I have returned from my week-long vacation to London with my boyfriend. It was a wonderful trip, and I have plenty of tales of it to share over the next several days (probably interspersed with some other material, for those of you not interested in "looking at vacation pictures" either literally or in the form of stories).
It began with a long flight to Dulles from Denver, and a longer flight from there on to London. That second leg was on a 777, a very cool plane with individual TVs for every seat, on which you could watch a variety of movies instantly on demand. But this wasn't quite obvious. See, we were sitting in the second row behind a bulkhead, on the left side of the plane; the row in front of us had two seats, while our row had three. I had the aisle seat, which carried the wonderful prize of not having a seat in front of me: therefore tons of extra leg room! But also, no seat in front of me: apparently no cool insta-TV.
About 60 minutes from the end of the flight, we saw someone in a bulkhead seat in the center pull out this crazy Transformer arm from somewhere even lower than the dinner tray, and his personal TV was on the end of it. That's when I learned that the big yellow twisty knob labeled "Release," that looked potentially hazardous or something, should actually have been labeled something helpful like "Get Your Cool TV Here." Had I taken the plunge and turned the suspect knob after reaching cruising altitude about six hours earlier, I probably could have watched three movies or something. Alas. But I'm passing the intel onto you, if you should ever find yourself in such a seat.
We landed at Heathrow, where apparently the gates are as far from customs and the baggage claim as the highway is from the airport itself in Denver. (If you've never been to either airport, that's far). We walked for 20 minutes through a comically long, sterile hallway of endless turns to finally reclaim our bags and get the trip started. I think England's athletes may have a measurable advantage in this year's Olympics for not having to tire themselves out walking through these halls before arriving at the Games.
Out hotel was in South Kensington, very near the Royal Albert Hall, Natural History Museum, and Science Museum. All wonderful places, I've heard. All places we walked by on our last day, actually, and asked ourselves, "might we not have saved ourselves some foot sores one day and gone one of these places instead?" But as you'll see, there's not much we did do that was likely worth trading away for that instead.
We arrived around noon. Knowing we'd be completely exhausted and jetlagged -- but knowing we'd never begin to adjust if we gave into the urge to go to bed right away -- we'd purchased tickets for something in advance that very afternoon. We headed to the London Eye, this well-known ferris wheel-type attraction built around the turn of the millennium along the Thames:
That photo is actually from the river itself, because the first thing we did was board a 40-minute cruise up and back along Thames, taking you by the numerous landmarks along the river. It was a perfect "first thing to do," actually, as we got to see where many of the things we'd planned to do were located, and know that if our plans somehow got fouled up, we could still say we at least got to see a huge number of things and places.
I was asked before the trip by a lot of people if I had any reservations going there so close to the Olympics. No, I was not worried that things would be extra zany there yet. But yes, Olympic preparations are evident everywhere in the city. Most of the Underground stations were warning about the preposterous amount of traffic they're expecting a month from now. There's a parade of flags of different nations hung above Oxford Street (something I'll get to another day). During this cruise, we saw that the Tower Bridge has been adorned above with the Olympic rings:
We completed that mini-cruise, then rode the Eye itself. I'd certainly recommend it to London visitors, as it affords wonderful views, from the breathtaking:
To the exclusive (who knew there was a building hidden inside the other building?):
To the unsettling (why does the guy seem to be holding up a dead child in this statue?):
This all kept us up and moving until around 5:30, and we were running on fumes by then. We stopped for a fast and simple dinner of sandwiches somewhere, and then called it quits for day one.
More (oh so much more) to come!
No comments:
Post a Comment