No Place Like London (Part 2: Saturday, March 15)

Ahhh, the first day in London! My first chance to get out and about and explore the city! And what a day it was, too. Beautiful, sunny, almost, dare I say (what's that feeling called again?), warm. Not quite; I still needed my coat, but very nice indeed.

Well, after loading our stuff into a locker in the storage room of our hostel (and buying a padlock that could actually fit onto the locker!), Shea and I set out. We had an adventure to attend; a special tour that Shea had discovered, given by a somewhat well known group (supposedly....) called the Blue Badge Tours. Best of all, it was FREE! And, you know, if the price is right.... All we had to do was get to the front steps of the Marylebone Church at 10:00am. And get there we did. After catching the metro to the Baker Street tube station, we had about 45 minutes to find the church and wait for the tour to begin. Which was fine with me; I was gazing around the home-street of the great Sherlock Holmes like the fat kid in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory stared at that beautiful, delicious flowing river of chocolate. Mmmmm.... Baker Street. There was even a statue of Holmes himself, which (darn it!) I didn't get a picture of. But it was great. Better still, in our brief wanderings before the tour started, Shea and I found a wee place that only the two of us would get excited about:

That's right, friends and neighbors! A Beatles Store! And if the stuff in there wasn't as expensive as it was, that would've been the end of me right there.....

Well, the Blue Badge tour, entitled "Great British Music - 250 Years of the Music Scene," proved to be interesting, but probably not quite what Shea and I had been expecting. The focus turned out to be mostly on classical composers and performers, although there were spatterings of more recent (and substantially more famous) performers thrown in to make things interesting. We saw, for instance, the Methodist church where a young Elton John used to play the piano on Sundays, and the apartment of Jane Asher, Paul McCartney's long-time girlfriend during the height of Beatlemania. So that was cool. And the weather held out throught it all!

After lunch, Shea and I took a stroll in Regent's Park, a rather large, somewhat opulent, but certainly very beautiful park just a block north of the Baker Street station. Strolling in a foreign park is always a good time; the trees, plants, and animals that are all around you are lovely and soothing, and though it all feels familiar, you can still retain the impression of exoticism that makes a vacation so intriguing and fun. Anyway....

We had decided to spend a bit of time in the National Gallery, so, after completing our stroll around the park, we departed for the Charing Cross tube station. But can you imagine the scene we were confronted with when we popped out of the station and turned the corner into Trafalgar square? A mass of people, some shouting, most quietly standing or walking, many wielding large picket signs.... Shea and I had stumbled onto the remnants of a massive anti-war rally that had apparently been going on in Trafalgar Square since noon. The protest was over, and all of the people left in the Square were merely the stragglers, the die-hards, and the simply bored, none of whom wanted to go home quite yet.

Wading our way through a sea (well, perhaps, "puddle" would be a more apt description...) of "World's #1 Terrorist" (adorned with a portrait of George W. Bush, of course) and "Free Palestine" signs, we mounted the steps of the National Gallery and got to drown our protestor-inspired indignation at the wrongs of the world in great art. Fun, fun....

Upon leaving the gallery, the weather, which had proven itself so amenable just hours before, had turned against us. With a passion. The wind blew, the rain fell, and the cold... froze? I guess that's the only verb that "cold" can actually do. Anyway, point is, it started pouring. Which meant that shelter had to be taken - in a Costa Coffee shop! Exxxcellent....

After the warmth of a cup of my favorite poison, Shea and I had to brave the rain, return to our hostel to grab our luggage, and take the metro to Kensington, where we were meeting a friend, Chris, who had agreed to let us stay at his flat for the next two days. And a dinner of Chinese food and two hours of Blood Diamond later, we were ready for bed.