London, Part 2

Happy Birthday to Susan Lange Gunst! Today, the 25^th of January, 28 years ago or so, my Mom was born. I hope you have a good one, Mom!!!!

After getting settled into the Regency Hotel early on the 25^th, I got about 5 good hours of sleep and showered, before Bruce and I decided to explore South Kensington and change some money. South Kensington is like the Bel Air of London, with the nicest 'flats' and cars. I took pictures of a Ferrari, a Maserati, a Bentley, even an Aston Martin Vanquish DB9, which is the same car, in the same color, as James Bond's in Die Another Day (without, of course, the invisibility mode). Later, we met up at the Hotel Restaurant with Hannah, our London coordinator, for drinks and appetizers. We were all pretty famished at this point, so Hannah suggested a traditional English pub, where we could get a good meal, called The Haverford Arms.

When we first went in, the doorman was wearing a kilt and greeting everyone jovially. After finishing my Angus burger, I went to find him again for a picture. However, he had changed into his regular clothes (“3 hours as a Scot is too much for an Englishman”, he admitted). Instead, he took me back behind the bar for a special photo, of which I am very proud, with our “'ands on the pumps!”. Afterwards, we went back to hotel and got some sleep for the big London tour the next morning.

I mistakenly set my travel alarm for 7:45pm, which meant that we were awoken by a telephone call 5 minutes before the tour bus was picking us up at the Regency. The tour was amazing. London is an incredible mix of organic urban planning-- where buildings pop up wherever they can squeeze in, and wide open parks. We saw so many magnificent things in just a few hours: The Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, The Parliament building, London Bridge, Tower Bridge, churches by Christopher Wren, and Piccadilly Circus. The tour lasted from about 8:45 to 1:00. 30 St. Mary Axe is a very modern building we saw that was designed by Norman Foster, one of England's premiere architects. After I read a little about it I discovered that it was built by Skanska, who also did an amazing job of building the extension to Duke's divinity school, and I think is a company we've used at VCCS.

After the tour, we were dropped off in the center of London to spend the rest of the day doing whatever we wanted. We convened for lunch, where we discussed the potential problem of Jake Martell and I sharing the same name. Because his last name is Martell, Mike suggested he go as Marty. Other Jake hated that name, so ever since he has gone by McFly, a reference to the 1985 Robert Zemeckis movie: Back to the Future. You can note here that, strangely, there was never any talk of changing my name, which will be funny in a few days. After lunch we moved as a group towards London Bridge. I stopped to pick up a scarf for Shelley, and half the group kept going. So then it was Mike, Natasha, Yvette and I, making our way down to the Thames (maybe we'd see a whale!). As we walked south along the river, we entered old London, originally called Londinium, which was founded by the Romans over 2000 years ago. Today Londinium, which is only about one square mile, houses the financial district. When we got to London Tower, Mike and Natasha went their own way, and Yvette and I decided we would make our way back to South Kensington seeing some cool sites along the way.

We crossed the tower bridge and walked through the south side of London towards the borough. What we didn't realize was that London tower to the Regency hotel was comparable to the Appalachian Trail, so we ended up taking The Underground, also known as The Tube, to Hyde Park, across the street from the Wellington Arch. Hyde Park was very cool. At the entrance was a huge statue of Perseus. The overcast sky, green sweeping lawns, and almost endless paths lined with trees was all very English. We walked past a lake and stopped by a small modern art gallery, which was a little weird, but had a pretty funny gorilla statue outside.

After perambulating the park, we moved south towards the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was cool because it had an extensive collection of classical art, and also an interesting exhibit on Muslim art. In Islamic tradition, art does not include images of people or animals, to prevent confusion with any type of idol worship, which was prevalent in Mohammad's time, especially in the Kabba. Because of this, most of the art there was in tile-work, calligraphy, or floral or geometric patterns. Over the front entrance hung a huge blue and green glass chandelier, which was also very cool. After leaving the museum we walked back to the Regency to see if we could find our group members.