...And Out

Getting to Gatwick turns out to be flawlessly timed this morning, even though it involves several transfers: out of the hostel at six to the Oxford Circus tube, step onto an arriving train, wait one minute for the Victoria tube, walk onto the waiting Gatwick train, and leave within half a minute.

I disembark forty-five minutes later at Gatwick thinking, That the rest of the trip to Seattle goes so smoothly.

Not quite.

Gatwick is wall-to-wall people. A harried airport worker points me to Zone B—farthest from the train’s entrance, but solely Continental—and I position myself in a single lane of people who are all pressing forward through seven lanes of oncoming travelers. Tempers are ragged, but most people shuffle along the best they can, looking haggard and travel-worn.

A few folks mutter and grumble and try to shove us up from behind as if we are a herd of recalcitrant cattle, but our progress is often blocked by cross-traffic: overpacked luggage trolleys, overflowing strollers, rolling hip-high suitcases, and enormous backpacks trailing their straps on the ground. Getting anywhere takes the stamina of a salmon swimming upstream for its last chance to spawn.

Having paid extra on my mileage card to upgrade to Business Elite class continues to pay off in valuable perks, especially on days when security remains high and the rest of humanity here is milling around in near-mob conditions. Zone B is in a basement of sorts, with Business Elite in their own check-in area. In the half hour wait, a man checks my papers while I’m in line, the lady takes my bag, checks me in, and sends me round the back end of the entry to the departure gates, which gets me to a security station in less than ten minutes.

They hand-search my daypack carry-on (which has very little in it), and are just about to take away my pens when, mid-search, the ban on pens is lifted—right after the security gal had to abscond with innumerable colored pens and pencils from a little girl’s pack ahead of me. I get to keep my pens, but she removes my aspirin, jetlag pills, apple, Snickers bar, and fruit granola bar before letting me through. Just about all that’s left is Perry, my writing tools, and my tickets/ID.

Sheesh. Talk about an unbalanced reaction to a threat. As of this morning, they’re now allowing cell phones, electronics, and laptop computers, all of which have detonation-capable battery systems, but they take away my Snickers bar. I feel so much safer.

Business Elite also means I have access to a Continental lounge, where I can while away the couple of hours until my flight. (Just for the record, the first class BritRail pass wasn’t worth the extra cost, even at summer travel, although the roomier carriages were more comfortable than in standard, and I sometimes had electrical power for Perry. About half of the trains I took didn’t offer first class. I was also more likely to talk to folks in standard than first, and I experienced more of the local people there.)

For the very bored (me right now) or the very desperate (god forbid I reach that point), Gatwick airport offers two floors of food and shopping and a smoking cell in the middle of the upper floor. The cell is about twenty by thirty feet, walled, unceilinged, with glass that curves inward over the smokers from shoulder height to six or seven feet up. An entrance is on each side of the cell. The space is packed—standing room only. Puff puff. Segregation of health. The opposite of an iron lung. A haze stands over the cell—that’s what caught my attention first: indoor smog.

Finally I’m on the plane. Tears come as I think of leaving Britain—I’m finally going back to the place I call home. I toast the event with a champagne mimosa while the plane continues to board. Christina is our attendant today. A charming black girl with friendly eyes and smile.

Business Elite feeds you. Seven course meal—warm nuts, bread and appetizer, salad, dinner, cheese/fruit plate, dessert, after-dinner drink. The 18-year-old boy next to me from New Jersey goes through five dinner rolls. I counted. He keeps asking for another one from different servers. Then more courses kept coming. He and his older brother have just spent five weeks in Greece, where this fellow was born. He goes every year. Their mom works for Continental; the eldest boy gets the travel perks, which he shared with his brother this trip. They swapped coach and business class on the way over; now it’s the younger boy’s turn to be in the plush seat. He’s loving it.

Mealtime over, he disappears into a movie, and I disappear into remembering my last day in London. Sitting by myself at St Paul’s steps yesterday, I took in the world, watching the people, and felt the truth of it all—the whole Earth is my home, these people—all of them—are my family, the same as I, different, all here sharing this time with each other, together.

What rooms will I go to next? Who will I meet next? When and where will I hook up with that life partner for good? How long am I to travel this planet’s halls, watching, sharing, experiencing, gathering Self knowledge?

Once we reach the US, it takes me longer to get through Newark airport than it did to get out of Gatwick and London. Wait for my baggage to come down the carousel, and then wait again to go through customs. Customs is so backed up because of heightened security that they make me leave my bag with them for a full search when they can get to it. I have a four-hour layover. The way to the lounge is convoluted and requires two security checks. Plus another security check to reach my actual gate for Alaska Airlines. Everywhere, security is understaffed.

I’m starting to feel tired, despite the “gain” of five hours’ time. It will be good to arrive at night and be able to go to sleep.

If we can ever get off the damn ground. First our plane arrives late from another destination, then it has an electrical failure after we’ve pulled away from the gate. We wait a half hour for an electrician, another half hour for him to declare the problem isn’t serious, then another hour to return to the jetway and crawl to our turn at the head of the runway. We finally are in the air three hours after our original departure time. I like Alaska Airlines. I really do. Just not at Newark Airport.

Even with a post-midnight arrival in Seattle, with SeaTac airport shut down and empty, my friend Patti and her daughter, bless them, are waiting for me. I collect my checked bag (grateful and astonished that it actually got here), and they drive me the 60 or so miles to Olympia in the wee hours of the morning.

I manage to stay awake enough to visit with my housemate, Marianne, who also has waited up for me to come home at 2am. Most important, I have a happy reunion with Patchouli, my cat, who, to my great surprise, does not give me a cold shoulder for having left him for the summer, but instead climbs all over me, purring his happy little heart out. Marianne has taken good care of him.

Leaving the job of unpacking for later (like five days from now), I collapse into bed and curl up into warm and familiar surroundings. It’s good to be home. Processing the trip, like washing the clothes, can wait.

London Over...

The last weekend of my three-month holiday is back in London, where I spend the time reacquainting myself with neighborhoods, reconnecting to friends I met with three months ago, and handling the logistics of getting out of a city whose main airports are now constipated by a fear-driven mentally of batten-down-all-the-hatches, give-no-mercy-to-infants-or-the-infirm, and suspect-everything-as-contraband high-level security.

A couple of days ago, Norman had sent an e-mail in which he alluded to some upcoming travel trouble, but having been blissfully unaware of out-worldly goings-on during the C2C and in York, I was merely baffled by what he meant.

It is from Maria, a Spanish roommate at the York YHA, that I get the first whiff of what’s in the wind for getting out of London. We are packing up bags and tidying bunks an hour before we leave together for the York train station on Saturday morning. She asks what I think of the day’s headlines about events at the airport. I stop, a shirt poised mid-stuff in my pack, and ask what she means. All that registers are phrases like “tightened security,” “bomb threats on Thursday,” “all flights cancelled.”

Eyes widening and heart dropping, I pull her newspaper to me. Cover story. Page after page expounding on the aftermath and upheaval from an apparently thwarted terrorist plot on British Airways in London on Thursday and Friday. They are maddeningly vague on the details of the threat—nothing concrete to report, really, at this early stage of investigation. But something about using false bottoms in water bottles to smuggle explosives and then using batteries from mobile phones to set them off. And the prospect of other bombing schemes that authorities may not have detected yet.

As with 911 in the US, reactions to the threat are swift and extreme, based on scant information and an ample dose of alarm that, of course, means mayhem at the airport. Security closes like a noose around everyone and everything related to travel. No carry-on luggage. No strollers or diaper bags. No purses. No packs. No wallets. No water. No food. No medicine. No electronics. Zippo. Put your passport, keys, cash, credit cards, tickets, and tampons into Ziploc bags and welcome aboard to flight #56 to all points non-British. Put all the rest into the hands of severely overloaded luggage carriers and systems, and pray they meet up with you in the end.

I get more information throughout the day. Heathrow is a mess, and will be backed up for days. Endlessly delayed flights. Stranded passengers. Lobbies overflowing with luggage and red-eyed travelers. People camping out in parking lots, running out of airport-supplied sandwiches and water, most British Airways flights canceled. Thank god I decided to not go with them this trip. I leave Tuesday on Continental from Gatwick, which, while also under security clamp-down, might have a faster return to normalcy.

By habit, I travel only with carry-on, and the prospect of all this self-delusional, “we can keep everybody safe by manic hyper-vigilance” security nonsense pisses me off. I’m most aggravated at the thought of packing my trusty little Pocket PC, Perry, and releasing it the custody of airport handlers or the mail. The thought of having all my travel records lost forever amid terror-fed disorganization doesn’t thrill me.

Petty concerns, I know, but I often wonder if the whole gain of terrorism isn’t in the buildings or lives they take down—it’s in their ability to trigger us into crippling our own infrastructures by our predictable, knee-jerk response to threat. It’s that marvelous, disturbing Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” played out for real.

Today is Saturday, though, and I leave Tuesday morning. Maybe things will blow over a little by then. I decide to keep an eye on the news and begin to lay plans for getting me and my stuff (some of which has been piling up at Norman and Jean’s house) back to the US with the least amount of schlepping and hassle. Will be weird traveling with absolutely no carry-on, though.

* * *

My London lodging is the YHA hostel behind St Paul’s Cathedral. Good location. Way more expensive than most other hostels—prices rival the Glynne Court Hotel that I stayed at in May, in fact. Nicer amenities, though. Wider staircases (lots of them, as usual), decent cafeteria, cute outdoor courtyard, noisy lounge, many bathrooms and showers (not all of them ones I’d like to use). One shared room tonight and a single room for the next two nights that’s right next to a 3/4 bath at the end of the hall.

It feels good to come back to London and to stay at St Paul’s, almost where I started my touring. This circle of travel feels complete. By now (my fourth or so trip) London is a familiar city, familiar enough that I can set a general direction by map and don’t get so easily lost when I wander.

It’s mid-afternoon, and I need to drum up some evening action in the shape of Saturday dinner and theater. I strike out for Salieri restaurant, Mom’s favorite haunt on the Strand (she goes there every time she’s in London, which can be several times a year). She’s insisted that I look them up to introduce myself and have dinner there. She’s told them all about my being in the UK for the summer, and to be on the lookout for me to come in. I was feeling too shy to approach them the first week I was in London, but that bashfulness is long gone after three months on my own.

The restaurant is empty this early in the day. I am aware of lots of reds and golds and bold-colored oil paintings and gilded theater props festooning the ceiling as I head for the concierge area at the back of the restaurant. I meet a short, swarthy young man in a fine waiter’s uniform—black suit and white shirt.

“Hello,” I say, “I’m looking for someone named Sandy. Is he here?”

“There’s no Sandy here,” the young man says in a Middle Eastern accent I can’t place. “How can I help you?” He’s not looking very willing to help. In fact, he’s looking as if he suspects me of being on a stakeout for a late-night robbery.

“I—er—uh.” I feel my face redden. Maybe I got the name wrong. I fish wildly for Perry, which has the contact info Mom had given me, and I babble an explanation of my presence, falling back on what Mom had suggested I say, feeling a little foolish to be namedropping some American dame this fellow may not know.

“My Mom sent me—Joanne? She comes here all the time. The blonde. From the United States. She said she’d tell you that I might be coming in. I’m her daughter.”

The man’s brown face goes from blank to fully lit. His black eyes and white teeth shine. He stabs at a snapshot that’s tacked above the cash register: a laughing, outgoing, sixty-something woman is surrounded by the Salieri crew, including my host.

I laugh, relieved. “Yep, that’s my mom!”

“Welcome, welcome!” He hugs me greatly. “I’m Sammy! Sammy Jr! What took you so long to get here?”

I mutter something about needing time to settle into London, other things to take care of.... He doesn’t look convinced, and I finish, “But I’m here now.”

“Yes, yes. And your mother. She’s coming again in December!” He continues to beam and introduces me to a waitress, Kate, who has overheard our greeting and whom Mom hasn’t met yet. “This is the daughter of Joanne, in the photo. Nice lady,” he says of my mom.

It’s too early for dinner (only four thirty), so I arrange to return for a pre-theater meal before I see Donkeys’ Years, a comedy that’s playing nearby. (Very good farce, precursor of the even funnier Noises Off by the same writer). When I come back, Sammy Jr has gone to the barber, and I must introduce myself all over again to Sammy Sr, owner, father, and generous man who also pulls me into an immense hug and puts me down at a private table away from the main traffic of the front door.

The booths here are painted with crowds of cartoonish people, and even though it’s early yet and the dinner rush hasn’t started in earnest, I somehow don’t feel alone.

As this is to be my last fancy supper in London, I decide to go all out. I order the filet medallion and ask Sammy Sr about the vegetables, which aren’t listed with the meal.

“No, no. We’ll take care of you,” Sammy insists. He sits down beside me in the booth while the waitress takes my order, and we talk about his restaurant, which he has been running since 1978, and about family and life in general.

“Waking up is a gift,” says Sammy Sr. “Take each day as it comes.” Wise words from a man who has lived some years.

The restaurant steadily fills and the number of folks being turned away without reservations speaks for the long-term quality of Sammy’s restaurant and service.

My filet “medallion” ends up being a full-out steak standing beside an artistically presented potato and tomato Cootie Bug-like critter that makes me laugh out loud. The bowl of fresh snow peas, fine beans, and carrots that comes with it is enough to feed the table next to me, as well. As the food keeps coming and I protest at the amount, Sammy Sr winks. “We have to take care of you or we get into trouble.”

The dessert I order—a luscious blood-orange mousse—comes with an added plate of fresh fruit big enough for three. Plus, bless him, Sammy puts a 25% discount on top of it all, much of which I convert into a fat tip.

As I waddle through the crowded theater district to the Comedy Theater, I realize that I like London...in small doses. It’s places like Salieri and people like Sammy Jr and Sr who keep the scale human. Otherwise, it can be just as faceless as any other destination city, so overrun with visitors that it’s hard to find the locals.

* * *

Sunday I play tourist with a dash of feeling like a local because I meet with two London-based friends. First is former Seattleite Sara for breakfast at Pain Quotidian in Maryleborne. It is great to catch up and share travel stories over buttery, jammy croissants and hot tea. She and her husband have done a lot of walking trips, including Nepal, and she shares the same love of walking as I do as a form of transportation.

My next two hours are spent on foot getting from Maryleborne to St Paul’s, via Mayfair and the Ritz, then the Embankment along the Thames, to meet up with Bath-met friend Sarah on St Paul’s steps. We intend to eat lunch and visit the Tate Modern across the Thames.

We actually end up eating at the Tate Modern’s restaurant—pricy but very good food, company, and view. We take in the standard Tate Modern exhibits, and I’m mostly unimpressed with the works—while some invite longer study, not much if this is my style...whatever that is. Whimsy, I suppose, is closest to it.

Sarah and I giggle and roll our eyes over some of the more extreme offerings and their oh-so-important sounding appraisals. I mean, who can really be serious speaking in hushed tones about the universality and rational aesthetics of a slashed canvas in a frame, or of a fluorescent light bulb mounted diagonally on a wall, or of a field of zinc and steel plates laid out ungrouted on the floor? Sometimes I wonder if artists aren’t really smirking at all this to-do, their tongues firmly planted in cheek, pulling a joke on all us grandiloquent, swooning art critics and patrons. The ultimate in whimsical art, perhaps?

It dumps rain as we leave the Tate, and Sarah and I huddle umbrella-less under the steel Millennium Bridge stairway with dozens of other folks, trying to stay out of the drips and marveling at the amount of water that is gushing down the walkway and disappearing into drains to the Thames. The squall passes quickly.

We soon part company for the evening, and I return to my final night of packing. I’ve decided to mail all my (mostly dirty) clothes home on Monday and use my rucksack to carry all my souvenirs and gifts back to the US on the plane. No need to bother with a second bag on what will undoubtedly be a hairy travel day, although the clothes will take up to six weeks to arrive home.

* * *

Monday morning, the BBC reports changes in security levels: a small carry-on will be allowed, the size of a small briefcase, and so will small mobile devices. Hurrah. I can go back to Plan A for bringing Perry and the daypack on board.

My last dinner for the trip, appropriately, is around the dining table with Norman and Jean, with whom I shared my first meal three months ago. Norman has me meet him in London after his work day, where he’s been serving as a guard and greeter at the Goldsmiths’ Hall on Foster Lane at the top of Cheapside Street (a “market” street, with guilds and manufacturers on side streets).

Happily, he can give me an after-hours tour of the place. Goldsmiths’ Hall is for the gold and silver workers, and a new prime warden (like a president or chairman of the board) has been voted into the guild every year since the 1300s. (This guild is also the origin of the word “hall mark” for proof of quality and integrity of coin at the assayers office nearby.)

The building was built in 1800s, after a rebuild in 1660 following the infamous London fire. Right now, it’s in the middle of its annual, two-month-long, floor to ceiling cleaning. Furniture has been removed from some rooms and crowded into others, canvas drop cloths cascade down the double staircase, and there’s an overall sense of upheaval to the place. Massive, six-foot wide crystal chandeliers have been lowered for cleaning. Even this disorder, however, can’t fully disguise the hall’s opulence and grandeur.

The building’s interior walls are more than three feet thick (requiring two oak doors and a cavity that acts as a short passage) and covered with wood and ten types of marble from Italy. Brown, green, cream, pinks. Ceilings soar three stories up, painted white and gilded; other rooms in wood paneling are also gilded; ornate wood carvings are everywhere, as are emblems and statues of the guild’s mascot, a leopard. Some doors are triple-man high. In one room, the guild’s motto, “Justice, Truth, Queen,” is woven into a crest in the center of an inch-thick, wall-to-wall carpet, which is still holding up after a couple hundred years.

We lament the chunks of ancient oak that we find in the rubbish dumpster outside—the result of renovation and beam replacement. What wood carvers and furniture makers wouldn’t give for that centuries-old oak!

Jean and Tara are waiting for us at home. Tara, bless her, has a printout of the latest airport info waiting for me. We all talk and eat spaghetti and laugh over how things have gone for us over the summer, and I eventually I unpack a knee-high stack of boxes and packages that I’ve mailed over the months. It’s like Christmas in August, especially since I get to hand-deliver special gifts to these, my new friends. Surrounded by debris, I start packing the large rucksack, rearranging this way and that. At first Norman had worried how I’d ever fit everything in, but I do so, with a little room to spare.

Norman drives me back to the YHA. As we pull up, a line of smartly dressed young women led by a smartly dressed matron marches down a side street toward the hostel. They are walking in single file, wearing identical red jackets and identical dark trousers, dragging identical red roll-arounds in a perfectly straight line, turning corners and crossing the road with the mathematical precision of a drill team. They are Canadian, just returned from a France and Switzerland tour. Heading home tomorrow, too, they hope. Air Canada.

I laugh, give my final farewells to Norman, and wave goodbye as I head through the extra-wide door to the YHA and my last night’s sleep in London.

Stairs and Alleys, Byways and Hidden Crypts

As a many-time visitor to London, Mom ("Mum" in the UK) has long since abandoned the Tube in favor of walking and the occasional taxi. After spending four full days getting around London on foot, I tend to agree...although I still prefer the Tube over taxi for longer distances when I need to travel on a schedule.

I spent these four days amid intermittent bouts of steady rain and blustery winds climbing over 1000 steps at St. Paul's to the highest gallery you can go to, riding the London Eye at the south of the Thames, and meandering through alleys and back roads of London by following a couple of published walks I'd found in a book called Secret London, as well as a guided tour that started in Covent Garden.

Doing St Paul's and the London Eye on the same day has a lot to recommend it--I got opposing views of the city, with the Eye like a silver ring standing on edge in the distance from the top of St. Paul's, and St. Paul's dome a tiny cap among square roofs from the top of the Eye.

St. Paul's lives up to its reputation for gilded beauty and art. Vaulted ceilings painted and tiled in saints and apostles and bible stories told in golds, deep reds, blues, and greens. Alas, no photos are allowed inside to protect the art and the reverence of the place--it is still a functioning church.

I did snap a few shots of the less-public innards as I climbed the wooden spiraling stairs to the Whispering Gallery inside the dome, and then wound my way up the second and third level of spirals (stone steps and metal staircase, respectively) to the exterior galleries for an overlook of the city. People used to be able to climb a ladder to the highest point of the church, but it's been closed for about 20 years according to one of the gallery attendants.



Outside on the galleries it was very windy--coats and hair and camera straps flapped around everyone. From the Golden Gallery, the section just above the cap of the dome, I took a photo down over the dome (below left) to the same spot from which I'd taken a photo of the dome from the ground (below right). The tall fir tree in the center of both images is the same.



I got a kick out of the simple graffiti on several walls of St Paul's interior corridors. Some that are carved into the stones date back to the 1700s and are only initials, while others, written and dated a month ago in pen, include Hotmail e-mail addresses. The desire to leave a mark that reminds others "I was here, please remember," seems universal across the ages.

I ate a sandwich lunch at the cathedral's Café in the Crypt (yes, the real crypt in the basement) among tombs and statues and memorials of people long dead. Tombstones had been stuck to the walls and laid on the floor as pavers. We tourists were shooed out from a small sideroom, the chapel in the crypt, at 1:30 so the room could be prepped for a wedding. A bit creepy if you ask me.

The London Eye was worth the walk from St Paul's (about 30 minutes), the price of admission (£9), and the bit of a wait (only 15 minutes this time of day). It's more like a people mover than a ferris wheel, taking 30 minutes to complete a circuit in the pods. I could barely tell we were moving, which was nice because it gives lots of chances for photos as we went round.

At the end of the circuit, the speaker system announces that a photo is about to be taken, Disneyland style, of everyone in the pod and instructs those who want to be in the photo to collect at a certain part of the pod, according to the NW, NE, SE etc. labels inside. The instructions were a bit confusing, and a large family gathered themselves together, faced the Thames, and grinned at what they thought was a camera inside the pod...just as I spotted the flash of the camera that was mounted behind us, on the Eye itself, taking a photo of what seemed to be an empty glass cabin.

I walked home that night from the Eye via Shaftsbury, Charing Cross, and Oxford St, coming upon two groups of Native American street musicians on side streets off of Oxford. They seemed like anachronisms in these London courtyards--dressed in leather-fringed, feather-headressed regalia and dancing to deerhide drums and wooden flutes and the hooyahiyaya rhythms that I usually hear in the Pacific Northwest. CDs for sale, of course.

The next morning, Sunday, Norman and Jean and I had planned to toodle around Islington, London. Rain delayed our start, so Norman taught me map and compass skills at their dining room table. They'll come in handy on the rest of the trip, especially in Dartmoor and Devon areaseas (if I get the and on the C2C walk.

We did troop off into town in the rain to take care of some shopping. I bought a pair of trekking poles in Tchibo's, and Jean and I each bought a new celery-green rain coat there. We looked like a pair of Kermit the Frogs.

After a lunch with Jean and Norman of smoked salmon, cheese, bread, and tea, the rain let up enough for Norman and me to head out toward Stoke Newington area.

The walk went through neighborhoods of Edwardian and Victorian era homes, some also late 1700s. All tidy and in rows. Some very posh areas per Norman. Elsewhere in town, Daniel Defoe, of Robinson Crusoe fame, had lived; we had a drink at the pub of his name.

The highlight of this walk for me was an out-of-the-way local cemetery--can't remember the name of it right now, Al-something. It was overgrown in a way that was both creepy and compelling.

Walkways ran through the area as if they were set for a forest stroll, but among the trees and tangles of knee-high shrubs stood hundreds of tombstones--many of them tilted and weathered and clustered and broken and moss-covered. An old stone chapel, once bright with stained glass windows and including a covered area that enabled mourners to dismount from their carriages out of the rain, was a decaying ruin.



My City walks on Monday started at St Paul's around 10:30a, with a pub lunch break at The Ship on the way. Today was a workday. Everyone in this area was dressed in black suits and black suit-skirts for the office. The famous beige-, red-and-black Burberry plaid was prominent in scarves, raincoats, and brollies (umbrellas). I was following a couple of walks in the Secret London book, which offered numerous opportunities to duck into alleyways and corridors, some of them just wide enough for two people.

Alleys back home aren't generally considered safe or welcome places, and I had to pluck up the nerve to venture into them at first. However, alleys here are clear of debris and rubbish bins and the smell of urine, and are used regularly by everyone as shortcuts through town or by smokers chased out of their offices by non-smoking laws. Bummer in all this rain.

Truly off the beaten path, I never felt unsafe, although the couple of twisty dark corridors that lead to The Mitre, "London's most hard to find pub" (says Secret London), felt like they were straight out of a Dickens novel, or perhaps the inspiration for Nocturn Alley in the HP books.

A warren of alleyways, curving side streets, and foot passages often led me to some very interesting pockets of shops, pubs, or public art. One street that housed the George and Vulture pub also had a high-end jeweler and a wall-mounted medallion marking the site of London's first coffee house in 1652 (no, not a Starbucks).

Through another, I came upon the house where Samuel Johnson, dictionary writer extraordinaire, lived for ten years while he wrote that famous 14,000-word tome. The house tour wasn't worth a £5 entry fee, but it was interesting in its way. It was four stories of mostly empty rooms and numerous engravings/portraits of Johnson's contemporaries on the wall. It did have a clever way of using hinged walls with doors to separate three rooms or make one great room.
I often trod on cobblestones or pavers and passed new or remodeling construction that had excavated through layers of brick and stone roads. Many former church gardens and cemeteries, with several of their erstwhile tombstones propped against walls, have become pocket parks where office workers come out for a cigarette or lunch.

I followed the trail to the ruins of a Roman crypt that the city planners had built around, in situ and surrounded by glass, as part of the bottom floor of an office building at Fleet street (former publishing mecca for newspapers).

The contrast of old and new in London is extreme, especially in The City area. At first I found it too jolting to take; after a while, it grew on me enough to appreciate the efforts that Londoners are making to move ahead without also completely sacrificing the awareness of their ancient roots.







Having toured the city on my own, it was time for an official guided walk. The only one available to my schedule was "Behind Closed Doors" with Brian as guide. Starting at Covent Garden, we dropped in on the new Opera House, all glass and iron work and stone steps and shiny escalators.

Our next stop, twenty minutes at the Royal College of Surgeons was particularly engaging for the scientific or macabre minded (or, like mine, both).

This place contains the remaining part of an original collection by the Hunting (Hunter?) brothers, who spent their lifetimes as surgeons and medical, uh, explorers of the 1800s, collecting body parts and bones of people and animals and learning and lecturing from their findings. The upstairs of the college, recently opened to the public at no charge (but alas, like most museums, also closed to photos), is lined with glass displays explaining the often ghastly means and tools of medicine and surgery in those days, the development of anesthesia and antiseptics, and the stories behind some of the medical miracles, disasters, and oddities the men collected, such as the umber-colored skeleton of one Victorian fellow who stood over seven feet tall, and a tumor the size of a basketball that had been successfully excised from a man's neck.

A row of what looked like modern art paintings in red on dark backgrounds turned out to be human nervous systems laid out carefully onto boards for study. It was like a cross between a DaVinci study and a plate from Grays Anatomy.

The rest of the space was a biology lab on steroids. Medical students sat with sketchbooks in front of shelf after shelf of specimens marinated in formaldehyde or encased in resins. Biology samples included cross-sections of bones, muscles, rooster heads, tumors, bugs, and skulls. Up, down, and all around, room by room of them, stacked above the cases, and on glass shelves.

We also visited St. Clemens church, where many of the Royal Air Force and other military forces are honored. The floor is paved in stone and metal plaques commemorating many military feats in the UK and abroad. Brian especially pointed out the medallion for the squadron that helped break up German dams during WWII in order to stop the Germans from creating a nuclear bomb before the U.S. The story is covered in a great movie called Dambusters--worth looking for at your local vid store or ordering from NetFlicks.

The last stop, the Royal Courts of Justice, was a highly secured site (metal detectors and bag searches), beautifully appointed in marble walls and arches, mosaic floors. It had a spot set aside for the history of judicial costume collection. I never realized how much the style of robes told about a person's job and stature in the legal system.

I hurried off to meet Kim, a friend of Leigh's, for lunch in the cafeteria of the Home Office, a centerpiece of UK government near Parliament. Entry was performed via a pass at the front desk, then a moment or two spent in one of the glass cylinder security pods that everyone uses each time they enter or exit the rest of the complex.

The cylinders are glass floor to ceiling and are barely big enough for one person to stand in. A card key opens one side, you step to a green circle on the floor, the glass door slides around to close behind you, you pause about 3 seconds in the pod, and a second door in front slides around to let you out. I felt a bit like one of the Surgeon's College specimens on display, or that I was about to be hit with a laser and beamed as particles to the other side of the planet.

The Home Office has colored glass panels along the roof line; the sunlight through them made an interesting Mondrian-like pattern on the sidewalk.

I made a failed attempt to record Big Ben's 3 p.m. bells--too much street noise to capture it well--and decided to skip a repeat visit to Westminster.


Instead, I walked from Westminster to Kensington via the south edge of St James Park, round Buckingham Palace along Constitution road, then through back-neighborhood roads and mews west of the Buck House. I came upon and meandered through Harrods a bit (the four floors of Egyptian-décor elevators are like something out of a Disneyland ride). Tired feet encouraged me to Tube back to the hotel.

Dinner was local--Abu Ali (Lebanese) restaurant off of Edgeware road. Mint tea (a Lipton teabag with a handful of fresh mint steeping in hot water); a salad chop of lettuce, tomato, peppers, cucumbers, and crunchy fried Lebanese bread as crouton in olive oil and pepper; and lamb chunks and more crunchy Lebanese bread swimming in yogurt and butter--a gyros in a soup bowl. Hot (temperature), tangy (yogurt), crunchy (bread), meaty (lamb), yummy, and filling.

I spent meal time naming my London photos, then went to an Internet cafe to upload them to my online folder and check e-mail. Lovely to use e-mail to stay in touch with folks, and to know I've got friends watching for word from me and sending good thoughts of safety and supply throughout my stay.

(P.S. Thanks to those of you who have left comments on my blog and/or have e-mailed to me. I love hearing from you all!)

Fur on the Menu and Smoke from My Nose

Maryleborne, the area of London where I'm staying, is like a mishmash of the Middle East, but without the civil strife and dusty streets. Store fronts, banks, restaurants have signage in Arabic and English. Fruit and grocery markets, Internet cafes, and local clothing stores are run by people of Iranian, Turkish, or similar origins. Restaurants come in Lebanese, Armenian, Arabian, Indian, and other flavors. Some of the women walk the sidewalks in robes and veils, but most are in modern dress.

Today has been a walking day and preparation day. I explored the Maryleborne area, then wandered along New Bond, Regents streets into Leister Square, where I bought tix to Smaller, a three-woman performance tonight at the Lyric Theater, fourth row £25. Bought a Vodafone SIM card for my phone and got it set up, and stumbled onto Longacre St, home of the famous Stamfords map store. I dallied there for an hour and bought my Coast2Coast walking maps and a few for Dartmoor and Cornwall area.

Taking dinner at the Souk Restaurant (Moroccan) outside Leicester Square by Mousetrap's theatre turned out to be an adventure. It's a dimly lit place, with sharp incense burning and two rooms--one at the street front and one a bit deeper in. The tables are large silver trays set on stands at knee height (read: potentially tippy and awkward to negotiate) and surrounded by cushions and low poofs to sit on. Each table is set with a large bottle of water and two glasses and candle. Colorful rugs overlap to cover the floor, sometimes bunching up to catch an unawares foot. Moroccan music plays over a speaker system.

The hostess led me to the back corner, where five other patrons were seated--two women drinking wine and just digging into their food, and three middle-aged blokes in a corner who were just ready to order.

The space was crowded with cushions and tables, and I edged in beside my table to flop with little grace onto a booth-like row of cushions. They were draped in slip covers that needed constant adjusting.

The menu here has a goatskin cover that still wears its fur. I didn't know whether to pet it or read it. I opted for both. For supper, I chose a stew of lamb, prunes (finding out the yikes-bite-too-hard-way that they're unpitted), golden raisins, apples, and almonds served with couscous and a huge silver pot of mint tea. During the meal, I eavesdropped on the three men, who swapped celery and prunes from each others' chicken and lamb plates, and bantered about women, food, grade school experiences, and actors.

Halfway through my meal, the cook came into our little alcove on a mission to get through the door that was virtually inaccessible for the cushions and tables clustered here. With a long-legged reach, sneakered feet, and a "'Scuse me, 'scuse me, sorry" he stepped broadly over the cushions and nearly on top of one of the nearest of the three men, opened the door, and descended into a basement. A few minutes later, he emerged with six large, plastic-wrapped styro-trays of meat stacked under his right arm and clambored his way back over the cushions and guests, again muttering, "'Scuse me, 'scuse me, sorry." John Cleese in Fawlty Towers couldn't have done it better.

As I paid my bill, a two-foot tall glass unit arrived at the men's table nearby, smoking from the top and snaking a 3-foot long tube.

"What is that?" I asked, leaning with interest as the one called Steve, whom the cook had climbed over, pulled the ceramic end of the tubing toward himself.

"A shisha pipe," he said in a difficult to follow Irish-based accent. "Also called a hubble bubble."

A hubble bubble? Surely I hadn't heard that right. Images of the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland came to mind. "How does it work?"

He pointed to the tower of glass and its various bowls and bulges. "Not sure, really. There's water at the bottom here, and it's drawn up as steam through here, where the tobacco is--it's a resin, actually, not like a cigarette tobacco--and the top here is very hot--don't touch that. It's glowing coals, that is." He put his hand above it, and I did the same to feel the heat of the burning ring at the top.

"And how do you do it?"

"Like that bloke in America, Bill Clinton," Steve joked. "No, he didn't inhale, did he?" He offered me a puff, and I surprised myself by saying, "Yes, thanks, but after you've tried it first. You ordered it. Show me."

He took a deep inhale. "Tastes like bubblegum."

"Yeah, right," we all laughed.

Another fella tried a puff and put the tube from his mouth with a grimace. "Foul."

I took an inhale deep enough to make the pipe gurgle from the base. This drew praise from the others. "You made it bubble. That's good."

The flavor was slightly sweet, not tobacco-ey as I expected. Yes, and slightly like bubblegum, or, as Steve pronounced it, "booblegoom." I found out later from Norman that the tobacco resin is soaked in honey and something else I can't remember. I'd already had a very sweet meal, so I didn't taste as much as I might have from the pipe, but smoke blew out of my nose as if I were a baby dragon.

They offered me some more ("Oh, you know you want to" said the one who had proclaimed the stuff foul), but as I was already running late for the theater in waiting for my bill to come, I declined with thanks. The tobacco's sweet flavor recurred several times on my way to the performance, accompanied by a hint of headiness. Such is the lightweight that I am with this kind of stuff, even after a full meal.

Landing London Among Friends

Today is May 29, a bank holiday, and I am sitting at a small table in my room at the Highridge B&B in Farmborough, taking the first opportunity to plug into keyboard and mouse since I arrived in the UK. The tablecloth is one of those vinyl jobs, printed in an orange weave pattern made to look like fabric. Its slick surface works great for the mouse.

Let me back up a bit. It's been nearly 15 days since I landed in London and spent my first day with Norman and Jean, friends of my mom's who live in Islington, a part of north London, and with Sara, a colleague from Seattle who lives in Maryleborne, in the heart of London.

Norman graciously picked me up at the airport for my morning flight, and I experienced the heartening comfort of coming out of Customs to spot, among a phalanx of strangers lining the roped corridor of arrivals, a photo-familiar face holding up a sheet of paper with my name on it. A hug and a double-check of my identity against a photo I'd sent Norman ("Right, then, it's you") we drove the hour or so to their home, where Norman fed me tea, helped review my general London plan and lodging options, and gave me the chance to shower after the trip in from Boston.

While Jean was at work, Norman and I walked Parliament Hill, which offers one of the best viewpoints over London, as well as a refreshment break at the cafe next to Kenwood Estate at the top of the hill. Norman later drove me to Sara's,who lives just north of the Marble Arch tube stop. I stayed at her gorgeous flat that evening, and the next morning found a bedsit (hotel) just a few blocks down the road on Great Cumberland.


It's the Glynne Court Hotel, with a single room on the third floor, the stairs barely wide enough for me and my pack to be lugged up beside me. At only £35 per night, this was a bargain.