London - Day 4 - "Checkmate"

26 December 2006

Boxing Day

After my too hot shower I sat on the bed waiting for Karen to get back and watching BBC news (on BBC 1). One of the news bites they were playing was about the law that had recently been passed (I assume) against the use of hounds while fox hunting. It was a bit surreal for me when I realized that that was a Boxing Day tradition, but I got a big kick out of it.

We assumed there were going to be lots of sales on Boxing Day, but it turns out that there weren't. This we didn't learn until we had ridden the tube over to Kightsbridge (checkmate, get it?) and discovered that both Harrods and Harvey Nicks were closed.

On our way to Victoria Station (backing up the story, a little) we saw a Military Police car. The officer was wearing a red beret and his uniform was only slightly more reminiscent of their military, but other than that he (and his car) looked the same.

We took the Victoria Line north to Green Park, then the Piccadilly Line southwest to Knightsbridge. Harrods wasn't opening again until the 28th and Harvey Nicks the 27th. From there we walked back towards Wellington Arch (avoiding the hard-sell over-priced bus tour). I changed the camera batteries at Wellington shortly after watching some people pass by in a horse-drawn carriage. At first I thought it was going to be the kind of thing you can catch a ride in, but as it passed it occurred to me that these were people out enjoying the day.

We walked through Hyde Park, to the East of the Serpentine, then north and east to Speaker's Corner. There is a nice little food stand (the kind you see on the National Mall in DC, but with better (and more reasonably priced) food) that we stopped by to take care of lunch on the cheap. We bought a bacon roll (WOW!!!!!!!), a ham/tomato/weird oozy cheese (toasted) sandwich, and a slice of pre-packaged (with tiny spork)orange carrot cake (best I've ever had).

When we were mostly through with our meal the pigeons started gathering and circling us like a pack of hyenas. Karen said like sharks, but she was wrong--"NO SHE'S NOT".

We rode the number 23 bus east to the Courts of Justice (across the street from St. Clarendon Dale, a pleasant little church through which we wandered for 15-20 minutes). Then on to FLEET STREET!!!!! Karen noticed the sign, and given our love of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, it was a lot of fun to walk along it. I was surprised by how short it was, but it was still cool. By far the best part of it, though, was the barber shop at the end of the street and the eatery with heavily suggestive (of cannibalism, if you're looking for it) advertisements.

I was taking a picture of a nice looking statue out front of St. Paul's (one of the few statues that does NOT depict Queen Victoria), I suffered a fair bit of pigeon interference. Specifically, ONE pigeon (determinedly) interfered with a picture, and even the threat of throwing nearby children at it failed to entice it to leave.



It was then that Karen observed:

Karen: "St. Paul's has revolving doors!"
Michael: "Well it is a church..."

We weren't Catholic enough to want to pay the admission price to the Cathedral, so we walked on toward the Tower of London. Our feet started killing us again, so we caught the number 15 bus to just shy of the Tower. it was cool. We vowed to return to the gift shop (when it was open) though we decided not to pay for the tour (though we are DEFINITELY going to next time).

Tower Bridge was awesome, but our feet *really* started hurting, so we pushed on (also declining to pay the £17 a person admission price for the London Dungeon. We went to London Bridge Station (to get back to Victoria a little faster) but accidentally went up to the rail platform . There we found signs directing us down (down, down) to the tube station. A woman with a Slavic accent approached us and asked for help getting to Victoria, so we had her follow us. Apparently Jubilee Line is the one with the jumper shields (as seen previously on MI-5 from netflix).

Back across the street from Victoria Station, we tried to get Billy Elliot tickets, but they were sold out (we could have queued, but there was no way in HELL we were going to stand for only a chance of getting tickets. We stopped in the station for a bottle of Nivea (for foot rubs) and a chicken/bacon/cucumber/tomato baguette, then started back to the "hotel".

We intended to hit the Sainsbury's on our way back, but it was closed. So, still in pain, we hiked back to the Sainsbury's Local where we picked up a rather tasteless fruit and nut assortment, some dates (meh), a couple of large (2 liter) waters, and orange-pineapple juice, a blackcurrant juice, and CANDY (the vanilla-chocolate bar, the dark/orange chocolate bar, white maltzers and some "biscuits" (the British word for cookies)).

We exchanged foot rubs while watching British Deal or No Deal, the Simpsons, the end of Bedknobs and Broomsticks (YAY!), and the news. I zonked out, and woke up at the end of Freaky Friday. We played three games of Cribbage (Karen 2, Michael 1), ate a Rowntrees candy and some chocolate. As for the juice: we were drinking the blackcurrant juice when we discovered it was concentrate. We were wondering why it was so strong, and as it turns out, we should have added 5 parts water for every 1 part juice. Heh. The orange-pineapple was 1-4 juice to water. It explained SOOOOO much.

We went to bed at around 10:30 and slept (happily).