London Trip, Day Five

we could call this one "day five," OR we could call this one "awesome adult day." this was the part of the trip that the kids got a much earned and well deserved break from stomping around the city and historical sites, and instead got to spend a day with their beloved aunt and cousins, got to swim and play and do art projects and eat candy and buy toys. they really needed a kid day.
and this was the part of the trip that we were so looking forwar to. david and i hopped on a morning train into the city, and moved through tourist sites like lightning, walking and busing and taking the tube so fast and furious, so free and untethered from our dear little children with their sore feet and tired legs and short attention spans.

the train tracks of promise....


and two adults on a vacation, on a train, so happy and excited.


upon arrival, we walked the distance of the queen's walk on the south bank of the river thames, stopping for views,

and to locate the "home of lawyers." i wonder if that functions like an embassy for esquires?


we found the tate (but didn't go in--i wasn't about to spare that kind of time),


and took selfies on the millenium foot bridge,


we lingered under the blackfriars bridge,


and we found the globe. we didn't go in, mostly because it's a reconstruction of the globe and not the actual globe. remember when the knights of the round table arrive at camelot in monty python's "search for the holy grail" and king arther says "camelot!" and patsy shrugs and says "it's only a model"? i'm sure you remember that, because that movie is cinema gold. anyway, we didn't go in because david was totally patsy in this scenario. he shrugged and said "it's only a model" so we left.


instead, we crossed the london bridge (quite an unremarkable structure), and climbed up the fire monument for a pretty spectacular view of the river, the city, and the tower bridge.


the stairwell was pretty tight.


the monument


we walked through a few markets, including the beautiful leadenhall market with all its gorgeous flowers and shoe shines and designer clothes,



and then swung through the spitalfields market, where we very nearly bumped right into john malkovich.


after dropping our bags at the hotel and wandering shoreditch to peek at the great diversity of street art, we headed to lunch.





our lunch was at the highly recommended st john restaurant, and holy cow was that a good meal. it's one of those restaurants that is great fun to eat at, and the food is full of anticipation and the menu gives you a bit of worry and you wonder if you're doing it right, and then the food comes and it looks crazy and tastes amazing. it was an eating adventure in the whole-animal style of cooking. we had beef bone marrow on toast (scraped right out of the bone), we had bone-in-pigeon (the menu warned that they couldn't guarantee the meat would be free of shot [!]), we had rabbit, and we had bread pudding.
 


after that, we wandered around old london and tried to feed the birds on the steps of st. paul's cathedral,


.....see the similarity?.....

and then we stepped into the london exchange to use the bathroom. that's about all we could afford to do in there.


after a visit to the bathroom, we hopped onto a tube to get over to the british museum, where the full extent of british colonial influence to plunder the riches and treasures of the world is on display. there are so so many things to see at that museum, the collection is staggering and well presented and well preserved, overwhelming. so we picked the top 5 things to see and hurried our way through the vast beauty to see as much as we could.

that lobby. super cool.


syrian treasure,



egyptian treasure,


easter island treasure,


ancient greek treasure (these stones are straight from the parthenon),


more ancient greek treasure (from the mausoleum at halicarnassus),


and the language treasure that belongs to humanity and history: the rosetta stone.


our museum visit came to an end just as the sun dropped low enough to glow up the place, shining off the houses across the street from the british museum.


we popped into a nearby pub for a pint of ale,


then rode in the top of a double decker bus to our hotel in shoreditch.

 we rested for a bit, then stepped out to peek at more street art and to get in line (queue, to be exact) for a table at the very popular dishoom. dishoom serves iranian-indian cafe food in the bombay style. it's certainly a style of indian food i didn't know i needed, but holy cow....best indian food ever.

and then that was it. the end of a very long, full, and satisfying day.