London, Days Two and Three

30 November 2013

We spent the better part of eight hours on our feet yesterday.  This is what we do in London.  We pick a place to go and start walking.  If we see something interesting along the way, we stop to investigate. Eventually we get to where we were going, and after that we keep walking.

Below are snapshots of what we saw on our way:

Compared to what we saw in Switzerland, at a mere $880, this is a steal. Plus, it has Jack's name on it.  We didn't buy it.

The iconic Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus is covered in a snow globe.

Throughout the city, lights cross the streets high above our heads:

We spent Friday in a couple of museums (the National Gallery and the London Transport Museum) and out on the streets of Marylebone, Covent Garden, and whatever was in between.

Anyone who's been to our house will recognize this London Underground poster:

Here's the original, from which the poster picture was taken:

The poster was created in 1986.  We picked up our copy in 1991.  It was then, and is still, according to the museum, "the most popular modern Underground poster."  Another placard explains, "The original mock-ups for this design were created in toothpaste before finally being moulded in plastic for the poster artwork."

Late in the evening, as a wine shop was closing, we went in.  Jack was instantly in heaven:  the place was dominated by geeky (his word) French wines.  As Jack enthused out loud, one of the two French clerks grabbed two glasses and reappeared with wine for Jack to taste.  "This is a red wine," he said.  It was white.

Jack sipped, paused, and said, "Rhone?"

Mederic held out his hand.  "What is your name?"

Jack has a new friend.  We've been back there three times.  The store is called Nicolas, and it's on the Marylebone High Street, if you're ever in the neighborhood.

At 9:30 on Friday night we went up to the Islington section of London to meet a friend of Jack's from grad school who teaches at Kings College in London.

London is expensive.  Living in London is nigh on impossible if one isn't working for a large corporation or a bank.  Islington isn't a shabby neighborhood either.  Lawrence explained how he, his wife, and his two kids get by on non-banker salaries:  "If we spend about four hundred pounds more than we bring in, it's been a good month."

Today we visited a friend from college who is over here for a three-year stint.  He's in the financial business, which goes some of the way towards explaining how he landed a flat in the heart of Bloomsbury (what Islington aspires to be).  "They don't cover my rent," he said. "They boosted my salary a little instead."  Even he couldn't afford to buy property here.  He showed us around his basement flat, two rooms joined by a long hallway that doubles as a kitchen.  "On the market this place would go for 800,000 pounds."

We took a walk north of King's Cross/Saint Pancras to an area that's being redeveloped at a breakneck pace.  One of the offices going up will house Google.  There goes any chance of affordable rent.

PDaniel (a nickname we gave him in college that we refuse to stop using) took us to the Grant Museum, a large, one-room hall stacked floor to ceiling with anatomical specimens in jars and cases.

First things first, though:  Jack poses with prehsitoric mule deer antlers.  Mooseasaurus.  There's a full skeleton at the Natural History Museum, but it looks as if we're not going to get there on this trip.

Skeletons watch us from the upper level:

Brains!  Because I had to:

Back at Nicolas in the evening, Mederic tends to a packed house,

while Helena describes a complex red wine to Jack:

Even though it gets dark here well before 5:00 p.m., late November is a good time to be in London.  It's relatively free of tourist crowds, and I can get a lot of Christmas shopping done.  It was only after we got back from our long day yesterday that I realized I'd been Christmas shopping on Black Friday.  I get a pass, though, because it's not Black Friday over here.  It's just Friday.

Anyway, my suitcase is full of chocolate and presents and chocolate presents.  And a kilo of coffee beans. Those are mine.

As things happened this time around, we didn't get to very many of our usual places, which is totally okay. There is always something new to do in London.  PDaniel said that, in his not quite three years working here, he's visited over 350 different places, and he's not finished yet.

Tomorrow we're taking an afternoon bus to Oxford, where we'll meet a professor friend who is putting us up for the night at the university.  It's a safe bet we won't have wifi in our room; unless we do, I won't be blogging.

Thanks for following along with us on this trip. I'll see you all on the road next weekend.

P.S.  This marshmallow-topped brownie is, apparently, a food thing in London:

I'll stick with Ribena, thanks.

London, Day One

Oxford Street near Marble Arch

28 November 2013

Good Ol' Blighty.  An hour in the passport control line at Heathrow is de rigeur.  As we sat in the taxi after the train ride to Paddington station, I looked out upon the late afternoon chaos:  storefronts spilling their wares out onto crowded sidewalks; shop signs in English, Arabic; clothing, food, hardware, holiday ware, mobile phones, mobile phones unlocked; holiday lights strewn overhead across the streets; cars, buses, taxis, pedestrians.

What a lovely mess London is!

The first order of business was getting our mobile phones sorted.  Rather than discard our old iPhones, we turned them into UK phones last year.  We both upgraded this year, so we wanted to take the most recent old phones and make them our UK phones.  This involved each of us carrying three iPhones (our US phones, should the switcheroo go wrong; our recently unlocked iPhones; and our old, slow, can't-hold-a-charge UK iPhones).  We got things worked out rather quickly, and each added 10 pounds on our UK phone accounts.  Half an hour later, back in the hotel room, Jack discovered that his entire balance was gone.  While we'd been walking home, his now-UK phone updated all of its apps, using cell data to do so, down to the last pence.  He'd forgotten to turn the auto-update feature off when he'd turned on the phone.  We figured we'd find a place to top up his account after dinner.

On Oxford Street is Selfridges, the poor man's Harrod's.  They do up their windows to rival Harrod's and Macy's.  People gathered in semicircles to take pictures.  There was only one that really caught my eye:

Play-Doh.

Jack said he'd have to come back to this wine shop (read the name out loud a few times):

After dinner (a tasty curry, because there is no bad Indian food in London) we went to the nearest cornershop so that Jack could top up.  While he did that I wandered the isles looking for dessert.

One thing about the British:  they're serious about their sweets and their biscuits.  They don't mess around.  At least half of the store was dedicated to chocolates, candies, and cookies.  Jack figured that a third of the place was given over to liquor.

It was with some restraint that I chose a representative sample from the shelves.  I do like blackcurrant, which you can't get in the States.  We'll be nursing the Digestives until they're stale.  The Eclairs are too chewy to wolf down, so they should last a while too.  The Ribena's gone.

So here we are, back in the hotel, catching up with the doings of all y'all back home, on Thanksgiving over there and Thursday over here.  If what's going on at Sean and Dale's house is any indication (I'd post the pictures, but...) you guys are having a good time.

P.S.  Geneva was a dud in the nightmare-scary-tacky Christmas ornament department, but London is looking promising.

Geneva, Day Two

27 November 2013

Today consisted of more walking and museuming.

We figured we'd head through the sculpture garden first.  We figured we'd see sculptures in the sculpture garden.  We did not.  We saw a couple of heads on pedestals, a bas-relief wall of Protestants, an underwhelming tribute to the Red Cross, and that's it.

My impression of Geneva is that it's overpriced and oversold.  That, and this city is buttoned down. No array of lights in the shopping district at night.  No holiday markets.  Very little in the way of anything would even suggest that we're a month away from Christmas.

So, if you wind up visiting Switzerland, spend more time in Zurich than in Geneva.

Anyway, here are some last pictures of the city.  Below is a bit of medieval city wall in the non-sculpture garden:

At the top of the non-sculpture garden, looking towards Old Town:

View of the city from the top of the wall that you can see in the picture at the top of this post:

This is how people get up the hills in Old Town:  battery-powered bikes:

Our first museum was Maison Tavel, the oldest residential property in the city, restored and devoted to Geneva's history, and free.  Here's a model of the city as it looked in the mid-1800s:

Our hotel is a bit above the center of this picture:

View from inside the museum:

Jack liked this door because it led nowhere and had no explanation:

Outside again, we were drawn into a home decor shop because they keep their moose under glass...

...and in piles:

We did not buy a moose.  (!)

This driver was backing up, very, very slowly, carrying a plane of metal that was swinging just enough not to crash through the plate glass windows on either side of this narrow medieval street.

We found a small museum devoted to the art of a small section of West Africa, so we did that for half an hour or so.

I tried to capture the steepness of the grade as we walked back down the hill.  It's steeper than it looks.

Last up was the Musee Patek Phillipe, run by the Swiss watchmakers Patek Philipe.  I might not have mentioned that a plurality of storefronts in Zurich and Geneva are plastered with watches whose prices are an order of magnitude more than one would reasonably consider spending for a watch.  Anyway, this museum had thousands of watches dating back to the 1600s, two hundred years before Patek Philipe was founded.  Three stories of these things held our attention, all the way up to the invention of the wristwatch around 1910.  Then it got boring, save for a handful from the 1960s. We breezed through the last hundred years.  Sorry, no pictures.

Here's a motorized bike in a storefront near our hotel.  There's a lot going on in the rear hub. The bike looked so heavy that it was hard to imagine not needing the engine for anything even slightly uphill.

This is either the battery or a trunk designed to keep one's belongings dry:

The bike has a license plate. Around the corner we saw another battery-powered bike with a license plate.

So that's it for Geneva.  Tomorrow we fly to London.

I don't figure I'll be blogging much from London because I've been there so many times (snob alert).  I'll keep the camera in my pocket just in case.

Geneva, Day One

26 November 2013

There comes a point for me in every vacation where I feel as if I'm just killing time.  After yesterday's euphoria, it's hardly surprising that today's the day the ennui set in.  That the wind was blowing at something above anything a roadie would go out in didn't help either.  The first thing we did when we left the hotel was find me a hat.  That helped a lot with the cold but not with the time-killing.

I'd made a list of everything we wanted to see, and found it all on the map the hotel gave us.  Two of those things, along the lake, were missing.  The much-ballyhooed Jet d'Eau, the 140 meter tall mid-lake fountain, was hibernating.  The Jardin Anglais, with it's famed flower clock, was also very much not there.  So much for the touristy stuff.

Here are the lake's choppy waters:

The wind was so strong that I had trouble holding my hands steady for this zoom of cormorants:

The tailwind pushed us back inland, where we found ourselves facing a Mont Blanc pen shop. I want to write that we've seen more pen shops in this city (at least three today) than we've ever seen before, but, really, until we went into the one in Zurich, I'd never seen a pen shop at all.

So here we were, being buzzed in and then escorted by elevator to the second floor.  Once again there were outlandish pens behind cases.  Not to be outdone by whoever it is who made the Sylvester Stallone pen, Mont Blanc is hawking the Mahatma Gandhi pen.  Yes, you read that right. Mahatma Gandhi.

Once more into the breach, up the hill into Old Town, where the streets were almost empty.

We were looking for the Cathedrale St-Pierre. We encircled the whole thing, somewhat chased by a small street-sweeper whose driver was being very thorough, before we found the main entrance.

Photography wasn't forbidden in this church (once Catholic, then one of the birthplaces of Protestantism).  This might be the first time I've been in a church when the sun was shining through the stained glass windows.

Here's a window...

 

...and here's the pattern it made on the wall opposite:

What you can't see here is that the wind outside was shaking branches, which was making the light dance on the pillars:

Next door was the Musee Internationale de la Reforme, all about the Protestant reformation in the 16th century.  Again, I knew almost nothing about this, good uncultured atheist that I am, until today. The lesson was made all the more interesting by having to read almost all of the labels in French, as only a handful were in English.

I read French far better than I speak it, but while Jack was having fun looking at more pens at our second pen shop of the day, I managed to pull off a conversation in which I asked if they had small pens one could put on one's keychain.  I had to talk around "keychain," and I mispronounced the word for key ("clef," which I remembered as being one of those counterintuitive pronunciations, therefore countering my intuition, and getting it wrong, because it wasn't intuition, it was memory that I was remembering, and it's pronounced "clay").  Anyway, I left the register avec deux stylos q'on peut porter avec des clefs, et deux cadeux pour Noel aussi.

Back into the wind, through a park where people were playing giant chess,

and then to the hotel to kill some time before dinner, which is now, so until tomorrow...