Kew

We spent today with Vicki and had a lot of fun. We had a leisurely morning feeding the geese in the canals as we drank coffee on the balcony and enjoyed the sunshine.

One of Vicki’s cats was also fascinated by the birds, but he kept a safe distance.

The battery appears to have died on my video camera, so Vicki figured the best place to get a replacement was at a camera shop in the new Westfield's mall in Shepherds Bush. We did not end up getting a new battery, but the shopping center was impressive for its size and the affluence of its shops. It is the size of South Coast Plaza or one of those huge Chicago suburban malls, but much of the shopping suggested Hong Kong or Dubai boutiques. There was an undulating ceiling with panes of glass in it to let in some natural light, but that was the only token nod to the environment.

Westfield's London is built like a huge fortress mostly accessible from the massive parking structure below. Transport for London - the new name for the regional transportation agency - had made a new tube stop, but it was not inside the mall itself but at least 500 feet from the structure. We had lunch there was a Japanese place with the fastest conveyer belt of multicolored sushi dishes I've ever seen.

We spent the afternoon at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew in Richmond. It was a perfect, perfect day and the flowers were in full bloom. I was at Kew about 20 years ago on a rainy May day. I was not much into plants at the time, and I do not remember being all that impressed. Yesterday was completely different.  There is such an amazing variety of beautiful plants here.

Besides taking pictures of plants, we had a lot of fun taking pictures of ourselves and each other.

One picture I did not take was of the tree in a cage! It is an Australian tree thought to have been extinct for 200 million years or something. As a Millennium Seed Bank site Kew is helping to grow some samples to revive the species. There are lots of kid-friendly exhibits as well: this would be a fun place for a field trip, er, "school journey."

Jerry, Vicki's husband, came home this evening. He's working in Leeds during the week where he stays at a small bed and breakfast which he says reminds him of an updated version of Fawlty Towers. Since he grew up in Belgium and northern France, he helped us plan out next week's adventure in Normandy.

Listening in the Rain

Day Two was devoted to walking around London, sometimes in decent weather. John was feeling better, and we drove the car to Boston Road Station to catch the Tube. He almost always stayed on the left side of the street!

We started our day in Leicester Square at TKTS, the half-price ticket booth. John was determined to see a play, but the tickets available were all for shows we had either seen or had no real desire to see. It started raining fairly heavily as we were waiting around figuring out what to do, and I began to think that this day was going to be a disaster.

We decided to do two audio walking tours we downloaded from Audible. The first was of "Royal London" which explored the old palace quarter around Saint James's Palace. We started out at Saint James's Church, a Christopher Wren building right in the heart of the area. Here is John standing outside of the outdoor pulpit there.

Apparently there was not always enough room inside the church so people stood outside and listened to a sermon there. It was another era, one with no TV....

There interior of the church has some beautiful touches such as the intricate woodwork of the reredos and the peculiar baptismal font with the near-naked figures of Adam and Eve. William Blake was baptized here.

Still, I could tell that millions of pounds were needed to restore the church to its seventeenth century grandeur, and I wondered if they would ever successfully raise it.

The audio guide next took us by a whole bunch of little shops with names like "Jopps". All of these places had been making hats or boots or gloves ever since 1600 or so. They all had a sign saying something like “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen”. John thought this one had a particularly intriguing name.

We went into Fortnum and Mason, the store which traditionally provided the aristocracy with overpriced groceries. The interior was somewhat grand with a large circular stairway.

We found a statue of Beau Brummel, the dandy who scandalized polite society by wearing only black and white.

We passed by a number of former and current clubs for aristocrats. This one supposedly is the place where Ian Fleming apparently came up with the inspiration for James Bond.

Speaking of Bond, James Bond, John was absolutely certain he saw Daniel Craig, the latest actor to play that part in the movies, as we walked down a particularly high-priced street. Alas, we are not good paparazzi and did not get a picture of him.

We saw the old Saint James's Palace and saw where Princess Diana's body was laid in state before the funeral. It is a pretty unimpressive Tudor place. No wonder they built a few new ones. We passed by Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. Of course, we stopped to take a picture of the Coldstream Guards.

By this time, the weather had changed completely and it was actually warm and sunny. So we took a break on the lawn at Saint James’s Park. It had nice views of the tourist attractions.

After we had rested a bit, we walked back towards Leicester Square to start our second audio tour. On the way back, we passed The Banqueting House and we stopped in to look. Now with this name most of us probably think of some all-you-can-eat buffet, but The Banqueting House is actually the only remaining part of Whitehall Palace, the largest royal palace in the world before it burned down. This section was used for formal receptions, not for eating. It was commissioned by Charles I, and he had Peter Paul Rubens do the ceilings. They are magnificent.

The paintings strongly suggest the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, so it is probably no surprise that Cromwell chose this spot as the place for executing King Charles. The pictures were the last things he looked at before he was lead out to the street and his head was severed from his body.

We passed by Trafalgar Square when John caught this lovely picture.

Our second tour was of the Soho area. It was not as well done as the first one and was kind of hard to follow at points. But we did seem some interesting stuff. We started at Leicester Square and went through Chinatown. London’s Chinatown is not as extensive or as interesting as San Francisco’s, but it is picturesque in places.

We saw the Carnaby Street area, famous from the 60's. The audio tour did take us to a couple places we otherwise would not have seen. We went inside a fairly uninteresting Catholic Church where a side chapel had been decorated by Jean Cocteau.

And we came across the Broad Street Pump, the source of the 1854 cholera outbreak which killed thousands in London. I read a book about this called The Ghost Map and told John about every detail of how cholera is spread and kills you. I did this while we were in rural Indonesia, just so every time his delicate tummy was upset he would be convinced he was about to die horribly.

When our tour was over, we took the Underground back to Brentford. We had fish and chips for dinner. We had to beg some malt vinegar for the chips from the neighbors. Vicki only had balsamic vinegar – hardly the same!

Mostly Sound

We arrived safe and mostly sound.

The plane ride was uneventful. It was the first time, I think, that I've been on a flight where the lead pilot was a woman. I was really surprised by the number of Middle East folk who were on the flight. Everybody was apparently going back to Beirut after this.  I guess this is not unusual for Virgin -- the little screen on the back of the seat not only told you where the plane was over the Atlantic, but what direction to turn to for Mecca at any given moment. I did not, however, see anybody with a prayer mat in the aisles however.

We landed in Terminal 3 at Heathrow. It was a dump when I was last here, and it's still a dump. We spent about 45 minutes in the line for Immigration. The line for UK/EU nationals was even worse. John's stomach was deeply troubled - evidently taking an Ambien to help you sleep and eating every last thing the airline gives you is not a good combination - and he had vomited in the bathroom before we had left the plane. I was pretty certain that they were going to spot him as having Swine Flu and send us off to some Ellis Island type quarantine, but when we finally hit the immigration officer he was so busy stamping things that he never even looked up.

We picked up the car at Hertz. We are not really going to need a car all that much, but British Rail is not only so awful but so expensive that a 4 day pass cost more for the two of us than renting a car for three weeks. Driving into Brentford - Google Maps really does fantastic directions, so much better than Mapquest - John really started to get sick. Two times while we were stopped at a red light on the A4 he opened the car door and vomited. I wondered what folks in the car behind us were thinking, but Vicki says that binge drinking is so prevalent in England that people are puking all the time. After a couple hours more the tummy was quiet and he ate his dinner with the usual voracity.