Freshly Minted: Down to London

Last Thursday (well, Thursday the 25th...time does fly) we went down to London for several purposes. The first was that Allison was attending a Roman Archaeology conference at Oxford and we decided to spend the night before in London. The second reason was that we were picking up our friend Joel from the airport--he was due to arrive Friday morning. Upon arriving in London on Thursday night we made our way through the rain (it is London after all) to our hostel and after a quick dinner of cheese sandwiches (still on the cheese sandwich diet) we decided to head out and see what we could see. Our hostel was located fairly centrally, near the British Museum, which enabled us to get to several of London's main sites that evening. First we passed through Piccadilly Circus (not, in fact, a circus with Elephants and tight-rope walkers, but a square not dissimilar to Times Square on a smaller scale) and a huge shopping section, which Allison liked a lot more that I did. We kept walking, suddenly appearing in Trafalgar Square, which boasted some beautiful fountains and monuments in front of a large museum. By this time the rain had stopped so we were able to walk around the square and take some pictures. After taking in our fill of Trafalgar, we headed towards the Thames, approaching it via a somewhat sketchy back road that we were glad to get off. But we emerged on the Thames at last and were pleased to see the London Eye, Parliament, and Big Ben in the distance (we had kind of overshot them, as we intended to come out right next to Big Ben). We made our way along the Thames towards Big Ben, snapping some pictures along the way...the darkness, however, made good picture-taking difficult. After a quick stroll halfway across the bridge near Parliament in order to get a good picture of it, we made our way back towards our hostel, as it was getting late by this time. On the way we passed Westminster Cathedral and Downing Street, the British equivalent to the White House, before arriving back at our hostel for a night of card playing.

The next day we woke early in order to get in a quick breakfast before meeting Joel at Piccadilly Circus metro station around 8:30-9:00. We waited around the station for a while, Allison leaving at 9:15 to travel alone to Oxford for her conference while I stayed and waited for Joel. Time passed...it was 9:30, then 10:00 (the time I told Allison I would head back to the hostel if Joel hadn't showed up), then 10:30, and finally at 11:00 with Joel still not arriving I dejectedly headed back to the hostel in order to leave a message there for him in case he arrived late (he had the hostel's address in case of emergency). However, upon approaching the hostel I saw a forlorn looking Joel with his bags sitting out front. Apparently the train he got on from the airport took him to Paddington Station rather than Piccadilly, and he took a taxi to the hostel from there and had been waiting outside for some time. So after clearing up that mix-up, we decided to head back to Paddington to store our bags for the day and then to see as much of London as we could before heading to Oxford that night. We walked back towards the Thames, strolling through Hyde Park Gardens, past Buckingham Palace, and then retracing much of what I had seen the previous night with Allison. After seeing Parliament, we decided to cross the nearby bridge and walk along the river on the other side in the direction of the London Bridge and Tower of London. We passed by many iconic sites along the way, including the London Eye, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and the Millennium Bridge. At long last we arrived at London Bridge, which I have to say looked somewhat different than I expected, only after some bathroom-seeking adventures. We walked back across the Thames via London Bridge and came upon the Tower of London. Since we were short on time and at least I was short on money we decided not to go in, but took some pictures. Next to the Tower was a pub called 'Hung, Drawn, and Quartered' which we decided to go into, discovering only too late that the pub's name was in fact a celebration of the death of William Wallace. Discovering that we had actually walked quite some way from Paddington Station and needing to get back there shortly to catch a train to Oxford, we took an Underground ride to Paddington before collecting our bags and heading to Oxford. Arriving at Oxford, Allison met us at the train station after her conference, which went quite well as she had heard many interesting talks and networked with all sorts of Roman archaeology academics. We had a late dinner of kebabs and burgers before retiring for the night.

I'll deal with the next day in the next blog...

Trafalgar Square