London is a circus

March 17, 2012, 2:17 p.m.

I’m not sure what I expected from London, but safe to say it blew my expectations. It was far more than I’d anticipated. More, bigger, louder, prettier, scarier, busier, older, better.

We landed at Heathrow and were promptly forced to figure out the workings of the tube. A bit iffy at first, we got off a couple stops too early, planning to transfer to a different tube line there. Quickly realizing our mistake, we hopped another train, made the proper transfer, and made it to our hotel. After a couple more tube rides, we pretty much were old pros. That’s the thing about the tube. If you screw up, you can right yourself in a matter of minutes.

After mastering the tube, we fell in love with it. That thing will take you ANYWHERE. It’s so organized, so streamlined, so FAST. I know Londoners have their complaints about it—crowding, delays, lack of air conditioning—but I’m not hearing it. Coming from Seattle and our so-far sorry excuse for a mass transit system, I was pretty much ready to marry the London tube.

After checking into our tiny yet well-appointed room in the very grand Grand Royale Hyde Park, we explored our neighborhood on foot and got some Indian food at Curry Palace. From there we strolled through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, stopping to appreciate the Princess Diana Memorial fountain, a very large concrete meandering ring set into a shallow hill, the water bubbling up from the highest point and trickling down each side like a slow river.

Afterward, we walked around the Piccadilly Circus neighborhood, which was remarkably like New York’s Times Square with it’s enormous digital billboards, flashing lights, and crammed sidewalks. We visited Trafalgar Square and then confirmed the Queen was in residence at Buckingham Palace, her red, blue, and gold flag a-waving. We capped the night with dinner and brew at a pub back in Hyde Park.

On day two we saw Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, took a spin around the London Eye, and explored Leicester (LY-ster) Square, another extremely busy and fast-paced neighborhood. My favorite from the day was our tour of the Tower of London, where past kings like Henry VIII lived and beheaded various wives like Anne Boleyn and tortured and killed various trusted friends and public figures like Sir Thomas More. In Beauchamp Tower, you can see the “graffiti” that prisoners carved into the walls during their stays, some of them elaborate works of art. We also got to see the crown jewels, which was pretty trippy. You see an old painting of a queen on the wall, and there in front of you is the actual crown that's painted in the picture, in all its gleaming glory. Our yeoman tour guide Moira was from Scotland, and when we told her we were headed there, she recommended a pub in Oban where she knows the proprietor. In about a week we’ll take her advice and find Lainey at O’Donnell’s pub, bringing her Moira’s regards from the Tower of London.

We spent several hours at the Tower before meeting up with Thayer’s high school friend Rina, whom he hadn’t seen since graduating from Exeter in 1997. At the Princess Louise Pub near Covent Garden the three of us enjoyed some pints in a gorgeous alcove of ornate dark wood and frosted etched glass. Later on Thayer and I stopped at a cheap show tickets stand and scored ourselves some seats at the following night’s showing of Wicked. Surely my musical-freak friends are appalled that I’d not yet seen it.

We began our third and final day in London at Harrods department store in the ritzy Knightsbridge neighborhood. This seven-floor behemoth is shocking in its luxuriousness. The “food court” is an array of oyster bars and caviar houses in a large hall decorated in white and gray marble and pastel-colored tiles, like a beautiful, precious candy shop, or a tea party for a princess. The children’s toy store has toddler-sized luxury cars you can purchase for £10,000. That’s nearly sixteen grand. The Ford Festiva I drove in college was $600.

Harrods was owned for twenty-five years by Mohamed al Fayed, father of Dodi Fayed, Princess Diana’s boyfriend who died with her in the 1997 crash. Al Fayed thus had two memorials erected within Harrods: one has framed pictures of Diana and Dodi and a pyramid containing the ring Dodi had bought and the wine glass from their last dinner together, still smudged with lipstick. The second is a bronze statue of the two of them releasing an albatross together. Both are fascinating, if a little creepy.

All that Diana-stalking and luxury-not-affording made us pretty hungry, so we went to Borough Market to scare up some lunch. I never imagined any market could be more impressive than Seattle’s Pike Place, but walking through Borough Market made me feel like when I think Earth is really huge and then I see a picture of it next to Jupiter.

The British Museum, which we cruised through next, also dwarfed every other museum I’d ever been to. Among the thousands of captivating ancient relics were the Lindow man—a murdered man so well preserved in an acidic peat bog that you can still see his skin and hair after nearly 2000 years—and the Rosetta Stone, whose perfect engravings of text in Greek, Demotic, and ancient hieroglyph made me nearly pull my hair out with its awesomeness.

We jetted off to St. Paul’s Cathedral just in time for the 5 o’clock Evensong service. The sounds of the church choir echoing through the domes and caverns gave me the shivers, and Thayer and I both agreed that with its ornate adornments, everything seemingly dipped in gold, it was even more spectacular than Westminster Abbey.

We capped our three days in London with Wicked, a perfect way to spend a both relaxing and exciting evening. What a show. There may have been some weeping coming from my general direction.

Then we went “home” and vegged in our hotel bed, watching a news program about overcrowding on the tube. Since we were Londoners now, this was quite concerning.

The next morning we got up early and hopped a train out of the city, and thus ends the story of Hayley and Thayer in London. I think we’ll only need a few decades there before we’ve seen everything there is to see.

(P.S. Happy St. Paddy's Day! We almost forgot about it because nobody over here is decked out in green.)

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