Neighborhoods of the Rich and Famous

If I were going to move to London (and I'm not going to move to London), I'd first have to win the lottery (a Powerball jackpot would be best), and then I'd find a place to stay in Hampstead. The neighborhoods on the outskirts of London are great; both Kew and Wimbledon are about 30 minutes on the tube from central London, Hamstead is a little closer, but still has that "village" feel. It's also the home of several celebs (Ricky, Russell) and for good reason, the homes are beautiful, the Main Street (or High Street as they're called here) has a ton of shops and cafes with the tube station at the top of the road, and Hamstead Heath, a fantastic, wild, huge, sprawling park with a view from a hill of almost all of London spread out below it, is a 15 minute walk from the tube station.

But before heading out to Hampstead yesterday, acting on a tip (thanks Laura!) I trotted across the bridge to the Tate in search of some Andy Warhol prints. My friend Laura emailed me that she had heard that the Tate has a series of prints Warhol made of his mother in its collection, and since the apartment we're staying in is almost directly across the river from the Tate Britain, it was easy enough to run over there and investigate. I asked the person at the information desk about the Warhol collection and she said that any Warhols would be at the Tate Modern (I learned that the Tate Britain does show contemporary art, but only by British artists). The info-girl was able to look up the Warhol collection currently on display at the TM on her computer but we couldn't find the ones I was looking for, which just means they aren't currently on show, but it was a fun little scavenger hunt anyway.

Then I jumped on the tube and headed up to Hampstead. Peter was spending the morning at the British Museum, I spent the morning taking a nap (I've never really gotten over the morning effects of the jet-lag) and then wandered around Hampstead, looking in shops on the High Street, and having lunch in a cafe. At 2pm I met Peter and Sumathi at the tube station and we headed to the park, walking through really fabulous residential neighborhoods on the way. Once we entered the heath, we found Parliament Hill which affords a great view of greater London, and from there got hopelessly lost. We walked and walked down paths and tails (Hampstead Heath is 790 acres, we passed exactly one trail map) but lost our bearings along the way and ended up in the middle of the park just wanting to get out. By asking a few different people we did manage to escape dying there and having to eat one another, Donner party-style, and made our way back to the High Street and the comfort of a bakery.

Monday night after our woodland adventure, Peter and I took a spin on the London Eye, which is a giant ferris wheel that was built for the millennium celebration; it turned out to be such a cash-cow that it remains a permanent fixture on the South Bank.

Today we wandered around the City of London with my friend Chris. When people talk about "The City" they are talking about a one-square-mile area of downtown - the financial district. About 8,000 people live there but about 350,000 people work there. We started our tour at the Royal Courts of Justice, saw a bunch of Christopher Wren-designed churches, stopped into a couple of ancient pubs, found some hidden, quiet, quaint courtyards, and then took the tube to go Sloan Square to go shopping, but ended up in the Saatchi Gallery instead. I love looking at this kind of contemporary art, mainly because it makes me laugh, usually at it, but still, what's wrong with that?

Country Life and Train Stations

Today we took the train to Amberley Castle which is in West Sussex and another 90-minute train ride from London. The castle was built in the 14th century, it went through many phases of destruction and restoration, it was owned at one time by Queen Elizabeth I, and in 1989 it was fully restored and turned into a luxury hotel. Peter and I went there for lunch. The dining room is quite formal, the food is good (not necessarily better than the Sri Lankan meal I had last night which cost about $15 for two; this meal was a bit more), but the grounds are beautiful. Peter had a cold watercress soup with cucumber sorbet and goat cheese foam to start (the goat cheese wasn't really foamy, thank god, more whipped), I had a smoked chicken thingy with pea jelly... okay, I know I kind of went off on dishes made into foam and jelly and cotton candy, but I have to admit that my cubes of pea-jelly were damn good even though it sounds both vile and pretentious. We both had a pork cutlet (which was really a chop) for our main course, which was served with a layered square of sweet potato, a smear of spicy apple sauce, and star anise pan-sauce; it was good but not the best thing I've ever eaten. Oh, and there was a perfect square of something totally unidentifiable on the plate, I couldn't get my knife through it so I finally picked it up (daintily, with my pinky out) and took a bite - it was pork crackling, fried hard. The only thing missing from the plate was a side of Lipitor. My dessert was almost too sweet, a square of nougat which was kind of marshmallow-y (I'm not so fond of marshmallows) and a smear of salted caramel, covered with malted chocolate ice cream; it was okay. Peter's strawberry parfait with mint sorbet was fantastic. I really enjoy these excursions to the country-side to investigate nice restaurants. If the food turns out to be fantastic, that's a bonus, but if it's just okay, I don't mind if the trip is nice. In this case, the grounds of the castle which we wandered around after lunch were spectacular. There were a bunch of hidden gardens, flowers everywhere, an albino peacock lounging on a parapet (it didn't have its feathers displayed, and really just looked like a fat chicken so I didn't take a picture of it), sculptures, water features, a treehouse where you can arrange to have private dinners for two - the meal is really only half the fun, so even though I'd only give our meal a mere 6.5, it was well worth the trip, even though we had to arrive by train and not helicopter, like some of the guests did.

We got back to London in time to have a 45 minute rest before heading off to Waterloo Station for The Railway Children, a play based on a children's book about a family in post WWI England. The mother and three children go off to a home in the country when the father is hauled off to be tried for treason (which the children don't know at the time, and which is a farily sophisticated plot-point for a children's story, I think). Their adventures center around the village's train station, the station-master, and the people who come and go from the trains. Except for in two scenes, when an actual life-sized train-prop appears on the platform (the stage is a real train platform with the audience sitting on either side and the tracks in the middle), the train is represented very convincingly with sound and light effects. The three children are played, also convincingly, by adult actors, and the story is quite charming, although in addition to the treason plot-point, there is also a slightly watered down pro-Marxist element, also unusual for a children's story, but then again, children need to learn about Marxism from somewhere. There was one very intense scene in the play where the children see a landslide on the track, and we can all hear a train approaching, and the children know they have to get the engineer to stop the train or there is going to be a horrible accident. The two girls have red petticoats on under their dresses which they remove, ripping one into two pieces, and all three of them wave the red flags wildly as the train approaches, with the older girl standing in the middle of the track so she is sure to be seen. I have to admit, I was pretty stressed. The actors did a good job of conveying the emergency of the situation but the real star of that scene was the sound design - it truly sounded like a train was approaching and three kids were trying to stop it - ONE STANDING DIRECTLY IN ITS PATH. Even though I was fairly certain the scene wouldn't end in carnage, I was still pretty anxious... the power of theater man, the power of theater.

An Ordinary Day

Today I did one of my favorite things to do in a foreign country, I went to the movies. I like doing it because it's something that mostly only local people do so it's a way to blend in and not feel so touristy. I also like doing it because I love going to the movies anyway, so why not do it while on vacation. I've been reading Russell Brand's autobiography (called My Booky Wooky) which was conveniently left here in the apartment, and since I've been a fan of his since discovering his radio show podcast on the BBC website a couple of years ago (he was forced to resign from that gig after a controversy that's too complicated to go into here), Get Him to the Greek was the obvious choice for a movie today. I thought it was completely hilarious. The first 15 minutes or so involve a music video for a song (he plays a rock star in the band, Infant Sorrow) called African Child, which is so ridiculously offensive and condescending, it's called by one critic (in the movie), to be "the worst thing to happen to African culture after famine and war." The interesting thing about the moive, I thought, as I happen to be currently reading an autobiography by its star, is that while Russell didn't write the script, the guy who did clearly had read Russell's book and based the character (a completely self-indulgent, heroin and alcohol-addicted, imature, destructive, hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold-type) on the real Russell Brand -- the pre-clean-and-sober-Russell, who was quite a tragic figure. I thought the movie was very funny; the book is very funny too, but very heart-breaking as well.

After the movie, I met Peter at the Royal Academy of Art and Science to see the John Singer Sargent exhibit. I had seen his exhibition of portraits when it was at SAM years ago, and while I don't usually go for portraiture, I remember really liking that exhibition. This one was mostly of seascapes in France and Italy and it didn't strike me as much as the portraits, but it was still very nice. The photo at right isn't from the exhibition, it's from the Tate, I took it on the first day in London, and it's stunning.

For dinner tonight, I met my friend Sumathi who is a British friend I know from my months in Sri Lanka (she's Sri Lankan-British), and we had dinner at a Sri Lankan restaurant just a few tube stops away from where I'm staying. My instinct was to completely pig out on Sri Lankan food because it's so delicious and this place was completely authentic, and who knows when I'll have the chance to have it again, but I managed to control myself. It was very fun catching up with Sumathi, she was my closest friend when I was living in Sri Lanka in 2008, and it's always fun to meet up with friends in foreign lands.

Taking the Waters

the old spa

Yesterday we went to the town of Bath which is 90 minutes by train from London. Jane Austen's characters were always going to the town of Bath - not that I've read any Jane Austen, but I've seen all the movies, which counts. Bath is a beautiful town; all the buildings are a sandy color, a river runs through the town, there are parks everywhere, and it's the site of the ancient Roman baths which is the main tourist attraction. The baths were constructed 2,000 years ago and are amazingly intact. The main bath still contains water from the same source that filled it in 43 AD as the thermal spring is still active and the construction is still water-tight. The Roman baths were built as a temple to the goddess Sulis Minerva, as well as a spa, an exercise facility, and a gathering place for both social and business activities. So, sort of... St. Marks meets Gene Juarez meets 24-Hour Fitness meets Starbucks.

the new spa

After checking out the ancient baths, I went to the modern bath for a soak in the mineral springs. The Thermae Bath Spa was built a couple of years ago and the water is considerably less slimy-looking than in the ancient one.

A Spot of Tea

Today was about organizing things, shopping, and snacks. We were supposed to go to the town of Bath today but when I checked the weather in the morning, the forecast was for rain all day so we changed our plan and got a few other things done in London, where there were only a few light showers. Peter went to some museums, I went to Victoria Station to change our train tickets, and then we met in Leicester Square to inquire about theatre tickets. Peter got a ticket to As You Like It at the Old Vic for tonight, he also got a ticket to the London Opera for Friday, and we both got tickets to The Railway Children on Saturday; I have no idea what it's about but it's being staged on a disused train platform in Waterloo Station, and apparently a train actually passes through the set - cool. Then it was off to the department store, Fortnam and Mason to look at the food halls and have some tea, followed by a stop at Harrods where the food halls are even more impressive. I can't imagine actually shopping at either of these stores, they are packed with tourists and totally chaotic - at least on the lower floors where the accessories, perfume, makeup, and food halls are. Maybe the upper floors where the clothing is located are more pleasant, we couldn't bring ourselves to investigate. Lots of ladies in burkas shopping in both stores; I'm guessing they're Saudi as it would take an oil well or two in the family to be able to shop at either; we saw a cake that you could order for about $6,000; truth told, it looked kinda gross.

Wimbledon

Today I fulfilled a lifelong dream: to visit the All England Lawn Tennis Club, home of Wimbledon. It didn't even matter that the tournament had been over for a couple of weeks, I still count the excursion as a major achievement in my life as a tourist (leaving just Euro-Disney and the Corn Palace to complete the list). I took the guided tour of the grounds and visited the tennis museum, which had some really good exhibits about tennis through the ages (ladies used to play in corsets and stockings; one of the sponsor's give-aways in the 1920s was a pack of smokes). The grounds of the club look a lot smaller in person (why is that true of so many things? People are always talking about how television rots the brain, how come no one complains about how is skews the sense of size?), but seeing Centre Court, the press area, Court 18 where the epic 138-game match took place this year, and all the other places I've watched on TV since I was about 12, was super-exciting. Membership of the club is about 375, there is a waiting list of about 1,000 and a rigorous screening process to get in. Our guide told us that the easiest way to get in (and the dues aren't even that much - less than a gym), is to win the tournament since all singles winners become honorary members.

The tour was really enjoyable, but one thing you are absolutely, totally, and without equivocation NOT allowed to do on the tour of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, is touch the grass.

The Royal Botanic Garden, Kew

or Kew Gardens, as it's more commonly known, is actually a 300-acre park which was established in 1759. The botanic research and preservation institute that runs Kew Garden is responsible for the world's largest living collection of plants, and apparently they keep track of quite a few dead ones too as their preserved specimens number over 7 million. Peter and I spent a very pleasant morning walking around the park, the highlight of which was the waterlily house. There was also a really nice butterfly exhibit where I leaned that a person can spend an awfully long time trying to get just the right photo of a butterfly.

After we left the garden, we took the tube back into Central London to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where a touch of home hangs in the central lobby; and then because I had watched The Young Victoria just a few weeks ago, we took a stroll past the Royal Albert Hall and the Prince Albert Memorial. Peter and I split up after that and he continued a long, circuitous walk back to the apartment passing the Queen Victoria Memorial and Buckingham Palace along the way, which prompted him to ponder at dinner, "I wonder where they'll put the Queen Elizabeth Memorial when she croaks." Good question.