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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Hello again, Reykjavik

March 16, 2012, 8:12 a.m.

True, this trip is concentrated mostly in the U.K., but first things first; we began our trip by spending twenty-four hours in Reykjavik, Iceland.

We’d taken the same Icelandair flight just two years before and had experienced the particular frantic heaven/hell of that first day in Iceland with no sleep, so thrilled and ecstatic even as our bodies shut down and we had to consider toothpicking our eyelids to stay awake. This time, we thought we’d be smart about it and have a little snooze on the plane.

The excitement had already set in, though. And no matter how disciplined we were, it seemed a feat of magic to fall asleep at 4:30 p.m. home time—magic we did not have.

Instead we stayed awake, watched movies, and chatted up our seatmate—a woman who does research for the University of Washington on women in commercial fishing. Her focus had been on Brazil for the past several years, and she’d recently moved her focus to Iceland. Since she spends months there at a time, she had plenty of advice to offer.

Before we knew it, it was 7 a.m. Iceland time, and we were still awake. Time to go. Time to go, go, go.

We took the Flybus from Keflavík airport to the terminal in Reykjavik, and for the first time we saw Iceland in the dark. You might recall that during our May 2010 visit, the sun only just dipped below the horizon, leaving a 24-hour glow that our body clocks had to fight in order to sleep. Now, in the dark, it was easy to remember that it was our bedtime, but we had only one day there, and we sure weren’t going to spend it sleeping.

So we walked to Marteinn’s apartment on Laugavegur (street) in the “heart of town,” as boasted on his Airbnb website. Marteinn is an artist—a painter and music composer. We’ve heard that some very high percentage of Icelanders are artists, that field of work being strongly encouraged as opposed to mainly discouraged as in the United States.

Right smack in the middle of downtown, we unloaded our stuff in Marteinn’s guest room and followed as he showed us around his small apartment, the highlight of the tour being the combination bathroom/kitchen complete with dish drying rack and space shuttle shower.

Marteinn gave us our keys and went on his way, back to his other house outside of Reykjavik in an area that doesn’t even have a name. Sadly, we soon discovered that our key to the building’s outer door did not work. Hoofing it up and down the three flights of stairs about six more times proved that none of the room’s other keys did the job either. But no matter; we met a kindly neighbor who generously gave us her spare. The Icelanders are a trusting lot.

Hayl: Amun…dar…dalur.

Thayer: What was that?

Hayl: You heard me.

After some cream-and-sugar-stuffed pancakes and coffee at Café Loki (hello again, Swiss Mocha), we walked to Perlan, Reykjavik’s Saga Museum. Before entering, Thayer noticed some steam rising up from the ground nearby, so we went to investigate. There we found a bubbling, boiling water pot in the middle of the woods. I crept closer to snap a picture, and a nice fellow sitting at a nearby picnic table snickered and said, “That’s not Geysir.” Heheh. We felt a little silly, gawking at a regular ol’ pit of boiling water in the woods, but what can we say; we’re Yankees. Gaui first took us for Canadians, having met Canadians at each and every stop on his recent European tour. We were happy to represent North America’s midsection.

Gaui didn’t give us too much guff about our boiling water fascination. He chatted us up for a while, as he’d just been passing the time reading his book outside on the overcast, 32-degree-Fahrenheit day. “Good weather,” he’d said. We laughed, as we’d never find the likes of him stateside on such a day. Gaui is pronounced “Gwee,” and it’s short for Guðjón, pronounced “GOOTH-yown.” Gaui, if you’re reading this, I apologize if I’ve just butchered the phonetics. I’ve got to make sure we’re on good terms, because we’re taking him out for coffee when we get back to Reykjavik in a few weeks.

Inside Perlan is the Saga Museum, where they have wax figures telling all the stories of the Icelandic Sagas. The museum did much to outline Iceland’s founding history, but we both found some of the stories confusing and difficult to relate to one another, as far as chronology goes. Clearly we need more lessons. My favorite story is of Ingólfur Arnarson, who threw three pillars from his ship overboard, planning to settle wherever the pillars came ashore. After a time, he sent two men around the island to find them, and when they returned, they were all, “Dude, no, you can’t settle there.” But Arnarson did indeed settle there. He named it “the Smoky Bay,” or rather, Reykjavik.

After Perlan we followed a trail down to a beach where a map told us there was a warm water inlet and, in the middle of that, a hot pot. We found the inlet, but it was not warm, and the hot pot in the middle was bone dry; still, any Icelandic beach is lovely to us.

[during the long walk from the beach back to downtown]

Hayl: Hmmm, maybe I’ll lose a couple pounds on this trip.

Thayer: Maybe if you watch the Swiss mochas.

Hayl: Watch them go down my gullet?

Thayer: Right.

On we went to Tjörnin, a manmade lake in the middle of downtown where people like to feed giant geese and where a webcam is set up, which I like to check often when I am at home in the States. Being the super sleuth I am, I spotted the camera and took a picture of it, which will be ridiculously boring to everyone but me. When we get back to Reykjavik, I plan to locate all the other webcams I check obsessively and take pictures of them, too.

Next was dinner at Hressingarskálinn, where I had something non-scary like a pizza and Thayer had a towering mountain of fish stew. At about 9 p.m. it was time for bed, or rather, for lying awake all night long while the very loud sounds of downtown Reykjavik echoed up to our third-floor window and our fears of missing our early morning bus kept us in a near-constant state of frantic readiness. We think we finally succumbed to sleep around 2 a.m.

Up we jumped at 5:45 a.m. and walked the kilometer back to the bus terminal, tiptoeing through the sleeping city and cringing whilst our suitcases thundered along the uneven sidewalks and cobblestones.

I slept the entire flight to London.

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Bound for the UK!

Tomorrow we head to the UK and Iceland for three weeks. Life certainly has its ups and downs, and we are beyond grateful for this big, big up.