London in a week

It's funny that I have an attitude towards Central London very similarly to what I have for Times Square- avoid at all costs.  Unlike Times Square though, once I am in Central, I realize it's actually kind of pleasant.

It's rather beautiful in its mesh of old and new, and being huge and sprawling means that tourist are not crowded so densely in a few areas, but spread out over a few miles.  Yes, there are tourist stopping erratically to take selfies every few steps when you hit a big monument, and people with cameras held up on sticks narrating videos while holding up the working masses on Oxford Street (whom I have so far successfully suppressed the urge to punch) and a few drunk party bikes holding up all manner of traffic, but for the most part, you can be in London and feel like people live there and work there, and with a little bit of an impatient pace, you can feel like you are part of that rather than just an observer.  

 It's a real treat for me to have guest in town to show around.  It's the only time I get to see the landmarks and check out what's going on around town.  Otherwise, I stay firmly south of the river, with occasional darts up to Dalston or Angel to meet up with friends and check out places to eat in more vibrant neighborhoods then what's around the flat (I only have the sort of fried chicken joints that indiscriminate drunks tend to frequent, and the bones of countless chickens are discarded along the sidewalks nightly).

Despite the January days being so brief, we hustled and got out of the house early every day, and the timing worked out well: instead of being dog-tired at the end of a long day, we were just moderately beat after a short one.

Besides, winter in London isn't nearly as cold and blustery on the east coast.  It's damp, and frequently grey and featureless, but it's only been icy a few times in the mornings so far, and nary a snowflake to be seen in years in the Southern part of the country.  It's good advice to dress warmly and expect rain, but it's no where near as terrible as it's made to seem, as the locals complain noisily at each drop of a degree on the thermometer.  But ah, green grass!  In January!  It makes things so much less bleak.

A couple things were new to me:  on the way from the Tube to the Tower of London, I happened to glance down and alleyway and spied something interesting, which ended up being a bit of the original Roman wall that surrounded the square mile of the city, now surrounded by hotels and large-scale construction projects, but somehow tucked away and preserved and infrequently noticed.

 The Tower itself is well worth a visit.  I hadn't been since I was first a visitor here in the early aughts,  it being the first castle I had ever had the pleasure of visiting on my first trans-Atlantic voyage.

It's a sprawling complex inside the walls, with lots of towers and odd rooms to explore, and a really hyped exhibit of the Crown Jewels where they plop you onto a moving walkway to spy, keeping the lines industriously moving.  

 It's well worth it to be taken around by a Yeoman.  These guides are funny and knowledgeable, and they get to live in private quarters onsite with their own private pub, and spin colorful dramatic yarns of residents past.  If you are going to be a tourist, then be a tourist!

For over 900 years, the white tower has been a famous landmark, revered and dreaded and the site of unjustly imprisonments and the executions of queens.  

Today, it's a working museum, with loads of military types trotting around with much ceremony.

 You also can't  eat well without stopping into Borough Market.  I like to take people there right before lunch with the thought to pick up ingredients for dinner, and have a good nosh while wandering around.  Cornish pastys, sausage rolls, goat gyros, fresh seafood paella, good crusty bread and oodles of fresh vegetables make this a place I can't afford to eat every day, but it's just fantastic when you have friends in town who aren't opposed to a little fat in their diet.  Even better to introduce them to a perfect Scotch egg.  It's standard pub fare here, but when it's done with a bit of love, it's really fantastic: a hard boiled egg (rid of its shell, of course) that is given a coating of sausage meat before being breaded and deep fried into a golden fatty mass of eggy goodness.  Like the standard bodega egg-on-roll breakfast sandwich in New York, these are as satisfying a gutbomb as any.

 I avoid the market on Saturdays though- it's just impossibly packed, and more people taking pictures of the artfully displayed produce, and very few actually seem to be supporting the vendors.  

The museums are the best attractions in winter, and people are always a bit in awe that they are all 100% free (well, except for exhibits, and those cost a mint) and you can just walk in off the street into the enormous turbine room at the Tate Modern.  Even if you don't really fancy modern art, it's still a site to see: a repurposed power plant, gutted outfitted with galleries and enormous bespoke exhibit spaces.

I've found that a week here will let you scrape the surface a bit: see the main sites, take in some museums and culture, learn to love (or hate) the local beers, sample a good curry and seek out some decent pub grub.  If you have the luxury of spending two weeks in London (you enviable thing!) you can spend more time exploring the sprawling parks and hidden crags of nature if the weather permits, and start to get a feel for how each neighborhood feels like an individual village that just happened to get swallowed into a giant metropolis.

 While it doesn't have the storied romance or beauty of Paris, I really do love it here.

Poppies

Ah, the poppies.  

 2014 marked the 100 year anniversary of the first World War.  To remember the somber occasion, the moat of the Tower of London slowly became a field of ceramic poppies.  The installation, called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Blood,  almost 900,000 flowers were "planted" leading up to the 11 November.  Staggeringly, each poppy represents a British fatality in the war.

 Starting in August with the "waterfall", the art installation grew and grew to encompass the entire moat.  Soon, this became a huge attraction, with people standing in lines for hours and congesting central London and some of the busiest tube stations in town.  All the tube stations had signs asking people to use alternate routes to get to the Tower as millions made their way to see it in the final weeks.  This made me nervous- I get agitated in the friendliest of crowds and waiting for hours in such crowds is bound to ensure that by the time I got to the front of the line, I would be a sweaty clammy mess of angry angst and cease to be impressed by anything.  

I chose a rainy night to make my pilgrimage.  It was crowded, but do-able.  It also happened to be the last night before they started uninstalling after Armistice Day, so I really waited until the 11th hour on this.  

It's just....incredible and moving and somber.  However, I did openly mock a man who was front and center on Skype on an Ipad and having a loud conversation about how his day was with the tinny speakers turned up.  Was he a New Yorker?  That was my best guess.  It's a war memorial, have some humility and respect.  Save the laugh with your blokes for later.    

It was hard to grasp the scale of it, but the entire moat was filled and you would need a drone to capture the entire thing on flim.  Ah, but that is where the BBC steps in.  Now that the installation is being deconstructed, you can buy a poppy!  All the proceeds go to charity.  

You can still see it- I heard that the cascade will be left indefinitely, and there is an exhibit in the Tower itself about the military history that it played during the war.  I haven't bought a ticket for the tower in years- maybe the first trip I took over to London ages ago- but I remember it being well worth the price of admission.  There's so much creepy dark history here, it really made for an appropriate and dramatic backdrop.      

A view....

Working in the glass and concrete jungle section of London is not without its charms.  The high, vaulted ornate ceilings of Leadenhall Market, a decent variety of lunchtime choices, odd tiny corners of park created pretty much exclusively for people in need of some vitamin D after being locked up inside for hours upon hours underneath flickering florescent.  

City of London is a tiny slice of the actual city, which expanded from this central Thames-side spot to gobble up other nearby cities and villages to become the behemoth that it is today.  It is mostly skyscrapers now, with small reminders here and there of the Roman past.

Also, views like these:

London, while growing, is much lower than NYC.  From low heights such as the 9th floor, you can get really lovely views, this one including the Tower of London and Tower Bridge.  Views like these are a real productivity killer.

Pas de souris, pas de problèmes

One of the things I'm loving about London is the fact that I don't have mice in my flat.  

I had been living in an infestation for so long I had started to think it was normal to wake up to cold, dead furry bodies scattered about the kitchen.  Mind you, I knew when I had moved in to the apartment in Paris that this was the case- the landlord gave me a box of rat poison when upon move-in (which I never used as snap traps are much more humane).  Old buildings are filled with holes, and despite the fact that I filled everything I could get to with steel wool and tin foil, the little bastards still got in.  

They were brazen, too- I'd have a few friends over and we'd be chatting it up and dining, and suddenly a loud snap would alert us to the fact that a mouse had been prowling around just a few feet from us.   I had the traps set  around the kitchen constantly, baited with nutella and a sunflower seed wedged in so they couldn't just lick the bait off and run off.  Some days, I would be dumping the bodies five or six times a day.  It just became normal routine....Wake up, dump the bodies, reset the traps.  Come home, dump the bodies, reset the traps.  They never got into food as everything was put away where they couldn't get, and I am clean as all get-out in the kitchen.  Still, all the crumbs of so many baguettes sustained them.  

My life is just easier without this morbid ritual.  

But somehow, it is more difficult for me here because I still don't have internet installed in the flat.  Seriously!  I moved in almost a month ago, and the tech isn't showing up for another two weeks now.  It's making life a bit aggravating, but at least I have a portable little laptop and a cafe across the street that has free, slow-as-hell, unsecured wifi.  They will probably miss me there once the tech finally shows up. 

Anyway....

Here are some pictures.  I took a chilly walk along the Thames, across the Tower Bridge and past the Tower of London.  I haven't done too much touristy yet aside from a few museums, as I'm saving that for when guests come to town so I don't end up with 18 ticket stubs to the same attraction in my collection.