London, Day 6

The Long And Winding... Staircase?
Thursday morning we slept in again, later this time than Wednesday. While showers were being taken we had another free nudie show via the hotel across the way from our window, this time certainly with a woman on the bill! No camera in hand, though, so there were no photos to document the moment. The restaurant in our hotel began clearing their continental breakfast items before we were done eating. With nothing to do at any particular time until evening, we made a leisurely meal of it, and then we headed out with loose plans to visit the Natural History and the Science museums… musea?…

We meandered a bit along the road, having missed our turn, and we asked directions of a nice, older gentleman, who pointed us back to our path. This put the Victoria and Albert Museum in our way, and we went inside for a look-see. Aside from a dazzling sculpture in the entry foyer, which looked rather like a psychedelic stream of vomit (and I mean that in the good way!), there wasn’t really much to speak of. However, with the convenience and the capacity for over-indulgence allowed by digital photographic technology, there was plenty worth taking dozens of pictures of!






































This thing is so ugly it's cute!














We never made it to the Natural History museum before lunch. On our walk from the hotel in the morning we had passed a pub called “The Hoop and Toy,” just a mere 50 yards from the front door of the Pelham, and since it was a known in a vast world of possibilities, we decided to go back there to eat.

A had the Chicken Kiev, which he quite thoroughly devoured. Mrs. Farrago and I had ale, she the Young’s, and I the Old London…or something like that. The pub had just a bit of that old tavern smell, which was kind of cool…reminding me of The Old Cheshire Cheese which we had tried to visit on our first day, but was closed, so all we got of it was the smell.

We returned to the museum area and went into the Natural History Museum. We were now pressed for time because of our dinner date at 6:30, so we whizzed through, during which I found particularly interesting the cut of California sequoia tree, which was dated back to the dawn of time…okay, the Roman Empire.





















Exiting there we made our way to the Science Museum where A wanted only to see the airplanes. We had made our way in only a few feet to a short set of marble steps where a small boy was playing and hanging from the hand rail. He dropped his feet down onto the top step, took a step forward and missed the edge, and toppled “ass-over-tea-kettle,” as Mrs. Farrago so eloquently phrased it, down the steps. It happened right next to me and, though he would have rolled down only three more steps to the bottom, I reached down and stopped him going more than one, though he had already rapped his head on the stone. Of course he cried, and I looked at a woman I thought was his mother, but she just gave me that “it’s not mine” look we all know so well. Fortunately the boy’s mother’s sonar picked up the tone of his cry through the droning din of other screaming, chattering and crying children in that zoo… er, museum…and she came walking back. I made a lame attempt at ensuring to her that it was the boy who made himself cry rather than this big, strange American who could very well have been fondling him by the look of it, for all she knew. She didn’t appear to care either way, but only said something to the effect of “It’s part of his daily requirement as a boy to injure himself at least twice,” and dragged him off to his next misadventure.

We made our way to the cleverly hidden aviation exhibit, and I was pleasantly surprised to see they had an actual jet engine from a WWII German Luftwaffe Messerschmidt 262, the first jet airplane to see service in the world. I could bore you with a brief history of the plane, but aren’t you bored enough already? Let’s just say I’m a bit of a geek about it and leave it at that, shall we?

It proved to be quite an interesting exhibit, and I was sad when we ran out of time and had to go.








Here I am looking frightfully like my father!!














We walked back to the hotel via a souvenir shop irreverently placed in the neighborhood of our hotel, and we made ready for our dinner date in Covent Garden.

The restaurant Boulevard Brasserie was, I gather, in the heart of the Covent Garden section/borough/neighborhood of London, a modern, bustling, vibrant part of the city. Modern, bustling, vibrant that is, except for the tube station. As the anonymous throng exited the train with us at the Covent Garden tube stop, it seemed an inordinate number of them were following the signs that read “To The Lifts,” which, while I know that “lift” in Great Britain means the same as “elevator” in the USA, I assumed meant “escalator” in this instance because every tube station I’d been to since I arrived had escalators, no matter what they’re called in Great Britain. But no, we arrived in the middle of the throng at two small doors to what I could only assume were two small elevators. I couldn’t make out why so many people were waiting to cram themselves on them, and so we three decided to take the stairs.

We arrived soon at a quaint little (large, actually) spiral staircase and a sign that read “Way Out,” with an arrow pointing at the stairs. And so we climbed. And climbed…. and climbed… The thing about a spiral staircase enclosed in concrete is that the view never changes – it’s stairs above your head and beneath your feet until a hole appears at the top of the stairs and you’re free. And we climbed… and climbed. An interesting thing about the London Underground Railway system is that, similarly to that of Paris and even Washington D.C. some of the tunnels are dug quite deep, some seemingly as much as six stories! Some of the London tube stations were used during WWII as air raid shelters.

And we climbed …and we climbed… Did I happen to mention yet SIX FREAKING STORIES?! I wasn’t quite sure if I hadn’t actually had a stroke from the climb because I had no feeling below my hips! I felt about ready to lose the dinner I hadn’t eaten yet!

So it turns out that the lifts are actually quite large despite the deceptively small doors, and had we ridden one we would have saved the four-and-a-half minutes it took to climb the stairs, and the 7.29 years shaved off the ends of our lives.












Dinner, on the other hand, was great, though not as French as the restaurant name “Boulevard Brasserie” would imply. I had the Entrecote Steak, Mrs. Farrago had the Sea Bass, and A had the steamed mussels.
















Afterward we strolled leisurely through the Covent Garden area toward the river Thames, passing through a large group of Russians on a twilight tour who clogged the walkway on the bridge, stopping to snap photos of the river and the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament, and then weaving our way through the Russian throng again as they had passed us while we snapped photos. At least I think they were Russian tourists. One of them was waving a flag, so maybe they were claiming the oil and mineral rights of England.

We made our way back to the Westminster tube station and headed back to the Pelham.