The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Happiness Is A Warm Camera

4/11/04

As Easters go, this was a pretty good one. Everyone in London pretty much deserted the city for the holiday weekend, Jan and Paul went off to do family stuff, and Mike's in Paris, so I had the house to myself, the tube to myself, the major roads to myself, and only had to share the British Museum with about 20 zillion American tourists who were apparently thinking the same thing I was about the lack of actual British people.

Nevertheless, I spent something like two hours in the place, maybe three, and took something like 130-140 pictures. I love the British Museum. Exploring it today, I went a whole bunch of places I had already been, then took a wrong turn, and ended up in this random room jammed full of Indian art. Then I took a wrong turn from THERE, and ended up in a huge Enlightenment exhibit. Deciding to go see if there was anything I had missed on the ground floor, it turns out that there are like three or four more rooms full of random Greek artifacts I didn't know about, and that hallway covered in Assyrian bas reliefs from Nineveh I thought was cool turned out to be something more like four or five hallways and a couple of fairly serious rooms, which I'm sure you'll all agree is slightly more impressive than some random hallway.

I also picked up a few touristy items, like a Standard of Ur (which I need to go take a picture of, now that I think about it) mug, and a couple of shirts. Almost got an Egyptian cat statue, but no.

At that point, I decided that yeah, it was about 4:30, and I was starving. Hare and Tortoise to the rescue. I need to reiterate that these people give you a whole lot of food. I've had family meals served in the dishes that these people give to individuals. I almost made it through my plate. Almost.

Keeping in line with my goal for the day, which was to find the way from Euston Square tube station to Euston tube/rail station, where I'm supposed to meet Stephanie tomorrow, I actually DID find the place, which is freaking HUGE. Also managed to find a good fast route from school to King's Cross/St. Pancras tube station, which I take to and from school, so that was nice. Also explored this nice little park that's like, 20 feet from school, which was apparently a cemetary back in the day, for values of back in the day == 1650-1830 or so. Random old graves and such scattered about. Quite nice and peaceful, actually.

And I am in posession of Cadbury eggs. Nyah.

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4/12/04 Easter Monday special

It's been a good couple of days. First Easter itself, and now today, which the observant will recognize as being my day out with Stephanie. We met up at Euston station about 11, and between then and 5, when we just barely got her back to her train in time, we had ourselves quite a time. Lots of walking, of course, but this is London, and there's lots to see, so what did you expect? Perfect day for it, too - warm, decent amount of sunshine, not as many people as you might expect.

We walked from Euston pretty randomly for a while, past the British Museum (which we didn't go in), through Covent Garden (sort of an outdoor market type thing, except the outdoors in this case is big old buildings), to Trafalgar Square. From there, we walked down the Mall, where we saw what was apparently the tail end of the changing of the guard, along with a bunch of statues of famous dead people. Then we came to Buckingham Palace, and, uh, wow. Royalty gets nice houses, let us say. While there, we sort of randomly met up with Kara and Laura, who are both in the AHA group, seperately and in the space of about 5 minutes. Then we walked from there into St. James' Park, which is one of the more spectacular places on the planet - I need my pictures to do it justice, but wow.

Went from there to Westminster Abbey, where we thought about going in, but since the line was a hundred or so people long, we decided that maybe we'd skip that this time around. So instead, Kara and Laura went to sit for a while, and Stephanie and I went over to Picadilly to find some food, which we found in this rather nice little Pub in the vicinity of the Tower Records store, which we went into after. For those of us who complain about record companies in the States, get this: They sell perfectly normal CDs there for about 16.99 in POUNDS. Keep in mind that a pound = 1.8 dollars these days, and that the same CD in the States would cost about 16.99 DOLLARS. Ouch. Nevertheless, I walked out with Further Down the Spiral, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's rendition of some U2 songs, which I'm writing this to. It's not bad.

At that point, we realized that Stephanie had to get herself back to Euston in about an hour to catch her train, but we ended up going by the US Embassy anyway, simply because I hadn't seen the place. Surprisingly, no protesters, which I thought sort of odd, considering the ones in front of Parliament and the "BUSH STOP THE WAR" graffiti everywhere. Ah well.

And from there, we walked back to Euston by the slightly long way, Stephanie got on her train, and I got to almost fall asleep on the train back. All in all, a good time was had. The company was excellent, the conversation likewise, and the sites were great. Good times. Good times. Hopefully we can repeat the experience in Brussels come June.

Posted by Dwip at April 12, 2004 11:48 AM