London Calling

The Clash played my soundtrack as our plane neared London.  Naturally, I planned it this way, because I wanted to have "London calling to the underworld; come out of the cupboards, you boys and girls… 'cause London is drowning and I… LIVE BY THE RIVER" ringing in my ears as I stepped off of the plane.  Having planned it didn't make it any less magical for me, however.  The only thing that could have improved upon the sensation would have been skydiving in to those lyrics and releasing a Union Jack parachute as I landed like Gustav Graves in Die Another Day.  (Except that I would be Bond himself, of course, and not the villain.)

And London was indeed magical.  But it was also TORTUROUS.  London has been calling to me since my desire for travel and adventure first began to take shape.  It's a call that has echoed to me from the banks of the Thames, from the gears of the Westminister clock tower, from the stage of the Globe Theater, from the tracks of the tube, and from the light above the fictitious apartment 221B of the authentic Baker Street. It's a call that has tolled through the Roman Empire's rule, the construction of the London bridge, the War of Roses, the Blitz in WWII, and the 1948 Olympics.  And it's a call that has been sounded by the likes of C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, George Herbert, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Shakespeare, King Arthur, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Isaac Newton, and bloody G.K. Chesterton himself.  So perhaps you can imagine that 23 hours was not nearly enough to satisfy my need to answer the call.

Yet 23 hours was all I had.

I was a strong advocate of simply not sleeping, and instead electing to spend every minute in London exploring.  In the end, however, team unity and something resembling common sense won out, and we got hotel rooms.  So for one night we were Londoners.  Very touristy Londoners.  We took red double-decker busses (awesome) from the hotel to the tube (awesome) and got off at Westminister, where we stepped out to an ever-so-slightly-misty evening on the Westminister bridge with the face of Big Ben shimmering across the Thames (so awesome).  I would have loved nothing better than to have found an authentic pub for dinner, but apparently those are rather hard to find in that part of town, so we found a trendy restaurant and I had a Rekorderlig Pear Cider, which wasn't exactly authentic – because it was Swedish – but it was delicious.  We tromped around the touristy areas some more and I climbed on things to take pictures, immediately stirring up some hard cheese from a local knobhead Bobby, and I tried to tell him to bog off, but he wouldn't leave it out, so I had to comply.  Bollocks.

The next morning we got up early and repeated our trek downtown from the hotel, this time to see the tower of London, the Tower Bridge, steal the crown jewels, and FINALLY have a burger and a brew at an authentic pub.  Then we headed to spend more of our precious time in London at the airport, just waiting.  Just waiting there while right outside, London was still calling.

London, you haven't seen the last of me.  I shall answer again.