LONDON 2009

From the time I was a teenager I've wanted to go to London. I've been to Europe many times and never made it there. Paul was born there and had studied a short course in microscopy during the eighties in London. I was very excited to be going to England. We took the Chunnel from Brussels and arrived at St. Pancras station. 

We had booked our hotel in  Bloomsbury near the train station for convenience. The East Indian desk clerk, Hans, was originally from Africa. He kept asking if Paul was related to a previous guest from Wales and seemed to find it hard to take no for an answer.  The Booking.com description of the hotel said that some rooms overlooked a garden so we requested one in our reservation. The garden turned out to be a 10' x 10' walled brick patio with wilted potted plants and a stack of moldy mattresses. To say that the room was "cozy" is an overstatement. We could barely move. While clean, the shower was impossibly small and water went everywhere. Still the proximity to the British Museum and being two blocks from all the bus lines and the train station made up for the inadequacies and the full English breakfast included in the price of the room helped.

The collection at the British Museum is fabulous. Notorious treasures like the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, antiquities from every corner of the globe are housed in the British Museum and we spent days revisiting the collections. For free! The British are so civilized!

The British people are some of the most polite, friendly and hospitable I've ever met in my travels. Some of them were the stuff of fiction. Sitting across from us on a city bus on the way to the Tate Modern was a man in his sixties with a tuft of hair on his otherwise bald head, glasses like coke bottle bottoms and missing teeth who whistled a three note tune every so often and I think said something about tickety-boo. You know someone that out of it has had a rough time but his good humor and odd behavior are pure Monty Python.

Listening to a young East Indian man studying economics complain of the cost of college in London over a curry dinner, watching children play in the fountain in Russell Square, a Sri Lankan demonstration in front of the Parliament buildings, doing our laundry in a laundry mat with an elderly Chinese woman; all these experiences make London a wonderful memory and a place I can't wait to get back to.