Day 182: London

Flight number 33 is brought to you.... Wait a minute, hold the phone - we were asking the Eurostar train from Paris to London. What a great way to travel.

We took a short train in the morning to Gare Nord. Passport control and customs were upstairs and it felt just like an airport, though we were still carrying all of our bags.

A short wait in the lounge later and we were on the train heading North under the English Channel. Awesome.

Beth and I spent the whole two and a half hour ride formulating our plan for London. We'd been talking a lot about it lately, but for some reason it just wasn't clicking in my head, which is unusual for me. I think part of it was that Beth has the expertise in London, and as a result I'd spent very little time researching it.

I had bought a French language map of London at the station before we left, and with my trusty sharpie, I began circling the sights and streets we wanted to see. We have half a day today and just two full days after that. We knew there were a few sights that were must see and a few neighbourhoods that were just walk. By the time we reached the shores of England, things just clicked and we suddenly had a solid plan for the first day and a half.

We arrived at King's Cross right on time and after a short walk and a few minutes we spotted our hotel which was right across the street. Luckily, our room was ready, as it was just before noon when we got there. The room was a surprise - clean and bright and not as small as I'd thought. I mean, for $400 a night, you'd think you'd be in a palatial room, but this is London and we'd gotten a pretty good deal at this place that's in a great location for us.

We went back to King's Cross station to ask the Tourist Information Centre people some questions. We'd read that single use fares on the subway were almost $10 Canadian per person. However, we had a very friendly lady at the TIC and she told us about the Oyster Cards that are used for local transport. You just load a £5 (just double for Canadian dollars ok?!) deposit, then £6.80 per day for adults and half for kids and you get unlimited use of the tube and all buses....that sounded like a bargain compared to what we'd read. She set us up with the cards and helped us with a bunch of other stuff, and we felt much better about our plan.

We decided to tackle the heart of modern London via a Rick Steves walk covering "West London". We took the Piccadilly tube to Leicester Square (do me a favour when you see Beth, ask her how "lie-Chester" square was...I've been intentionally mispronouncing place names and she's been acting like a true Brit and getting offended!).

Anyway, we got to LieChester Square in a matter of minutes, and suddenly we were in Craig Fantasy Land (trademark, patent pending!) - we were in the middle of the square, listening to a pretty nice solo acoustic guitar busker, totally surrounded by tons of movie theaters! In fact, this is the square where they have a lot of the red carpet movie premieres.... London just moved to #1!

It was lunch time, and we spotted a fish and chips place, which was on our list, so we made it so. Luckily, we had the foresight to split two orders of cod and chips - the portions were massive!

Lies in the square to the East, we headed for Covent a Gardens, on the way, we stopped In at Stanford's, a great travel bookshop and picked up a little Christmas ornament shaped like a globe - how apropos.

Covent Garden was grand (I'm really picking up the language here!). There were magicians, comedians, a small band and an opera singer who was really quite good.

The girls did a bit of shopping and I was able to acquire some genuine English wine gums that seemed to fall through a hole in my pocket....

Leaving, we turned North, heading towards Charing Cross Road. The route brought us through the really funky, cool "7 dials" part of town (named after a little monument that has 7 sun dials on top, pointing to the seven streets that meet in the little quiet roundabout in the middle).

We stopped in at a little music shop on Denmark Street, a street full of music oriented shops as well as a place famous for launching the careers of some of England's biggest musical acts.

Next up was SoHo Square, followed by a tour through SoHo, an area that features the gay section of town, as well as a seedier area mixed with porn shops and cool restaurants.

Out of nowhere, we turned right onto Carnaby Street which ended at the Liberty Department Store - a high end, niche department store if I'd ever seen one. The place was made out of the wood from two large naval ships and had a really cool interior look. The first price tag I checked, a scarf (what, I wanted to see what Beth would be getting us into!) had a price tags of £378! Ok, moving on....

We stopped at Starbucks where I got "Greegg".... Interesting. Our hotel doesn't have wifi and I don't have a SIM card for this short visit, so we have to rely on some free wifi services to get stuff posted and communication with home. Our house minder, Christine, has been fantastic (well, we've heard that from Christine herself... But we trust her :-)). Going for this long of a trip brings certain challenges - furnace cleaning and startup, cars run every once in awhile, gardening, mail, security, dealing with a cleaner that seems to make her own schedule.... Thank you Christine!

From the Liberty, we went west then turned south onto Regent Street. Wow. What a sight. Beautiful edifices with some Christmas decorations strung between hanging over the road. Bright red double decker buses zooming down the road. High end stores galore.

 I saw a humongous retail espresso and espresso accessories shop that I'm pretty sure, dressed as we were, we would not be allowed to enter ("get out you stew-peed Americans, with your leggings, sweatshirts and back packs... I spit in your general direction!") (technically, that was British, as it was done in a Monty Pythonesque outrageous Frenchaccent).
We stopped in at the very famous Hamleys (nicknamed by Papa as the "Pick of the Crop" of London - that's a joke only readers of this blog from Oakville will get...) which is a seven story toy story rivalling FAO Shwartz in Mahatten.

There were tons of drones on display. I mean, who would want a drone? It's kind of useless... Sure, you could control it with your phone, and you know, see video that the drone was filming, but that sounds, totally, useless.... I mean, unless you built houses and like.... Could justify... You know... Using it on one of your job sites...for.... Periodic inspections? Really stupid.... You know.... Unless....

They also had a lot of non adult toys that I had no interest in, but the girls, you know them, they insisted on looking through the entire Lego section, and the Harry Potter section, the Lord of the Rings section, the Star Wars section, the Game of Thrones Section.... It was so boring, but I managed to suffer through it, praise be to Gandalf...

The kids wanted to do a pub for dinner, so pub it was! It didn't take to long to,find one, and soon, Beth and I were sipping on a fine pint and half pint of Noble.... Good stuff.

At dinner, we talked about what would be our top five cities to live in for a year. We also talked about top five cities we wanted to visit that we hadn't been to. I was kind of in awe how big the girls' worlds were now.... Here they were rhyming off cities that I think 6 months ago they would not have known, and they talked about the cities now like they had a good idea of what those new places were all about.

The girls were exhausted and they were really trying our patience before and after dinner (does the moment they woke up this morning qualify as "before dinner"). They wavered between ecstatic to be in London to biting and scratching each other (ok, maybe not... But they were for sure elbowing and issuing dulcet toned expletives).

We got them back to King's Cross at a decent hour and they were in bed at 8:00 (9:00 Paris time). That's when I decided to have a shower. D'oh! Whoever designed the drain (sloping the pan to the chintzy glass sliding door side of the shower, really?) didn't account for potential drain blockages. Within two minutes of starting the shower, water was running out the shower, into the bathroom and then into the room. What a cluster fuck.

Yada, yada, yada, we were in a much bigger room down the hall and in bed by 8:45, so at the end of the day, it wasn't a big deal. They even gave us wifi (for one device...hah!) as an apology. Despite the bumps, we are pumped to be in London. The first time I came here was a whirlwind (meeting Beth for a weekend - she was here on business for a month) and I feel like I got to know a great aspect of London today.