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Another weekend in London
Apr. 10th, 2009 04:40 pmI just had my first properly British-Indian korma in one and a half years from the place at the end of the road last night. I'm really very happy about it.
And even though we left on Monday, I've just about got time now to talk about our stay in London. The hotel was not one of my favourites, not necessarily because of its positively Lilliputian dimensions (so effortlessly euphemized as "cosy" by travel guides everywhere) but mostly because the fire alarm went off an extraordinary amount of the time and I didn't get a full night of sleep during our stay there. But there was a Tesco right down the road and we were steps away from the underground.
We managed to see three separate friends while we were there, whose lives have for various reasons come to revolve in and around London or for the moment, and some of whom I hadn't seen since our wedding in 2006. I didn't have the chance to see much of the place during my last stay in London because of being trapped inside waiting for a courier service to deliver my papers to let me out of the country, so it was also a new experience to just walk around Hyde Park (which we got through without giving me too many awful memories of the route to my visa appointment), to see the science museum, and so on. Someone has built Princess Diana a memorial waterslide.
We rode (or 'flew', as the leaflet says) on the London Eye, after some convincing, and a mile-long queue that sucked all the enthusiasm out of you like Chiswick Post Office. I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned this, but I developed a fear of Ferris wheels after a traumatic experience on one in Disneyland just after the wedding - on this wheel, some of the carriages weren't actually fixed to the wheel, but on to oval-shaped tracks inside. We went into one of these, and it wasn't until the ride demonstrated this itself that I realized that the physics involved in this meant that as soon as you went past halfway up, your carriage would plummet towards the sea and then swing out to horizontal, then back again, until it ran out of momentum ready for the next turn. It took them a while to pry me off the central column I was clinging to after it had done that a few times.
But the Eye was at least slow, gentle... and high. Once the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, in fact, and I believe the tallest structure in Britain apart from One Canada Square (and it'll be the first when that's destroyed by the Daleks and Cybermen next year). Its height was only surpassed recently - and it still has the claim that it's the tallest in the world that's only supported on one side. How encouraging. You're taken around in a little bubble (which I suppose would make it an eye-Pod) that's carried in a loop on the outer edge of the wheel, and rotates to keep you upright, during which you're treated to a view over the city as far as the eye can see. Or, if you're like me, clinging face-down to a bench. I think I was better once I was up on top of it and could see evidence of some significant support under our feet.
We also went to Madame Tussaud's, which is a positively unnerving experience. I had thought that it would be just a fairly... plain, I suppose is the word, wax model museum, but they put you through various themed rooms, the first of which is set up like a celebrity reception party with the wax figures dotted around at random. And because there are so many people milling about among them, often standing very still in order to have photos taken of them, it's very difficult to tell at a glance whether somebody is a real person or a wax figure that you just haven't recognized (especially as most of them look far more lifelike than I ever do myself in photographs). I wanted to try standing still myself until at least one group of people started wandering around me and wondering who I was supposed to be. One other room is full of politicians, and it's interesting how they've arranged them so that the ones that people would rather forget about are tucked away into a corner not visible from the entrance - going from Margaret Thatcher around the corner to George Bush, followed by people of increasing levels of dodginess, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, then becoming slowly more agreeable again as the line comes out of the corner and eventually ends at Obama's desk.
There's also a ride near the end where you're taken through various ages of London in taxi-cab-like carriages. As usual I had only remembered to bring my sunglasses with me, because of their necessity being more immediately obvious when I step outside in the morning and sneeze my head off, so I was wearing them throughout the indoor route so that I could see anything more than a few feet away more clearly. And as we approached the end of the track, an assistant leaned down and made sure to pay special attention to guiding me out of the car, thinking that I was blind. There are some nice people in London after all.
And even though we left on Monday, I've just about got time now to talk about our stay in London. The hotel was not one of my favourites, not necessarily because of its positively Lilliputian dimensions (so effortlessly euphemized as "cosy" by travel guides everywhere) but mostly because the fire alarm went off an extraordinary amount of the time and I didn't get a full night of sleep during our stay there. But there was a Tesco right down the road and we were steps away from the underground.
We managed to see three separate friends while we were there, whose lives have for various reasons come to revolve in and around London or for the moment, and some of whom I hadn't seen since our wedding in 2006. I didn't have the chance to see much of the place during my last stay in London because of being trapped inside waiting for a courier service to deliver my papers to let me out of the country, so it was also a new experience to just walk around Hyde Park (which we got through without giving me too many awful memories of the route to my visa appointment), to see the science museum, and so on. Someone has built Princess Diana a memorial waterslide.
We rode (or 'flew', as the leaflet says) on the London Eye, after some convincing, and a mile-long queue that sucked all the enthusiasm out of you like Chiswick Post Office. I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned this, but I developed a fear of Ferris wheels after a traumatic experience on one in Disneyland just after the wedding - on this wheel, some of the carriages weren't actually fixed to the wheel, but on to oval-shaped tracks inside. We went into one of these, and it wasn't until the ride demonstrated this itself that I realized that the physics involved in this meant that as soon as you went past halfway up, your carriage would plummet towards the sea and then swing out to horizontal, then back again, until it ran out of momentum ready for the next turn. It took them a while to pry me off the central column I was clinging to after it had done that a few times.
But the Eye was at least slow, gentle... and high. Once the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, in fact, and I believe the tallest structure in Britain apart from One Canada Square (and it'll be the first when that's destroyed by the Daleks and Cybermen next year). Its height was only surpassed recently - and it still has the claim that it's the tallest in the world that's only supported on one side. How encouraging. You're taken around in a little bubble (which I suppose would make it an eye-Pod) that's carried in a loop on the outer edge of the wheel, and rotates to keep you upright, during which you're treated to a view over the city as far as the eye can see. Or, if you're like me, clinging face-down to a bench. I think I was better once I was up on top of it and could see evidence of some significant support under our feet.
We also went to Madame Tussaud's, which is a positively unnerving experience. I had thought that it would be just a fairly... plain, I suppose is the word, wax model museum, but they put you through various themed rooms, the first of which is set up like a celebrity reception party with the wax figures dotted around at random. And because there are so many people milling about among them, often standing very still in order to have photos taken of them, it's very difficult to tell at a glance whether somebody is a real person or a wax figure that you just haven't recognized (especially as most of them look far more lifelike than I ever do myself in photographs). I wanted to try standing still myself until at least one group of people started wandering around me and wondering who I was supposed to be. One other room is full of politicians, and it's interesting how they've arranged them so that the ones that people would rather forget about are tucked away into a corner not visible from the entrance - going from Margaret Thatcher around the corner to George Bush, followed by people of increasing levels of dodginess, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, then becoming slowly more agreeable again as the line comes out of the corner and eventually ends at Obama's desk.
There's also a ride near the end where you're taken through various ages of London in taxi-cab-like carriages. As usual I had only remembered to bring my sunglasses with me, because of their necessity being more immediately obvious when I step outside in the morning and sneeze my head off, so I was wearing them throughout the indoor route so that I could see anything more than a few feet away more clearly. And as we approached the end of the track, an assistant leaned down and made sure to pay special attention to guiding me out of the car, thinking that I was blind. There are some nice people in London after all.
