London

Fair warning: I’ve been working on limiting my writing in recent posts, as I know huge blocks of text can be daunting; however, this recent trip was so much fun that I’ve indulged my desire to record every detail. In other words, feel free to skim!

A couple of weeks ago, Brian and I spent five days in London visiting my parents. The company my dad works for needed someone to fill a temporary vacancy in the London office for two months, and my dad was happy to oblige (just as my mom was happy to keep him company). Since their time over there didn’t coincide with any major breaks, we begged our director for a few days of unpaid leave; he agreed, and off we went.

Now, London would be amazing at any time of year, but there’s a reason that late February is not high tourist season. The weather was as chilly and drizzly as you’d expect, but after two and a half years of warm weather, it felt novel to don coats and scarves for a while.

Our first stop on the Friday we arrived was lunch at the café in the St. Mary Le Bow crypt. The tiny tables had been wedged in at some interesting angles, and we overheard one couple who was blocked in against the wall by a stone pillar say, “S'a little dodgy back here, idn’t it?” We found it charming, though, and the food was delicious—definitely an auspicious beginning to the trip.

Dad had to work that day, so after a quick visit to Guild Hall we bid him farewell, and Brian, Mom, and I headed over to St. Paul’s Cathedral. The corporate apartments where my parents are living are only about two blocks from St. Paul’s, and the pealing bells have become a beloved part of their day. Mom’s bringing us there, then, felt like she was introducing us to an old friend whose stories she could recite by heart. After exploring the interior, we climbed the hundreds of steps to the dome observation area and gazed out over the city. This shot looks down on Paternoster Square, which my dad walks across to get to work each morning, and the Christopher Wren memorial to the Great Fire. A bakery that we frequented was just around the corner from here.

After he was done with work, Dad joined us at Williamson’s Tavern—a great old pub whose main room housed a fireplace with Roman tiles. This was Brian and my introduction to the English pub culture, and we quickly became devoted fans. Plus, after years of drinking what passes for good beer in Cameroon (essentially warm Budweiser by other names), we were in heaven sipping our pints of draft bitters and stouts from the pub’s cold cellar.

Since many museums are open later on Friday nights, we walked across the Millennium Bridge for an evening visit to the Tate Modern. This is a photo of it (the brown building on the right with the smokestack) taken earlier in the day from St. Paul’s; you can also see the Globe Theater’s familiar shape on the left, but we didn’t visit that until later in the week.
The Tate Modern has several I-can’t-believe-I’m-seeing-this-in-person pieces, including one of my favorite Jackson Pollack paintings, but by this time the fact that we hadn’t slept much on our all-night flight from Yaoundé was starting to take effect; we stumbled into a pizza place overlooking the Thames, and Brian and I managed to keep our eyes open long enough to enjoy the meal. On our way back to the apartment, Bri snapped a few shots from the South Bank looking toward St. Paul’s.
Then we shivered back across the bridge and collapsed into bed.

Saturday morning found us much more rested, and we hopped on the tube to Notting Hill for the Portobello Road Market. We weren’t 100% sure where to go from the station, but we figured this stream of people down otherwise quiet streets probably wasn’t a coincidence.
They didn’t lead us astray. (I want to officially thank Kelly Owens for generously letting me borrow her pea coat and several sweaters—I wouldn’t have looked nearly as happy and warm in this and other photos without them!)
We poked into several cute antique shops and browsed the stalls along the market’s main route. Here are Mom and Dad searching for prints of their favorite London landmarks.
I ended up buying some scarves, but mostly we just soaked up the bustling atmosphere. My parents knew of a cozy Italian restaurant nearby, and our lunch of homemade asparagus soup and lasagna warmed us all up after the rainy morning.

After gathering our coats and umbrellas, we ventured back outside and made our way to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V&A is billed as a gallery of decorative arts (pottery, jewelry, etc.), and we weren’t initially sure Dad and Brian would get much out of it, but the collection—from its sculptures to its furniture and medieval tapestries—turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of the trip.
My main motivation for seeing the V&A was that a book I had read recently, The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, was partially set there, and one of the characters was the museum’s curator during its opening days in the late 1800s. Since the building itself is so impressive, I just thought it would be fun to get a feel for that era, but as I rounded a corner I happened upon the Gloucester Candlestick—an important object in the book’s opening scene. Almost 900 years old, the bronze candlestick is covered in dragons and other creatures and is thought to represent the battle between good and evil.
At this point, my day was made, but like I said earlier, Brian also enjoyed the museum, and it had nothing to do with candlesticks. One word: armor. (The suit in this photo appears to be giving Brian a thumbs up.)
As I discovered on our trip to the Middle East a couple years ago, there’s something about castles, knights, and swords that brings out Brian’s inner eleven-year-old. Exhibit A: There was an interactive section at the museum where kids could put their hands in gauntlet replicas; Brian was so entertained that he wouldn’t stop waving his hand around long enough for me to get a focused shot.

From the Victoria and Albert, we walked to Charing Cross Road and spent an hour or so contentedly rummaging through used bookstores. Then we hurried to St. Martin in the Fields for a candlelight performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. We didn’t manage to get a good picture of the ensemble, but some of the photos of the church turned out well; I loved the way the dark wood contrasted with the chandeliers.
We had one of the side pew boxes all to ourselves. (Brian had been cold, so he wore his Smartwool top under his button-down shirt—in case you’re wondering why he looks a little bulky and rumpled in this photo.) :)
A walk to Piccadilly for a dinner of bangers and mash at Langan’s Brasserie marked the end of Day 2.

We got a late start Sunday morning, so we had long ticket lines for the Tower of London.
It was worth the wait for the official Beefeater tour, though. Our guide was a real character who relished describing the tower’s bloody past of torture and executions—another highlight for Brian. (I should pause and credit Dad with this picture and several other photos in this post.)
We wound our way around the fortress’s inner walls, awed by all the history surrounding us.
Here is a shot across the courtyard towards the Tower Bridge.
As neat as it would have been to see the Crown Jewels, we were deterred by the idea of standing in another line in the rain, so we spent our time in the White Tower. As you enter this structure, there is a small plaque noting that this is where the bones of the two “little princes” were found—a legend that is part of one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, Richard III.
Brian was equally pleased to find an assortment of cannons…
…an executioner’s block and axe…
…and, of course, more armor.
In addition to all of its military artifacts, the White Tower is also home to this startlingly beautiful 11th-century chapel.

We continued our historical exploration at the British Library, which holds such treasures as the Magna Carta, the manuscript of Jane Eyre, a Shakespeare first folio, Jane Austen’s writing desk, and a hand-written score of Handel’s Messiah. At one point, Brian and I realized we were looking at the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf—not something you experience every day!

Since we were in the area, we meandered around Bloomsbury for a while and tried to picture Virginia Woolf strolling along those same streets and parks. And as if we hadn’t had enough literary encounters for one day, we popped into the Fitzroy Tavern, where writers such as George Orwell and Dylan Thomas used to hang out.
No brilliant epiphanies, but we still enjoyed our beer, as well as the chance to get in from the cold—note the red noses.

That evening we went to an evensong service at St. Bartholomew the Great. Being in such a small gathering in that gorgeously ancient church and listening to the choir’s otherworldly voices was truly a small piece of heaven. Then it was back into the blustery night before a late dinner of beef bourguignon at a French bistro, wrapping up another amazing day.

The next morning, we left for an overnight trip to Shakespeare country: Stratford-upon-Avon. The two-hour train ride provided us with some lovely views of the English countryside and a chance to get some reading done.

We stayed at a quaint little B&B that was an easy walk both from the train station and also into the center of town.
Our first stop was the museum at Shakespeare’s birthplace. I’ll admit it was somewhat touristy, but it was still fun to see.
Since it wasn’t raining, we decided to take the half-hour walk along a footpath to the Hathaway Cottage, where Shakespeare’s wife grew up. The path wove its way through residential areas…
…beside quintessentially bucolic pastures…
…and by some extremely detailed signs.
When we got to the cottage grounds, Brian and Dad wanted to take some photos of the orchard. I like this picture because it captures a common scene from the trip: Mom and I waiting patiently for the boys to return from wherever they’d wandered off. :)
The cottage itself was very well preserved…
…and the two elderly British gentlemen who gave us our tour couldn’t have been cuter or more enthusiastic.

It was starting to get drizzly again by the time we got back to town, so we sought out an upstairs tearoom for traditional afternoon cream tea. This was a new concept to me, but after I’d tried the homemade scones with cherry jam and clotted cream, I could see why it was such a pastime!
The last stop on our Shakespeare pilgrimage was his burial place, Holy Trinity Church.
Since we had lingered over our cream tea, we arrived too late in the day to go inside the church, but we could still get a sense of the place. The cemetery had some fascinating old tombstones, but it was getting chilly, so after walking around for a while, we ducked into a nearby pub to warm up with a pint and some pistachios.

That night we had one of the best meals of the trip at a local spot called Edward Moon. I had bangers and mash one last time, but this version was made with apple and pork sausage—delicious. (Whoever said Britain doesn’t have good food must have been crazy!) Speaking of which, we thoroughly enjoyed the second “B” of our B&B with a full English breakfast the next morning, before catching our train back to London.

Once we’d dropped our bags at the apartment, we continued our gastro-tour of London with lunch at Blackfriar’s Pub. Mom and Dad wanted to show us this particular pub because of the amazing art nouveau interior, but we found the shepherds pie and seafood pie equally noteworthy.

We spent most of the afternoon at the Churchill War Rooms (sorry—no photos were allowed). This was the bunker where Churchill and his staff set up shop during the blitz, and it was absolutely fascinating to see the map rooms, switchboards, sleeping and dining areas, etc. It was like a small, underground village, except that its sole purpose was fighting a war. We highly recommend a visit if you ever have the chance.

After resurfacing, we walked through St. James Park…
…and past the Admiralty Arch…
…to Trafalgar Square. You can see St. Martin in the Fields (where we’d gone to that concert on Saturday) in the left of this photo.
We spent about an hour in the National Gallery before meeting up with our old friend Gil; she had been second in command at the British High Commission in Yaoundé during our first year there and had been a frequent poker buddy. Now she took us to a Belgian restaurant called Belgo, where we all dug in to steaming pots of mussels. We eventually moved our conversation to the Salisbury—yet another historic pub that was somehow unlike any of the others we’d seen.

After saying goodbye to Gil, the four of us walked down Fleet Street to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, one of the oldest pubs in London. We had a half-pint of stout as a nightcap, as well as some unbelievably delicious sticky toffee pudding, and we delighted in thinking that writers such as Alfred Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charles Dickens had been regulars in this pub, possibly even sitting in our same worn, wooden booth.

Brian and I began our last full day in London by making the requisite English/drama-teacher visit to the Globe Theater. Although we knew it was a replica, it didn’t disappoint.
Since we were there in the offseason, we weren’t able to see a show. For now, though, it was enough to picture the pit filled with rowdy groundlings and the balconies shading the wealthier, lavishly dressed patrons. Quite the scene.
Walking back, we took this shot on the Millennium Bridge…
…and this photo of St. Paul’s rising majestically between modern office buildings.

We had yet another incredible lunch, this time at an Indian restaurant called the Bengal Tiger, near my parents’ apartment. Then we took a bus over to Westminster Abbey.
This is a building that we’ve seen hundreds of times in books or on TV, but it was even more magnificent than I’d imagined, and I loved how each chapel had its own unique style and decoration. While St. Cecilia’s in Ames, Iowa, was a lovely setting for our wedding, I can certainly see why William and Kate ultimately decided to go with Westminster. :)

The day before hadn’t given us quite enough time, so we returned to the National Gallery for another hour. Here is a photo of the four of us right in front of it in Trafalgar Square. (You can see Big Ben in the background.)

Then it was off for an early dinner at Brown’s in Covent Garden before the grand finale of our trip: a performance of Les Misérables.
Here is my illicit shot inside the Queen’s Theatre from our seats in the very last row.
It had been years since I’d seen Les Mis, and Brian had never seen it, so I was worried that I may have overhyped it. Not so—it still gave me just as many goose bumps as the first time I saw it, and I was so happy to finally get to share it with Bri.

It was the perfect end to a wonderful week. We had so much fun with Mom and Dad, and although it was hard to say goodbye to them, this year has already flown by, and I know it will be June before we know it. As for London, I’m thrilled my parents had this opportunity to get to know it so well and that they allowed us to share it with them for a few days—we can’t wait to go back!