Anyway, this is actually my second return trip from London this week. It’s tough being such a high powered executive as I am. <--That was a joke, really - I’m not that big of a deal.
Today’s trip was just there and back all in one day. Not too terribly bad really, it’s about 1:45 train ride from Bristol into London Paddington. Comparatively, it’s like driving from Fort Worth to north Plano in rush hour for work...which I have also done. The difference being that you can do things (like type a blog) while you ride which I’m sure TxDot or DPD would frown upon if I’d done on I-635.
Monday’s trip was much more entertaining, so I want to talk about it. Monday, as many of you in the US might remember, was the 4th of July. It is not really a big deal over here. I didn’t find any true Brit saying, ‘thank you for not wanting to be part of our country anymore and declaring your independence from our rules.’ Nope. Didn’t happen. There wasn’t even a story on the 10pm news about US Independence day or fireworks or hot dogs or baseball, oh I missed those things a bit on the 4th. So what did we do on the 4th? Well, PwC required me to go a training class entitled ‘Living and Working in the UK/UK Business Skills’. I renamed it. It will for now forward be called ‘How not to offend the Brits.’ Come to think of it, renaming their classes might be on the list. The irony of them sending me to a class on how to be British on American Independence Day was not lost on me. It was on many of my co-workers when I tried to explain it. Since I had to be in class all day Monday, Adam & I decided to go to London on Saturday and spend the weekend visiting the city. We knew this would be one of many trips, so we didn’t try to do too much. So the highlights. We took the train in and then the tube to our hotel. Both bits of transportation we managed to handle without getting lost or getting on the wrong train. This is a personal victory, I believe, because especially on their trains, they are not great at labelling which train is which. We stayed at the Club Quarters – Trafalgar Square. The hotel was okay. We were on a corporate rate, which made the price great especially for the location, but the trade off was this made the view from the room not so spectacular...
After checking in, we went to eat at St. Martins in the Fields church. They have a cafe in their crypt (incidentally called The Cáfe in the Crypt) that serves full hot meals for very reasonable prices. We had a roasted chicken thigh & leg, squash, potatoes, rice, a roll, and a coke for £7 each. Once we were fully sustained again, we headed to our walking tour. I’d read about in one of Rick Steve’s travel guides, but then also saw an advert for them at St. Martins. We took the ‘This is London!’ tour. It was billed as the highlights of the city tour which we thought was a great one to start off with. We walked along the Tower of London (which is more of a fortress than just a tower!) and saw Tower Bridge then we got to take a boat tour down the Thames and walk around the house of parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and it ended back at Trafalgar Square. It was really interesting. Definitely worth the £8. They have about 100 different tours. I could see us doing another one sometime. A barrage of photos of the sights from the walk below.
We then attempted to go to Evensong at St.Pauls Cathedral. As we walked up to the church, there were hundreds of people coming out of the church. Many dressed in much nicer clothing than Adam & I. We stood there for probably 10 minutes just waiting for some sort of interpretation as to what was going on; guessing maybe a wedding or graduation ceremony. Then we saw someone with a program and were able to ascertain that it was the ordination ceremony for new deacons in the church. Because of the ceremony, they cancelled Evensong so we didn’t get to go into the church and enjoy. We opted instead for dinner...Sunday, we had a scone, jam & hot chocolate breakfast. It’s become our new weekend morning routine. I think it could be one of my favourites :) Then we headed for some cultural learning at the National Gallery. I’m pretty sure you could spend a week in this place and still not see everything. After about 6 hours, however, our feet were tired & we’d gotten hungry so we took a break for lunch. In the afternoon we decided to go to the National Portrait Gallery (see a theme in our tours?). A couple of interesting differences. The National Gallery pieces are there because they are painted well or are ‘classic’ pieces of art where as the National Portrait Gallery pieces are included because of who they’re of or who painted them. We took a guided tour of both museums and interestingly, the NG tour focused on how the works were created (oil paint vs tempura; canvas vs wood; fan brush vs round brush, etc) and the NPG focused more on who the people were in the painting or photograph and how they were important to British history. Even more interesting -- to me...probably not to you...you know you really can stop reading at any point when you get tired of my rambling. I digress. Even more interesting was that Adam enjoyed the NG museum better but the NPG tour whereas I was exactly the opposite. I loved hearing about the art in the NG – they talked about things that I’d never heard of & probably never would have noticed. For instance, there is a piece with some trees on the left side of the painting; a few leaves of one tree are a slightly lighter shade of green than the other leaves in the tree. Why? Because the frame that was on it for the first couple hundred years of the painting’s life covered that area. When it got reframed about 80 years ago, they could see more of the tree. First of all, I never would have noticed that there were different shades along one side of the trees and secondly, I never would have figured that out! But believe me, when you come visit, I’m going to point it out to you!
After we decided we were thoroughly cultured, we decided to go to Harrods. I referred to the store, when Adam asked what to expect, as Nordstrom’s on steroids. I still don’t think he fully comprehended what was about to occur. We walked through the £1,500 men’s dress shirts before he gained some insight as to how expensive this place actually was and why we weren’t actually going to buy anything there but I kept saying I wanted to go.
When he got tired of my window shopping (from inside the windows), I told him I wanted a picture out front of the building then we could go eat dinner. Please note the extreme excitement that he is displaying in these photos.
Monday rolled around and I went to my 'Don’t be an Ugly American' training. Things like, stand in the queue; mind the gap; don’t talk too loudly; say please and thank you alot were just a few bits of wisdom I’ve taken away from this day. Adam had a much more exciting day at the Imperial War Museum. After he’s completed his scholarship application for his MBA program, he’s allowed to tell you about it. Sorry, but the task master has commanded that he has to complete that by Monday so he’s got a few more days until he can have fun again.
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