Unlikely Words

I guess I was tired. I didn’t even open my eyes until I heard Karen leaving the apartment around 10:00, and it took at least 30 minutes more for Rachel to get me out of bed. In the end, it was the promise of a relatively easy day that got me going. We’d buy a ticket to one of those London bus tours that lets you hop on and off during the day, and use that to at least lay eyes on all the major sights, so we could decide what to go back and see in more detail later.

First, though, was lunch. (Any day of activities with me has to revolve around the meal plans. If there isn’t a firm idea of when and where I will be fed at regular intervals, spending time with me is not recommended. My whole family is like this: when our blood sugar drops, we are impossibly grumpy. Whenever two or more of the Harvey siblings go on a long car drive, one of us always asks, “Did you bring a granola bar?”) Karen had recommended the sandwiches at Pret A Manger, so we got out the computer to look up where one might be. We found one in Leceister Square, wrote down the address, and headed out. Any Londoners reading this are, at this point, laughing at the idea that we’d need to look up directions to a Pret; they are everywhere, like the stars in the sky, or like Starbucks in Seattle.

Luckily, it’s also really good. It’s basically a refrigerator case with pre-made sandwiches, salads, and assorted other things. They have a wide variety of unusually flavored crisps (as they call them over here) and beverages. There also appears to be a statute that requires all English sandwiches to be sold on square bread, halved on the diagonal, and sold in a triangular box that presents the cut side to the consumer through a window of clear plastic. I admit, it’s rather aesthetically pleasing to see them all lined up in a row. I had a prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich with basil and rocket, along with a bag of sweet chilli crisps and a bottle of pomegranate-flavored water. I couldn’t quite believe it myself, but it was one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever eaten.

After eating, we made our way down to Trafalgar Square to buy tickets for the Original London Bus Tour. Nelson’s Column, sadly, is undergoing cleaning and renovations, so we missed seeing the centerpiece of the Square. Then again, it’s… a big column. And they have more than one of those here, and we saw the other one. No harm.

The bus tour was very helpful for getting around the town. The tour guide on the first bus, however, was informative but utterly lacking in personality. We decided to hop off the bus at St. Paul’s and look around for a bit. The £10 admission fee sent us scurrying back out, however. It’s quite lovely from the outside, I can tell you that.

While waiting for the next bus to show up, it started to rain. Naturally, the lower level of the bus was full, and we had to ride up top, exposed to the elements. They eventually handed out ponchos, but only after we’d had our jeans thoroughly soaked, so when we put them on we ended up sort of, well, steaming. Let’s just say I’ve been more comfortable.

Our new guide, at least, was great. Personable, knowledgeable, funny, he was everything we could have wanted in a bus tour guide. We saw the Monument to the Great Fire, we saw London Bridge, we saw Tower Bridge, we saw the Tower of London, we saw Pall Mall, and we saw Picadilly Circus, and then that bus ended, and we had to get onto an inferior guide’s bus. Fearing further drenching, we stuck to the lower level, and between sub-standard narration and the fact that you can’t see a damn thing from inside a bus, we didn’t quite experience St. James’s Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Downing Street, and Buckingham Palace to the degree I’d have liked, but we saw them. (I have about three or four pictures of something blurry and gray outside the bus windows, while in the foreground is our guide, in perfect focus, nattering on about a neighborhood in which lived, among others, “Eric Clapton? The famous guitarist? Eric Clapton.” Oh, that Eric Clapton. Yeah, thanks.)

We finally disembarked back at Trafalgar Square. Cold, tired, and hungry, we decided a bit of a pick me up was what we needed, and that the restaurant in the National Gallery was the place to get that pick-me-up. We ordered tea and scones, and while I remain more or less neutral on the intrinsic worth of the scone, I am now a committed clotted cream partisan. Seriously. Clotted cream is the best thing with a gross name you will ever eat.

Be-scone’d and en-tea’d, we felt fortified to look at some art. We strolled through the Gallery, which is a lovely museum. The paintings were, for the most part, beautiful, and the gallery rooms themselves were spectacular. And it’s free! Highly recommended. I stopped for a few minutes to admire “The Virgin of the Rocks,” which to my everlasting shame I must admit I’ve only heard of because of The Da Vinci Code, and Rachel wanted to see some painting on which she’d missed a test question once in an art history class and about which she is still bitter.

When we’d absorbed all the culture we could stand, we walked back to Leicester Square to catch the Tube to Gordon and Karen’s place. The plan for dinner was to go to a “gastropub,” which is a term that doesn’t need to be put in quotation marks (or “inverted commas” as they call them here) in London. So far as I can tell, a gastropub is a pub (in that it has as its main focus a bar, furnished in standard wooden pub décor) that serves restaurant-quality food. I think it is a fabulous idea, and I really wish it would take hold in Providence. Our fair city suffers from a distinct lack of (a) comfortable bars in which to hang out after a day at the office and (b) good food that isn’t more than $25 a plate. Entrepreneurs, are you paying attention? Gastropub me.

We ate at the Coach and Horses, and it was quite good. We shared a really interesting appetizer: cold prawns in some kind of ridiculously delicious congealed broth, and a salad with warm roasted tomatoes. Rachel ordered arancini, I had steak, and both were delicious. We ate and talked for a long time (in England they won’t bring you the check until you ask for it) and then enjoyed a lovely walk home since the rain had stopped.

London ain’t too bad, folks.