Four days in London! I hate to sound jaded but this is getting to be no big deal. It was Dick's fourth business trip in a year and our second time combining the weekend before/after with pleasure stops. On the other hand, London, like Paris, always has something new and changes too quickly to keep up with everything.
Frequent readers of this page probably caught Maria's description of her days in London over the millenium change where the weather was pretty bad. (If not, try http://../../paris/visitors/maria-dec99/maria-london.htm ). Our weather was very good; great if you consider it was mid February. We had a bit of misty rain on Saturday but bright sun the other three days.
We started on the 8AM train from Paris, beating our week-long house guests (Tom and Bev) out the door. We were betting that the usually trusty Paris taxi drivers would come through and get them to Charles DeGaulle airport about an hour after Pietrina and I pulled into London's Waterloo station. (All this happened according to plan until Tom and Bev got to Detroit's airport with its four inches of fresh snow).
Our first premonition of the week to come was when the subway escalators didn't work. (Some of these tubes are fifteen stories deep underground so you just don't climb the stairs up.) But without much incident we were into our bargain four star London hotel, this time in a new area to stay: South Kensington.
Before noon we were walking around South Kensington, past Baden Powell's statue (OK, now, who's he?) and past our favorite London building, the terra-cotta Museum of Natural History. We love the buff and pale blue exterior of this building, now about 120 years old but patterned after 11th century Rhineland Romanesque cathedrals. Here's the west side we snapped as we walked towards Hyde park:
…and the east side as we walked home towards the end of the afternoon. Unfortunately we weren't able to get a full frontal shot:
Pietrina was able to revisit this place on Tuesday but we had too little time to see it together.
Our next stop was dodging the construction around the back of the Royal Albert Hall, a huge round drum (A mile in circumference, the guide books say, but it didn't seem that big and we walked around 2/3rd of it). Albert apparently wanted it bigger (30,000 seats) than what was built (a measly 5000). No matter, his grieving Queen pretty much put his name on everything built in the area in the last third of the 1800s. Atop of this page is a frontal view of the hall with the bright sun giving my lens a lot of trouble:
From here you can see the flat dome and the upper frieze of figures. Here's a closeup of the frieze taken from the other side:
The same guide book says that these illustrate arts and sciences, so tell me what the handcuffs are all about? (Maybe a Baden Powell thing?)
Our next stop was at the Albert Memorial. The sun was bright and the statues freshly cleaned so we went overboard with the digi-cam. If you've got that kind of bandwidth, please join us by clicking here.
Where do you want to go today? Here's a few choices:
last updated 21 June 2007
This work is licensed under a Creative
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This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.