London Lights, Part One

New Bond Street at Oxford Street

19 December 2015

Y'know how conventional wisdom says you should always get to the airport three hours before your international flight, and you follow conventional wisdom and wind up sitting at the gate for an hour?  Well, if you're flying out of Newark a week before Christmas, you're going to need two of those hours to check in and stand in line for security. Correction:  you're going to need to stand in the line that leads to the line for security, because the TSA lets all of those who shell out $85 and send in fingerprints go ahead of you before they let the likes of you go up the escalator ten at a time. You'll make your flight, but don't count on a sit-down dinner first. Grab some yogurt and a banana and eat at the gate before boarding.

I must have slept on the flight. I make a point not to check my watch after I set it ahead five hours. I don't want to know that I'm walking off the airplane at 4:00 a.m.  Wheels up, eyes closed. 

I've done this solo flight enough times now that I have a routine after clearing customs: Get money, get breakfast, get coffee, get my butt on the Piccadilly line to the center of London.

We're staying in Mayfair, in a swanky hotel for about half price, near the southeast corner of Hyde Park. It's push-button everything up in here, including opening the curtains and the blinds.

First things first, though, before unpacking and showering. The Christmas tree must go up.

Next was a pub lunch, of course, because I need a jacket potato with cheese and beans at least once if I'm in England.

After that, we headed towards Oxford Street so that I could swap my old UK phone -- a cracked-screen iPhone 4s -- for a newer old iPhone -- a 5s in good shape. This meant I was carrying three iPhones in my carry-on bag at the airport, and the same three in my jacket all day. Now the 4s is e-waste, the 5s is my UK phone, and the 6 (my US phone) can stay in the hotel room. Jack did the same thing when he got to London three weeks ago. There are six iPhones, two laptops, an e-reader, an iPod, and a bluetooth speaker in this room. And a camera. A digital camera.

With which I took pictures as we wandered around Mayfair.

There are no tacky Santa ornaments for sale in Mayfair. There are no ornaments for sale anywhere in Mayfair, as far as I can tell. Upscale clothing, upscale shoes, Swiss watches, sure. Mayfair is what Princeton's Nassau Street wishes it was.

Berkeley Square:

Hedonism Wines:

Jack said that this was the wine-porniest shop he'd ever been in. Here he is in a special room dedicated solely to white Burgundies.

Here, Sauternes are organized by age. As the wine gets older, it turns from yellow to orange:

In a back corner, the far end of a sculpture moves every now and then, swinging a bottle of wine or twisting a branch:

A 27-liter bottle of wine is called a "goliath."

We were about to leave when Jack saw the Enomatic machines and had to buy a sampler card worth two tires and a bottom bracket. I'm keeping track. When he gets to a bike's worth of wine sampling, I get to pretend I'm going to buy a vintage, lugged, Colnago frame on eBay.

Sunset is at 4:00. The lights were just coming on on Oxford Street. The entire two exposed sides of this department store are covered in white lights:

New Bond Street at Oxford Street:

Farther along on Bond Street (where the name changes to Old Bond Street):

Burlington Arcade, where each light is a flower and the gemstones in the windows are worth more than my house:

Fortnum and Mason, Piccadilly Street:

A Piccadilly cross street:

We returned to New Bond Street on our way back to the hotel:

Albemarle Street:

Winding our way back to Piccadilly:

Near Curzon Street, around the corner from our hotel:

Within a few minutes' walk from the hotel is a neighborhood full of Middle Eastern restaurants. I ate too much and I loved every minute of it. We walked it off by heading to Hyde Park to look at the carnival lights:

We had walked through this carnival last year, during the day, when not all of the rides were running.

I clearly don't know how to take pictures of moving objects in the dark. From a quarter mile away we could hear the screaming and the rumbling and smell fried dough.

Jack complained about sensory overload. The moon shone through a thin veil of clouds and branches. We walked back to the hotel.