I arrived at Gatwick North around 20 minutes late on July
19, circa 11:15 or 11:30pm. Signs of the Olympics were everywhere. The terrible
logo was plastered on every column and every wall.
The passport control woman asked me why I was in London. I
shrugged my shoulders and said, “My dad has a 100-year-old bottle of Port he
wants to open here.”
“Oh, so your father lives here, does he?”
“No, he just wants to open it here. I have no idea why.”
“Alright, anything for a good bottle of wine.” Stamped.
Why was I in London? I certainly can’t afford to live there.
It’s terribly expensive. But my dad actually wanted to open up a 1912 bottle of
port, and what better place to do it than at Hampton Court Palace. He rented
out Fish Court, one of two rooms they rent in the palace that once belonged to
Henry VIII, for the week before the Olympics. I think we probably would have
stayed for a bit of Olympics week, too, but Hampton Court was hosting the
Cycling events, and they wouldn’t rent out the rooms for those dates. This
family vacation had been planned for quite a while, and it was a great way to
get acclimated to English-speaking society before getting back to the United
States. Besides, I’ve been through London so many times in the last decade, but
haven’t spent any real time in the city since I was 5, the last time we stayed
at Hampton Court.
I got a 12:00am shuttle to Gatwick South. From there, I took
a 12:20am train to London Victoria for an absurd £18.90. From Victoria, I would
have taken the Underground to Bayswater, but the Underground was closed, so I
took a cab to the Central Park Hotel, walked up to room 415, and knocked on the
door. Mingwei, my old friend from Wash U freshman year, whom I have hung out
with in New York and Beijing as well, opened the door.
We chatted for a while before going to bed. Mingwei goes to
Cambridge now, and is working at the Olympics for some company that brings
important people around. His first day of work was the next day.
I woke up in the morning, once again, at 8:30. Mingwei left
to go to work. I checked out at 11:30, and found out to my horror that the
hotel has no baggage room. I’ve stayed in hostels in depressing third-world
countries that have baggage rooms, and this English hotel does not. So I
resolved instead to go straight to Hampton Court, where my Parents would be by
that time.
I walked to Queensway station, walked down an epic spiral
staircase with my backpack on my back, and caught the 11:48 Underground.
Queensway -> Bond -> Waterloo.
At Waterloo station, I booked a ticket on the 12:36 train to
Hampton Court. I met my mother on the platform at 1:12 at the end of the line.
We went straight to a pub in the nearby town for some food.
I put my massive backpack against the outside wall of the pub, where my dad was
waiting, and we sat outside to eat and drink.
Then, across the Thames to Hampton Court! I haven’t been
back since I was 5 years old. Hampton Court is home to some of my earliest
memories, many of them faulty. I did not remember the layout of the interior of
Fish Court nearly as well as I had thought I did.
I relaxed for a while in Fish Court. It’s been an exhausting
several months, and it was nice to just put my bag down and have a nice, clean,
comfortable couch to relax on.
Just before 6 my mom and I went on a tour of the grounds
while the tourists emptied out. That’s one of the perks of staying at the
Palace. You get roaming rights at all hours of the night to most places on the
grounds. There is truly something magical about standing in Base Court at
midnight.
The three of us had dinner downtown at Le Petite something… I can’t remember. We had duck, scallops, and
dressed crab. It was incredible, and we each stole from each other’s plates. It
was also the first taste we have ever had of an improved English dining
culture. 15 years ago, restaurants were just no good. English food still is
terrible, but at least this time it has given way to foreign food, like this
night’s French adventure.
We were in bed around 11:30. I stayed up in one of the loft
rooms, overlooking a courtyard.
In the morning we missed the 10:54 train to Waterloo, so we
got the 11:24 instead. We spent a short while at some market we stumbled on by
the London Eye pier.
At 1:10 I separated from my parents so they could go on some
tour or museum or something. I went to this thing I call an Omnimax theater,
which is basically an IMAX theater in spherical form, I think. I didn’t get
inside, they had no tickets to the just-released Dark Knight Rises. Not for
weeks.
I checked my email with the free wifi outside the Waterloo
tube station, before going across the street to the main station and buying an
Oystercard, realizing that unlimited transport on the tube and train to Hampton
court would be most valuable.
I made contact with Ben, a friend from Wash U who had just
graduated and moved to London for work. He suggested I get a cheap
pay-as-you-go cell phone for the week. I got on the Tube and went to Tottenham
Court Road via Bond Street station to find the Carphone Warehouse. There I got
a £3 phone with a £10 top-up. It was worth it for all the texting and talking
between myself Mingwei, Ben, and Chadwic.
Oh yea, Chadwic was in London. After leaving Kiev he had
made it to London, where he started working again. I’ll write more on that
later.
I went back to Waterloo station. Walked to the Thames, then
past the London Eye and over the bridge to Big Ben (passing it at 5pm exactly,
as the bells chimed) and parliament.
I relaxed in Parliament Square for a bit (why is there a
statue of Abraham Lincoln in Parliament Square?) before heading to Westminster
Abbey, which was closed, but beautiful from the outside.
Next I walked over to Whitehall, to see, well, Whitehall,
and 10 Downing Street, which I finally realized is a brilliantly placed locale
for the PM to live. Downing Street is of course riddled with guards, sandwiched
on all sides by major government buildings, and 10 Downing Street is angled in
such a way that one can barely see the front, and there are clearly no good
angles for any sort of attack. But the Press films it from the front, with a
close-up of the buildings, so it looks like the PM lives on a street like any
other English street. On camera, 10 Downing Street looks like your average
little English city home, meaning the PM is no one special, just one of your
fellow citizens. Brilliant.
Continuing on to Trafalgar Square, I searched in vain for a
pigeon. 5-year-old me loved to chase pigeons, and Brian and I had such fun
chasing them at Trafalgar Square. But the Olympics had taken over, and the
Square was decidedly full of workers and construction, and decidedly void of
pigeons.
Around 7 Mingwei came to get me and take me to Greenwich to
hang out with some friends of his.
We stopped off at Elephant and Castle, which was completely
out of the way, just to say we’ve been there. Then to Laicester, where we got a
drink at the Bear and Staff, before meeting up with his friends, Gaurav, Mark,
and Chandu. The five of us went to Chinatown, to a Malaysian-Singaporean place
called Rasa Sayang. We had a lovely meal, and I ditched around 11 to make it
back to the last train of the night, 11:36pm.
I woke up the next morning on July 22, a little tired but
not too bent out of shape. Brian showed up, having spent a little time in Paris
and taking a train in that morning. The family was once again reunited for the
first time since Istanbul.
We toured the grounds as a family and got dinner at a brand
new Lebanese place next to the French place in town, but that was pretty much
all we did all day. It was a lazy day.
Oh, we did crack open one of the 1912 ports and have a sip
or two. It was unbelievably sweet and, despite the little bits of cork floating
around in it, very much worth the wait.
July 23 found my father and I exploring still more of the
palace. This time, we went to the chapel, which today houses one of the first
(maybe the first) editions of the King James Bible. We went to the King’s
private Chambers, observed the amazing weapons collection along the walls, and
found the Kings’ true throne (complete with velvet seat and bucket to catch
what is tossed).
Later, my dad’s friend Eric came with his wife and children.
I took the kids to the maze, the world’s oldest hedge maze, before taking them
back to meet up with the adults in the great banquet hall.
That night my dad had a big
party for all his friends in London, to enjoy the wines. He had taken out many
bottles to enjoy, most of which we did not get to. We finished off the 1912
port that we had opened the night before, and drank and ate to our hearts
contents. Mingwei came for the party, and spent the night with us at the
Palace.
At midnight, I think we achieved
a first at Hampton Court. Mingwei, my Father and I sat in Base Court, under the
moon, drinking 100-year-old port and smoking Cuban cigars. Pretty sure that’s
never happened before in that spot. At least, it seems fairly unlikely.
On July 24 I would finally make it back to London. In the
early afternoon I headed out with Mingwei, past the construction of the cycling
events outside the main entrance to the palace, and made my way to Waterloo,
then to King’s Cross St. Pancras station. I took the obligatory photo of
Platform 9¾, but it didn’t bring me to a new dimension, nor was it between
platforms 9 and 10.
I sat at the station for a while, working on my blog and
relaxing over a cheese plate, then got word from Chadwic of where I could meet
up with him. So I met him in Camden Town, a little hipster area that was
actually pretty fun. We got some beers and sat by a little waterway, talking
for a while.
We grabbed dinner at some food stands along the water,
before Chadwic had to leave to meet up with some girl. He’s in the last few
weeks in London as well, as he has resolved to save up some money (he quit
being a chef, hated his old job, and got a new one as a mover, but wants to
move on) and move to Spain for the next section of his adventures.
I went to the Hilton London Metropole, where Mingwel was
being housed for the Olympics. We hung out for a while in the evening until it
became time for me to head back to the city by train. I caught the train to
Wimbledon and then got on the Waterloo à Hampton Court line as
it passed through.
My parents had rented a car when they arrived, and we put it
to good use on the 25th of July. We drove west a ways, leaving
London to go to Salisbury, Stonehenge, and Bath.
Salisbury boasts an incredible cathedral of dizzying beauty.
It stands out in the surrounding countryside in an amazing way. Inside,
architecture aside, there is the world’s oldest mechanical clock, consisting of
an intricate series of gears and pulleys, weights and counterweights. Many
famous people were buried here, too. But the main attraction is the most
undamaged of the four remaining original productions of the 1215 Magna Carta.
It truly is an incredible document.
Stonehenge is almost due north of Salisbury. It is
beautiful, definitely, but I’m wary of anything sitting in a field that no one
is allowed to approach with a ten-foot pole (or a 10-meter one). We got the
audio guide, and I recounted its contents to my parents. The construction is
baffling – I have to echo the sentiments of so many who came before me – how
did such primitive people manage to construct something so complex, heavy, and
symmetrical?
From Stonehenge, we continued west to Bath.
We didn’t spend much time in Bath. I needed to be back in
London to meet up with Ben for dinner, and Bath is on the other side of the
island from London. But the town is charmingly quaint. It seems to have this
distinctive hue on all of the buildings. Apparently famous for its, um, Baths,
Bath has natural hot springs galore. We grabbed a quick meal, drove around the
town, and saw the Royal Crescent, the most famous crescent in Bath, before
heading back towards London.
We made it back a little later than I had hoped, but it was
no problem. I had my parents drop me off at Hammersmith station, on the
outskirts of London (On my way to the station, incidentally, I passed by
another St. Christopher’s Inn, by chance). From here I took the tube to
Farringdon station to meet Ben.
The two of us had a very nice meal at a little Bangladeshi
restaurant near there, before we wandered the streets talking, and headed to
Whitechapel, looking for some trash cans for Ben’s new apartment. After a while
I bid him adieu, and headed back to Hampton Court via Canada Water and Waterloo
to enjoy my last night in Europe.
On the 26th of July, I left Europe. I got on a
plane at Heathrow and flew to Philadelphia. It was depressing. But my journey
was not quite over!
I would spend the night in Philadelphia with my Grandfather.
The next morning I would go to St. Louis to spend several days with my roommate Josh to move all our stuff from last
semester into a new apartment, as our landlord was kicking us out. And then, on
August 3, 2012, I would make it back home to Westport, exactly 7 months after I
had left in January. Unfamiliar is just one word to describe how it felt to be
back in the States. Confusing is another, as my parents had moved houses while
I was gone, and now I have to call a new place home. But that should be no
problem – I’ve spent the last seven months calling a new place home every few
days. One more change can’t hurt.
