girls from all over the world, and it was nice to have people to go out with at night to dinner and whatnot.
In Paris, I stayed in a single room at the Le Montclaire Hotel. The room was quite spacious, all things considered. It had a single bed, a closet (!) a small writing desk and a sink with a mirror. The showers are only on every other floor, though, and they have the kind of nozzle that you have to push continually to keep the water coming. While it was nice to have the space to spread out, I think I would have had a better time in a dorm, where I could have met more people.
In Amsterdam, I stayed at the International Budget Hostel. No free breakfast here, but they made a good ham, egg and cheese sandwich that you could buy. This was the most awkward hostel experience for me, because I was in a 4-bed dorm with three guys. They were all very nice, and I never feared for my safety or anything like that, but as I said before, sleeping in the same room with strangers is very intimate, and sleeping in a room with strange boys was a little too intimate. Plus there was nowhere to change except the shower stalls, which were wet most of the time. But being back in a dorm let me meet more people again, and the lounge area was very comfy for watching TV and reading.
I don’t think I would want to do the hostel thing every time I travel, but once you get acclimated to it, it’s not that bad.
Traveling through Europe on my own for two weeks was so big, that I have trouble figuring out where to start or what to say about it. There were the people, the buildings, times when I felt empowered and times when I was so homesick I wanted to cry (that usually happened when dogs were around) — just a lot to look back on and remember.
So I guess the best thing to do is begin at the beginning, a very good place to start. I kept a written journal for each day I was there, so that I wouldn’t forget anything “important”, like what I had for breakfast each day (vital info). Hopefully I can edit out the boring details and keep in all the good stuff, but sometimes the boring details are the best part.
My plane trip to Brussels, where I would connect to London, left Dulles Airport at around 7 pm — a full hour behind schedule because, as our pilot said, there was some “weather up ahead”. I had left enough time between connecting flights so that this wouldn’t affect me, but the guy next to me was going to miss his connection to Sweden, which sucked because he was going home to see his boyfriend, who he met on the Internet about 2 years ago and on a whim went to visit, and ended up staying for the past year and a half. The guy’s name is Danny, but I don’t find out his name until after he’s given me an Ambien and bought me a drink from the airplace bar cart. These two things combine to make it my shortest trans-Atlantic flight ever.
In Brussels, as we’re getting ready to walk off the plane, I hear over the intercom “Would a passenger King please see a United representative about your connecting flight.” Turns out my connecting flight is canceled, and I’ll have to take a later one at noon. So my first hours in Europe are spent sleepily drinking coffee and staring at airplanes while people around me chatter in French and Dutch.
I don’t hear my first English accent until I’m on the plane to London. I get to Heathrow around noon (there’s a one hour time difference between Belgium and the UK) and customs is a breeze. Before leaving the US, I bought a pay-as-you-go Oystercard online, so I go straight to the Underground, get on the Picadilly line train and ride it straight to Russell Square station (about 45 minutes). My hostel, Astor Museum Inn, is a 5 minute walk away, and when I get there I realize that I am directly across the street from the British Museum — this is an awesome location.
To be continued…
I haven’t updated in awhile because, well, not much is going on in trip news. September feels light years away, and I’m just trolling the Web, trying to find things to do in Europe that are inexpensive or free.
One thing that I partcipated in when in London 5 years ago (and totally forgot about until a few days ago) was London Walks. This is the group that does the famous Jack the Ripper walk, which is excellent, plus many other guided walks around the city. It’s about $12 for a two-hour guided tour, plus they do day excursions to different areas outside London for cheaper than I’ve found elsewhere. Plus, they have a similar group in Paris that has English-speaking guided tours (and a Web site that looks like it was designed using an HTML for Dummies book from 1995).
Some miscellaneous trip-related events:
- I think I’m going to book a day tour to Bath, Stonehenge (cue the Spinal Tap references) and Salisbury Cathedral during my time in London.
- Also on the agenda in London: going to see Ricky Gervais at Royal Albert Hall. Because I can’t pass up a chance to see one half of the brains behind The Office.
- This article in the NY Times about travelers insurance got me thinking about if I really need it or not. I know next to nothing about travelers insurance, other than the general view that it’s something of a scam. If anyone has comments about it, positive or negative, I’d be grateful for the input.
 Found via thecoolhunter.net, this art display at the London Underground’s Gloucester Road station looks more like something you’d see in Tokyo than England.
Last Saturday was the last of the sunny days around D.C. for awhile. I went to the Rembrandt exhibit at the National Gallery of Art and then strolled the National Mall and took some pictures. The one above came out brilliantly, I was so pleased.
I’m over my previous indecision about my trip. I started having wild fantasies of going off for three weeks and trying to pack in as many cities as possible, but have calmed down a bit and decided to go for quality over quantity. So the trip is like this: three days London; four days Paris; three days Amsterdam; with a day for transfers between each city (each train trip will be about four hours, so it’s hard to plan sightseeing on those days). I feel much better about this plan, and while the price isn’t any less than before, I think the overall trip will be much more relaxing.
In a little more a week until I go to Las Vegas (!!!). Better go buy some 3-ounce bottles for when I pack my liquids.
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