London – day 1 – Thames waterfront

took the train from leicester to london (st pancras station) this morning. it was a short ride, only 1h15 minutes. I had fun trying to get nice pictures along the way. I'd just point the camera out the window and click randomly to see if I could get something nice. It was mostly farmland and grazing land, with a few villages here and there.

In London, we took a ubiquitous black cab. Cabs in the UK, I have learned, are completely bizarre. Apparently, luggage counts as a person (i.e. the more people you are in a cab, the more the fare cost for the same distance – weirdos, the lot of them). Got to the hotel, where the accomodations are spartan but should suffice to sleep in and look clean. Stowed most of our stuff then went on walkabout. After a bit of a false start figuring out a map of the Underground, we headed towards stuff we could just look at – we'll start the visiting tomorrow. We got out at Tower Hill station and headed off towards Westminster. It looks like a reasonable walk on paper, but it took something like 4 hours to do.

The first thing we saw was Tower of London and Tower Bridge. We didn't go inside cause the admission prices are highway robbery, though I'm kinda disappointed to not have seen a beefeater guard. We walked along the Thames snapping pictures along the way.

Amusing random moments:
– seeing “look right” painted at every street crossing to prevent tourists from being squished by traffic
– Katy doing the wee dance trying to find free public toilets
– Katy yelling out of nowhere “a rat! a rat! look, a rat, now that's a London trademark!”
– myself almost walking up stairs that lead into the Thames

We passed lots of bridges, each nicer than the previous ones. For an annoyingly long amount of time, I had “London Bridge is falling down” stuck in my head – probably because we went over it. Southwark Bridge has a really cool underpass, where the tilework illustrates the history of the bridge. The Blackfriars bridge is really pretty at night, and is close to clean, free public toilets, so that's something in its favour :D The new Millenium Bridge looks cool, and apparently has now been fixed so it doesn't induce motion sickness on those people who cross it because of all of the swaying it previously had.

We reached the Embankment, where out of nowhere we saw an Egyptian Obelisk flanked by two sphynxes. We had our first good look at the London Eye and Big Ben in the distance. The Eye is impressive. It's BIG, and it's scary to think that only “little” spokes keep that wheel upright. There was Golden Jubilee Bridge, a cool suspension bridge, and then the Houses of Parliament with Big Ben.

We were walked out, so we headed back to the hotel on the tube. That's another source of weirdness. Putting aside the ubiquitous “mind the gap” jokes and adverts about rats coming to eat your trash, you need your ticket to *exit* the tube as well as get into it. Madness, sheer madness.

Went to eat at a place called Garfunkle's, which will probably have our repeat business as its close to the hotel, reaaonably priced, varied menu, and most importantly, didn't kill me.

That's it for now. We're watching Coronation Street right now on a TV that “has all its channels squiffed wooed (translation: jumbled up)”. Katy was about to “throw a wobbly” because she couldn't find Coro', poor thing :)