I really don't know how long I'm going to stay in this city. After being in smaller towns, London just feels too massive and rude right now. I only got here this morning and I'm going to give it another go, but I might just leave early.
The bus here was a nightmare. Quite literally: I had a storm of terrible dreams as we drive down from Edinburgh. It left at 10:30pm and arrived at 7:30am this morning. The seats wouldn't lean back and their cushioning had long gone flat, the driver didn't turn off the lights for the first hour, and then randomly turned them back on at 3am, plus it was freezing cold and the driver didn't turn the heat on until we were practically in London. I got a window seat to myself, but the glass was too cold to lean against. The entire night was me, shaking awake violently to find yet another muscle in my body aching from sitting too long in the wrong position, shifting to find some other position to fall asleep in, and then drifting back to sleep to repeat.
When the bus stopped at the Victoria Coach Station, I stumbled out of it like a drunk and for the first few hundred yards I walked around in a daze, trying to rub the sleep from my eyes, my legs screaming at me from the way I'd slept on them, and the world in general just not making any sense. My guesthouse was going to be in the southeastern part of the city, off the Berrylands exit of the underground. My host for the night had told me where to go, but not what time, and I ended up arriving at my guesthouse hours and hours early, having spent about an hour on the subway for no reason and only turning around and going back to London, but that all actually helped a lot and by the time I arrived in the city center for the second time I felt much more like a human being. My legs were still very upset at me, but I think that's also partly because of all the hiking I've forced them to do with little warning.
I did a whirlwind tour through the city for the rest of the day, getting into the churches for free because it was a Sunday. I only stayed in St Paul's cathedral for a bit; I stayed in Westminister Abbey for the entire sermon, mostly staring up at the huge statue of Shakespeare, the bust of Blake, the slabs for Tennyson, the Brontes, Jane Austen, and so much more. Isaac Newton's memorial is spectacular, but we weren't allowed to take any pictures of the inside, unfortunately. To me, while the church was spectacular, it looked something like a hoarder's basement, stuffed full of historic relics that they just can't let go of!
I walked to Buckingham Palace, saw some of the guards at the Guards Memorial, saw a monument for Abe Lincoln and another for John Smith. I listened to Big Ben toll, walked across Westminister, The Millenium, Blackfriar's, and the London bridge during all my touring. There were awesomely comfortable sun chairs laying out on the parks for anyone to sit on. Jost of the public places, though, charge you something like $0.50 to use the toilet! And wifi is not so common. I'm used to how most of the stores and restaurants in Denver have free wifi, like Fridays, all McDonalds, all Starbucks, etc. Here, it's a rarer thing to see advertised in the windows and it's frustrating!
So I wandered all through the city all day, from about 10am until 5pm, when I heard to my guesthouse to meet up with my host. Hs name was Nigel and he's something else. He's studying to become an oil rig engineer, the type of job where your signing bonus is something like a million dollars. We stayed up late talking politics, travel, and future plans before turning on YouTube and watching old Nirvana videos until about 1am, when I pretty much passed out.
No comments:
Post a Comment