London Days 3&4
Shopping in Camden. Still did not find the perfect femme!Jack Harkness shoes. Did buy a read leather coat for a truly embarassingly ridiculous amount of money.
Spent about an hour in the National Portrait Gallery, which was not quite as boring as I thought it would be. No portrait of Ada Lovelace, though :(
We found a place to go swing dancing, which I think K and L actually enjoyed more than me. Technically there were three dance floors as advertised, but they were small nightclubby dance floors surrounded by crowds of people drinking and walking through the dance floor. Not enough space to really show off. Everyone was dressed up, which was great for K to have something to look at, but I didn't get to dance with many good dancers and they weren't particularly friendly. There was a guy dressed in a pink satin shirt, pink bowtie, pink petticoats, pink knee breeches, pink fishnet stockings, and a pink streak in his hair. I'm not sure what the occasion was but he was a good dancer and all the ladies were asking him.
Sunday I went to the National Gallery while K&L went back to the British Museum. I don't see why one would want to look at more ancient artifacts when they could be seeing two whole rooms of Rubens, but I suppose that's why we're different people. I had 2 hours and had to hurry through the later things.
We had a reservation for afternoon tea at a hotel restaurant which was perfectly serviceable, and meet our main qualification: must contain cucumber sandwiches. Then walked around Kensington Gardens in the rain, saw the Peter Pan statue, went to Earl's Court tube station just to see the police box there. It doesn't look exactly like the TARDIS but close enough! They installed it in 1996, possibly around the time the BBC was trying to copyright the design.
Then we stopped by the purple bar, which is all purple and tiny chairs. L loves purple and enjoyed this and paid happily for the £15 purple martini we split. Our next mission was consuming our daily sausages, which is never a problem because there's always a pub somewhere. I fell asleep after that. I think they went to dinner but I wasn't hungry.
Today, the Tower of London! Where I will not be thinking about Moriarty's and the Crown Jewels, I swear. Well, maybe. It would fit into our mandatory Doctor Who/Sherlock/Hitchhiker's Guide/Discworld discussion per hour. Appropriate since L and I have only experienced Britain through fiction.
Culture shock: no recycling. It is so hard to bring ourselves to throw glass bottles in the trash.
Most impressive thing about London: functional public transit! I don't feel like a martyr every time I use it! Cementing my belief that transit and cars are actually opposed and the only way to have really good transit is to make it inconvenient to drive. Which is never going to happen in most parts of the US. I will now argue with my friends with more vigor when they complain about rising parking costs. The problem at hone is that suburban areas are built for cars and will never have functional transit and people will go there instead if the city because they are afraid of buses.
I'm serious about the bus thing. People will take disgusting, creepy subways, but still be afraid of buses.
Spent about an hour in the National Portrait Gallery, which was not quite as boring as I thought it would be. No portrait of Ada Lovelace, though :(
We found a place to go swing dancing, which I think K and L actually enjoyed more than me. Technically there were three dance floors as advertised, but they were small nightclubby dance floors surrounded by crowds of people drinking and walking through the dance floor. Not enough space to really show off. Everyone was dressed up, which was great for K to have something to look at, but I didn't get to dance with many good dancers and they weren't particularly friendly. There was a guy dressed in a pink satin shirt, pink bowtie, pink petticoats, pink knee breeches, pink fishnet stockings, and a pink streak in his hair. I'm not sure what the occasion was but he was a good dancer and all the ladies were asking him.
Sunday I went to the National Gallery while K&L went back to the British Museum. I don't see why one would want to look at more ancient artifacts when they could be seeing two whole rooms of Rubens, but I suppose that's why we're different people. I had 2 hours and had to hurry through the later things.
We had a reservation for afternoon tea at a hotel restaurant which was perfectly serviceable, and meet our main qualification: must contain cucumber sandwiches. Then walked around Kensington Gardens in the rain, saw the Peter Pan statue, went to Earl's Court tube station just to see the police box there. It doesn't look exactly like the TARDIS but close enough! They installed it in 1996, possibly around the time the BBC was trying to copyright the design.
Then we stopped by the purple bar, which is all purple and tiny chairs. L loves purple and enjoyed this and paid happily for the £15 purple martini we split. Our next mission was consuming our daily sausages, which is never a problem because there's always a pub somewhere. I fell asleep after that. I think they went to dinner but I wasn't hungry.
Today, the Tower of London! Where I will not be thinking about Moriarty's and the Crown Jewels, I swear. Well, maybe. It would fit into our mandatory Doctor Who/Sherlock/Hitchhiker's Guide/Discworld discussion per hour. Appropriate since L and I have only experienced Britain through fiction.
Culture shock: no recycling. It is so hard to bring ourselves to throw glass bottles in the trash.
Most impressive thing about London: functional public transit! I don't feel like a martyr every time I use it! Cementing my belief that transit and cars are actually opposed and the only way to have really good transit is to make it inconvenient to drive. Which is never going to happen in most parts of the US. I will now argue with my friends with more vigor when they complain about rising parking costs. The problem at hone is that suburban areas are built for cars and will never have functional transit and people will go there instead if the city because they are afraid of buses.
I'm serious about the bus thing. People will take disgusting, creepy subways, but still be afraid of buses.