London

To continue my scenic (and hopefully somewhat environmentally friendly tour of Britain) I followed my usual route of taking the ferry and train to London. It's a great deal, only 41 euros and you don' have to pre-book. I had no trouble arriving at the ferry, and not a minute too soon as the ferry actually left earlier than scheduled. It was a great fast ferry called the Jonathan Swift. I had a really comfortable ride and got a nice view of the sunrise. I arrived at Hollyhead, Wales to wait for my train. The first part of the trip was good, traveling through Wales was incredibly beautiful, and I was sad that I wouldn't see more of it since my tour of Wales had been canceled. But after changing trains, it was so busy I had to stand most of the 2 hour trip to London. I arrived at London's incredibly busy Euston train station, and made my way towards the tube (the metro). It was chaos in there, people everywhere. They are in the middle of some major renovations on the tube and the station entrances were packed. Still, I managed to figure it out and made my way to my hostel. Luckily it was right beside the tube station and I had no trouble getting there.

While in Dublin, I had caught a nasty cold, and it was really getting the best of me in London. Because of this, I didn't get to see a lot of things that I would have liked. I did still see a lot though, including the British Museum and it's amazing collection of Greek and Egyptian artifacts. Their most famous artifact is the Rosetta stone, the stone that was used to decipher hieroglyphics. I also saw the National Art Gallery and Trafalgar Square, and took some pictures of the big Lord Admiral Nelson Statue in the centre of the square. I walked through the market at Covent Gardens which was full of people and buskers. I walked a lot.

I liked the energy of London, it was very fast paced, everyone seemed like they were in a rush to get somewhere. I had a lot of trouble getting used to the fact that the cars were on the wrong side of the road (at least for me), and was constantly having to look each direction before crossing (though many streets have arrows that show you which way to look, probably just for tourists like me). That night I decided to really treat myself and bought a ticket to the musical Wicked, which I'd wanted to see last year in New York but couldn't afford. It's the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, who is not really that wicked, just misunderstood. It was really wonderful, I enjoyed it immensely.

The next day I went to the Tate Modern Gallery, which had a fantastic collection of Surrealist and modern paintings. One of its current exhibits is a great huge crack running through the whole of the bottom floor, called Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo. It's intriguing to think about how the artist managed to do it, but the gallery won't say.

I was starting to get pretty exhausted, so I decided to book a hotel room (a private room all to myself) and ended up in Greenwich, London, in the Devonport House. It was a lovely place, with an amazing breakfast, and I spent the weekend convalescing. Greenwich had a couple really great markets with some of the best displays of food vendors I've ever seen, selling coffee, chocolates, italian nougats, cookies, breads, olives and many other tasty delights. I didn't explore the area that much, but I did walk near the water and found a strange little round building that turned out to be the entrance to a foot tunnel under the river. There was a huge elevator that you could take down, and then you walked for several minutes in a long tiled tunnel. It was a little eerie to walk it by myself in the early hours of the morning when I had no idea where it would come out, but I ended up on the other side and had an amazing view of the river in the early morning mist.

Before I left London, I walked by the Parliament Buildings, Big Ben, St. Paul's and stopped at Buckingham Palace. It's closed to visitors in the winter, but you can still take pictures at the gate, which I did, and there is a beautiful park beside it (Green Park) with a nice Canadian Monument, which acknowledges the contributions of Canadians in the wars.

That was my all too brief time in London. Next stop: Paris.