I'll be back in the game possibly tonight, if I'm awake that long (spent 25.5 hours yesterday traveling or sitting in airports, and only ended up with about 5.5 hours of sleep after crashing in my bed upon returning home, before I had to get up to get the kids to school), but for now, just a few thoughts.
15 Trivial Things I Learned While Traveling in London
1. For a place which insists you throw your rubbish in rubbish bins, the Underground has a deplorable lack of said bins.
2. "Mind the gap" means, basically "Watch your step", in American. It's what they print on the platforms of the Underground to remind people to be careful as they enter or exit the trains. Oh, don't look for the "Exit", by the way, if you are trying to get to the street after disembarking from your train. The signs will all point to the "Way Out".
3. Most Underground trains will have the poles for passengers to hold on to painted the same color as the train line. For example, Circle Line trains (yellow on the map) will have yellow poles. The one exception I found to this was the very last Underground train I took to Paddington station on my way back to the airport. It was a District Line (green on the map), but it had yellow poles. (It didn't matter, as either one would have taken me to my destination, but the train did identify itself as a District Line train.)
4. Having words printed on the crosswalks to tell you which way to look for traffic is kind of handy.
5. I actually make scones correctly. They taste just the same as the ones there. (Chalk up one success.) Now, to learn how to make clotted cream and Victoria Sponge . . .
6. If you order water in a restaurant, the wait staff will ask you, "Still or sparkling?" The first couple of times I heard it, I had absolutely no idea what they were asking, especially as the vast majority of wait staff I encountered did not speak English (either British or American) as their first language, and I couldn't understand the word "still". And when I did finally understand, I was puzzled. What on earth would be "still" water? What they are offering is bottled water, either sparkling or . . . not. If you want tap water, you have to outright ask for it, as they will not offer it in their initial question. If you look at them like an ignorant foreigner (or a blonde), they will finally get around to mentioning it.
7. The restaurant prices are all reasonable . . . if you think of them as being in dollars. Unfortunately, they are not in dollars, and the dollar is not showing very well against the British pound right now. Ouch.
8. It takes my husband and me three times as long to make it through an attraction as it does other people, because we read and examine everything. We're the kind of people who, instead of saying, "A suit of armor, that's nice," end up staring at the tiny detailing the craftsman put into the border, wondering how he could have managed to make it so even. (Or marveling at how fine the threads were spun which were used to create the incredibly delicate lace on some of the gowns.) In Kensington Palace, Westminster Abbey, and the Tower of London, we barely made it out by closing time.
9. You can spend seven hours going through the Tower of London and still not see everything there is to see. Go past the royal jewels twice, as the moving walkway by them moves too swiftly to see everything well the first time. (Most everyone else will just move on, so it really doesn't cause a lot of extra traffic if you do.) And do get involved in a reenactment, if you happen upon one. (We were some of the few adults who jumped right in when a soldier reenactor called for volunteers to join with the King's forces to help escort a prisoner who was threatened with vigilante justice safely to his cell to be tried according to the law. Other people joined those who were yelling for his death.)
10. Joining a walking tour with a guide is very worth it and usually reasonably affordable. In addition to a vast store of tales, legends, and other stories, the guides have a way of pointing things out which may otherwise have been missed. (This includes the Yeoman Warders in the Tower of London.)
11. "Bespoke" means "custom" in American. For example, what we might call a "custom" suit, they would call a "bespoke" suit. I would never, ever have guessed that one if our guide hadn't mentioned it (well, more than merely mentioned it) as we passed by an elite hat shop in Kensington and its neighboring men's clothing store, specializing in "bespoke" suits. (I actually had a lot of fun trying to figure out the many differences in vocabulary usage. As a dabbling writer, it's really rather fascinating. I'm sure my husband became wearied of my giggling every time I made a connection about the language, however.)
12. It is entirely possible to become sunburned at low elevations in humidity, under cloud cover. Yea. It just takes longer and is less severe.
13. If you walk down a street and see a house with a blue circular plaque on the front, it means someone famous or noteworthy lived there/was born there/etc. In some neighborhoods, you can hardly get away from blue circular plaques, but it was fun to go read then when we saw them.
14. 221b Baker Street is between 230-something and 240-something. Yes, the numbering was changed. You see, what would normally be 221b is a larger building, taking up the space which would comprise several numbers. The place now numbered 221b was actually a 19th century boarding house, with a floor plan very similar to what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described in his Sherlock Holmes stories, so it works beautifully in its present function: the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Obviously to my family, but not so obvious to you, because you would not be aware that I've probably read all the Holmes short stories and most of the longer ones, I absolutely had to go inside. (They sure had a lot of fun recreating things, down to the "VR" on the wall which Holmes made one day by shooting bullets out of his revolver. My husband, of course, analyzed the kind of weapon likely to be used at that time period in London, including the powder charge and why the bullets would not have simply gone through the wall, hehe . . . Yes, we are sometimes enamoured with details . . .)
15. Not all people consider American travelers rude. You hear all the time in the media the condemnation of American travelers, who are said to be arrogant and rude. As I stood in line to receive the recording for the self-guided tour at Westminster Abbey, the friendly black man who was handing them out, programming them to the appropriate language as needed, asked, "What language?" I said, "English." And he immediately burst into a broad grin and exclaimed, "An American! See how she's smiling at me!" (Of course, that made me smile more--how could I help it--as I blushed a little.) As he picked up the device, he said, "I love Americans! They always look so bright and shining." I thought it was a marvelous compliment.
All in all, the visit was a lot of fun. I don't think I saw sunshine more than an hour or two the six days I was there, and my husband and I ran ourselves absolutely ragged, walking hither and yon. When you look at it, we could have seen more places, but considering point number 8 above . . . I'm not sure we would have enjoyed it any more than we did doing it our way.
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| For us, the spring weather was kind of like winter . . . highs in the 50's. Brrr. Sometimes I wished I had brought my gloves. |
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