London!

Our first trip since the move to Stuttgart was to London for the weekend. I had been twice in high school with I Giovani Solisti, an orchestra I was in, but Ben had never been. We both flew in late Friday night and immediately remarked to each other how funny it was to be in a foreign country where we could read all the signs and understand everyone. We got our first dose of culture shock, though, when our cab driver got into the “wrong” side of his taxi! Driving on the wrong side of the road is really strange and somewhat scary, even as a passenger.

We were staying at a place we had found on airbnb.com, same as for all of our trips. This time, it was with a nice family that had two kids. If you don’t know about it, airbnb.com is a great way to find a nice place to stay and is WAY cheaper than a hotel. You can get your own apartment or live with a family in pretty much any price range. We feel like we “live” in the city a little more than if we stayed in a hotel. Highly recommended. Oh, and much cheaper than VBRO.com (which is a similar site that more people seem to know about) with a better search function.

So many great works of literature take place in London, so it’s only fitting that our day on Saturday started out with fictitious places and characters. After getting our day passes at Paddington Station, we swung by the store devoted to Paddington Bear and visited the little bear himself:

Molly and Paddington Bear

Incidentally, if you buy a day pass at a major rail station in London, you can take advantage of these great two-for-one offers at a lot of the most popular tourist sites in London. A day pass on the weekend is only £7 per day (which pays for itself after 4 rides), and we got into everything only paying for one of us, so that definitely saved a lot of money!

After Paddington Bear it was off to another fictitious London site: Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station to catch the Hogwarts Express! Neither Ben nor I could get through the barrier, unfortunately. I guess we’re muggles after all…

Ben trying to get on the Hogwarts Express

I didn't have any better luck!

King's Cross Station

We had gotten a late start, so after waiting to take our picture at Platform 9¾ behind all the little kids there, we headed to Jamie Oliver’s London restaurant, Fifteen London.

Jamie Oliver's London restaurant, Fifteen London

Yummy gnocchi

This restaurant has the same mission as Fifteen Amsterdam, which we ate at when we were in Amsterdam. Basically, every year 15 underprivileged, at-risk young adults are given a first-class culinary education and work in Jamie Oliver’s restaurant for a year. Our menus said 80% of graduates are still working in the food industry. This restaurant was very different from the one in Amsterdam, but just as delicious. Ben started with gnocchi, while I got roasted potatoes with rosemary. For our main course, I got the most delicious short rib (cooked for 6 hours!) I’ve ever had. It came over a parsnip puree and Swiss chard, with some sort of relish on top that was amazing. Ben got Italian-style cioppino, which was also fantastic. We were, unfortunately, too full for any dessert. :( If you’re in London, make sure you stop by this restaurant (close to King’s Cross station) – it’s delicious and not too expensive, especially for London.

Italian-style cioppino

Amazing ribs!

By the time we were done with lunch it was already mid-afternoon and the sun sets in London around 4pm at this time of year. Plus, it was rainy and cold that day, so it was already pretty dark. We headed over to the Tower of London, but decided not to wait in line to go in. Ben took some great pictures of the outside, though!

Tower of London with a double-decker bus

Tower of London

Right behind the Tower of London is the Tower Bridge. Somehow I had missed this when I came to London in high school, despite the fact that it's huge and famous… Ben took about a million pictures of it and we tried to take a picture of ourselves in front of it:

Tower Bridge

 

We took the tour that goes up to the top of the bridge, which was really good! The tour is mostly self-paced, but there’s a lot of interesting history about the bridge and famous bridges in general. Since London just hosted the Olympics, there was display (that spanned the length of the bridge!) about the history of the modern Olympics, which started in 1896. It was really interesting to see all the various cities that had hosted the Olympics over the years and to read the little interesting facts they had listed about the Olympics for each year. You get a great view of the city from up top, of course, but since it was so rainy and foggy, we couldn’t see as much as you probably normally would. Ben still got some good pictures:

London at night from the top of the Tower Bridge

London at night from the top of the Tower Bridge

 

After going up to the top of the bridge, you also get to go down into the engine room, which explains how the drawbridge was hoisted up back when it was built in the Victorian era. This would definitely be the most interesting part of the tour for an engineer (like my brother), we thought. 

Tower of London engine room

On our list of things to do in London was to try to see a show. You can get reduced-price tickets in Leicester Square the day of, so we headed over there next to see what was available. Unfortunately, everything we were interested in was sold out or way too expensive (over £100 per ticket!). So, we decided to have an early dinner (at an Indian place that was way too spicy for me) and go to bed early, but not before stopping to make a quick phone call!

 

Sunday morning we spent having breakfast with the family we were staying with and talking with their kids. They were around 9 and 11 years old and really funny. Ben entertained them by speaking with a British accent, which he always does in a high-pitched voice for some reason. I wish I had a video to post of this, but you’ll just have to imagine Ben saying, “Would you like a banana?” in a British accent like one of the comedians from Monty Python who is playing an old, stuffy British woman.

When we finally set out, we decided to ride on a double-decker bus to get lunch. It’s fun to ride so high above the street. Here is a picture Ben took of the view:

Riding on top in a double-decker bus

 

Sunday was a beautiful, sunny day, so we decided to see all of the outside attractions. First stop was Ben Ben, the London Eye, and Westminster Abbey. We took lots of pictures of Ben with Big Ben:

Ben with Big Ben

The London Eye: Big and Slow

The London Eye is huge, but it moves surprisingly slowly. We debating riding on it, but then we saw how slowly it was moving and decided it would probably be pretty boring. 

Westminster Abbey, right next door to Big Ben and Parliament, doesn’t allow tourists in on Sundays, much to our disappointment. Fortunately, there was an evensong service just starting when we got there, so they let us go in for that. I remember when I visited Westminster in high school I wished I could hear a concert in the space because it would sound so amazing. I was not disappointed. They were singing music by Palestrina, Byrd, Robert Parsons, and Thomas Tallis. It was incredible to hear that music in that space, the way it was intended to be performed. We didn’t stay for the whole service, but it was nice to get to go inside for little bit. You can’t take pictures inside and we didn’t get to see where all the famous writers and other notable Brits areburied, unfortunately. Next time!

Next we walked over to Trafalgar Square, passing the mounted guards on the way:

When I was last in London (in 1999), Trafalgar Square was completely overrun with pigeons. Here's what it used to look like:

You could buy birdseed to feed them and they would come sit on your arms and your head, trying to get at the food. Now, they’ve outlawed feeding the birds there, so it’s just overrun with tourists. The most famous statues in the square are the four huge lions. Ben climbed up to get his picture with them and almost got eaten! :)

Ben with the lion

There was also a statue that didn’t match the rest, of a boy on a rocking horse:

I thought the plaque explaining it was interesting:

After Trafalgar, we walked through the Admiralty Arch and down The Mall next to St. James's Park to get to Buckingham Palace.

Admiralty Arch

By the time we got there it was dark (even though it was only 4:30 in the afternoon) and the famous guards were gone for the day. It was really striking to me how much less ostentatious and ornate Buckingham Palace is compared to Versailles. Buckingham Palace looks like a poor man’s hut compared to the Sun King’s retreat!

Buckingham Palace

We had bought tickets to see the London Symphony on Sunday night, so we decided to head over to the Barbican next to find dinner. I always thought the Barbican was an old hall, so I was expecting something along the lines of the Paris Opera or the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, but it’s not old at all (it opened in 1982!) and it’s really ugly. It looks like Boston CityHall or Mudd Library at Oberlin or any of those really boxy, concrete monstrosities from the 60s. Why in the world was that architectural style ever popular?

Anyway, we found a great place to eat at the Barbican that served British-style tapas. The food was excellent and not too expensive – high recommended! They even printed right on the menu which dishes were gluten free! One thing I ordered said it was a vegetable torilla. I was expecting some sort of strange, gluten-free tortilla with grilled vegetables wrapped up inside or served like a quesadilla without any cheese. Instead this is what I got:

Tortilla?

It was like a crust-less quiche. Apparently that’s what a tortilla is in Spain and Portugal. It was fantastic, but nothing like what I was expecting!

When we got the check, it said, “Thank you for your custom.” I asked our waitress (one of like four who served us) what that meant. She looked at me strange since I’m obviously a native English speaker. “It means thank you for coming,” she explained. I told her that for Americans, that sentence made little sense. I guess we were in a foreign country where people speak a different language after all! :)

London Symphony before the concert

The LSO concert we saw after dinner was great – Berg violin concerto with Leonidas Kavakos and Mahler 1. More composers need to write pieces where sections of the orchestra stand up. When the horns stand up at the end of Mahler 1 it is the greatest thing ever, even better than when they and the winds play with bells up!

After the concert, we headed home and went straight to bed. I had an early flight out the next morning to get back in time to teach on Monday afternoon. We didn’t get to see any of the famous museums in London, but we did get to do and see a fair bit in two days. Ben would say, “I say, good show!” in his fake British accent. Cheerio, then, mate!