Weekend Trip to London

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So yesterday I went on the first of what may be many day trips to London. It's really not very far from Oxford (about 1.5 hours by bus) and is a place I could go every weekend and still not see more than a tiny fraction of what the city has to offer. But for the first time, this was a pretty successful trip. The main events were our visit to the British Museum and seeing Spamalot in the West End, but most of the day was (very pleasantly) spent walking around the city.

Most of the people in the house were planning on taking a trip somewhere this weekend. In addition to the people day tripping to London there was also an overnight group that left on Friday plus smaller groups going to Bath (mostly to attend the Jane Austin festival going on this weekend) and Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon. Our group of four left the house a little after 10am and walked to the downtown bus station to procure transportation. A round trip ticket only costs students 13 pounds, provided you return the same day or the next. The bus ride was uneventful except for a detour to avoid a large demonstration in London. We never really figured out what it was for (something about protesting the culture of violence) but we saw traces of it all over town, including several people standing around advertising "free hugs". We arrived in London's Victoria Coach Station after 1 due to bad traffic. Having missed breakfast I was starving, but was blessed to enjoy a Kebab that was (and I saw this unhesitatingly) the most delicious thing I have ever eaten. Every time I'm in the city from now on, I am going back to this store. For the record it's the Kebab and Fried chicken place about half a block east of the station on St. George's drive. Go there. No seriously, go there.

The plan was to walk to Leicester Square via Buckingham Palace and Trafalger Square, buy the cheapest tickets to a show we could find, then continue on to the British Museum, look at old stuff, return to the theatre district, and finally walk back to the bus station after the play. And a good plan it was. I don't know why everybody keeps telling me that I should expect the weather to be unpleasant here, because yesterday was another sunny, warm day. Buckingham Palace was, as usual, crawling with sightseers like us, the vast majority of which seemed to be from the Continent. I think I heard more French than English. Jostling for a position at the fence to watch the guards stand really still is only entertaining for so long, so we proceeded down the Mall along St. James' Park toward Trafalger Square. Because of the sunlight the park was full of people enjoying the weather, presumably in an endeavour to get their annual supply of Vitamin D before the 9 months of cold and rain starts. The police were setting up barricades in advance of the march, which seemed planned to end in front of the Palace. We ducked under the Admiralty Arch to enter the crowds at Trafalgar Square.

The square is an impressive sight, with the National Gallery sitting on a hill behind it and, more notably, Nelson's Column rising 169 feet above the street. The column is a monument to Lord Nelson, the admiral who commanded the British fleet at the Battle of Trafalger, where he was also killed. I always think this sort of monument is amusing in a vaguely Freudian sense. What better way to memorialize a hero of the Empire than putting his likeness atop a giant phallus in the capital city? That being said, it is a very big column and he probably deserves it. I also like the giant lions guarding the base. Unlike the last time I visited the city, there were almost no pigeons around this time, depriving us of the inestimable pleasure of chasing flocks of small birds around a large, open space. Walking past the National Gallery, we continued on to Leiscester Square.

Leiscester comprises the heart of London's famous West End, the British answer to New York's Broadway. We had the choice of several dozen shows, some of which had been running since the last time I was in London in 2001. We decided on Spamalot, a musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film which I can confidently claim to know every line of. I've heard it was funny, and it only cost 15 pounds, in contrast to the stage version of Billy Elliot, which was ambitiously priced at 60 pounds. Having secured entertainment for the evening, we continued to the British Museum.

Despite some minor navigational missteps, we arrived at the museum about 4pm. Let me say that I absolutely love the British Museum. It has an unbeatable, varied, and vast collect, plus it's absolutely free. This is what a museum should be. The inside was packed, not with just tourists but with people who at least seemed to be from the neighborhood. One of the things that I like about the museum is how you can wander around a corner and come face to face with an artifact that you've heard of, like the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin Marbles (this is especially impressive if, like me, the number of named archaeological objects you've heard of can be counted on one hand).

It is a little odd that these priceless artifacts from around the world ended up in London. I get the feeling that most of the collection was formed by Victorian gentlemen wandering the world, finding something cool, and saying "This is pretty sweet. Let's put it in a box and send it back to England!". It clearly never even crossed their minds that the statuary from the Parthenon should stay, oh say...on the Parthenon! As a helpful pamphlet explained, countries the world over are trying to get their stuff back from the museum in this more enlightened time, in response to which the museum is essentially flicking the bird and saying "No way". In a way, I think it's better that everything stays in the Museum. This way, it's all in the same place, as well as properly cared for. Finders keepers, I suppose.

We had dinner at what advertised itself as a pancake house, although it looked suspiciously upscale for an IHOP. We picked it because everyone in our group expressed a hearty desire to eat some pancakes, though curiously when we ordered nobody got any. Perhaps it's for the best; no matter how good they may have been Wafflehouse will always occupy a place in my heart as "Breakfast Food Distributor of Choice". Spamalot was just as funny as I'd hoped it would be, a bit of a surprise considering that I'd seen the movie umpteen million times. There was a fair amount of new jokes, plus the musical numbers complete with tap dancing. The thirty minute walk back to the bus station went fairly smoothly, but I will say that a few more streetlights along the Mall would not go amiss. It looked a little dodgy, even though it was probably the safest place in the city considering it was about 200 yards from the Queen's front door. Besides, several thousand people had just spent the day marching to the same spot in support of peace. Had we been the victims of knife-crime, the irony would have been astounding. (I am, of course, exaggerating. We were never in any kind of danger and didn't really feel unsafe. Just antsy in a deserted, dark part of an unfamiliar city) Returning to the bus station unpunctured, we caught the 11:30 bus back to Oxford.

It was an uneventful trip home, despite an attempted drive-by egging as we were walking back to the house. Apparently it's a bit of a local pastime to troll the streets at night in your Peugeot, lobbing unfertilized chicken fetuses at hapless pedestrians. This is especially weird since eggs here cost almost a pound per egg, making this an expensive hobby. Several of the people in the house got hit last week, but fortunately we were able to dodge the yolky ordinance. By dodge, I mean look perplexedly at the white objects splattering the sidewalk at our feet while thinking "Now what the....Oh, eggs! Crap!". I can only hope that the sirens we heard later that night was the local constabulary on its way to beat our assailants repeatedly with nightsticks. In addition to being pleased to avoid the eggs, I was also pumped about UGA football's victory over Arizona State, though we were unable to actually watch the game. Go Dawgs indeed.