London Dec 17-21
How we got around
It was our first venture into using one of the many European budget
airlines, and seemed too good to be true...19 Euros Bilbao, Spain to London
(Standsted). Drew made fun of me for buying a tape measure, as I was dead set
on keeping my backpack small enough for the "guaranteed" carry on
size. As it happened, Easyjet wasn't very picky.
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| Drew and his alter-ego |
We arrived at Stansted Airport, about an hour north of the city.
There is a train into Liverpool Station in central London. There
are also several bus companies that run convenient shuttles (much cheaper) to
central London as well. The Oyster Card is the way to go if you are going
to need to get around in London. It looks like a credit card. You
pay 5 pounds for it (which is refundable), and can either put money on it,
which will be deducted when you scan the card as you go through the turnstiles, or
buy the unlimited travel card for a week, which is a fixed rate. You have
to look at your zones of travel and do the math to figure out what makes most
sense. It's good on buses and the Underground.
Where we stayed
and what we did
We stayed in East Finchley with my friend Amanda, whom I met 22
years ago in Thailand on a hill tribe trek somewhere outside of Chiang Mai, and
had not seen since.
She pulled out her old photos albums…there we were, a small group of young
backpackers, visiting villages of the Karen, Shan, Yao, and Meo and getting
around on foot, on hastily thrown together bamboo rafts, and elephants.
Of course, we look exactly the same.
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| deep "Underground" |
We filled up the air mattresses and made ourselves comfortable on
her living room floor. She could not have been more welcoming. It was fun
to be there around the holidays when decorations and lights are up, and people
are getting into the holiday spirit; we went to her choral performance, and a
little holiday party with zippy conversation. For a taste of “Downton Abbey,” we walked the Kensington
Manner House moors and toured the house, enjoying both the art and the docent’s
enthusiastic stories, which connected historical "dots" and brought
the paintings of the monarchs to life for us. We dined and drank at one
of the most historic pubs in London, called "The Spaniards."
Apparently the original owner's son, Dick Turpin was a legendary
"highwayman" in the 1700's (a TV show was based on him.)
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| crammed subway...gets much worse than this |
Drew and I put on the miles walking the sites along the Thames by
both day and by night (when buildings and bridges are colorfully lit). We
visited the usual sites...Trafalgar Square, Pal Mal to Buckingham Palace with
throngs of other tourist. If it’s this busy in the winter it must be
insanely busy in the summer.
Most of the British museums are free but surprisingly not the churches.
We were in “history nerd” mode, so decided on 2 museums, the Museum
of London and the Imperial War Museum.
What we learned at
the London Museum
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| Kensington walk |
The London Museum was an eye opener. I knew London was
part of the Roman Empire but didn't know the British Isles, and London to be
such a melting pot historically.
The area now known as London was originally inhabited by Celtic
tribes. The Roman's succeeded in conquering the area in 43AD. It
was a booming Roman stomping ground for the next 150 years or so.
Christianity came in 312. Roman London began to decline and faced
increasing German/Saxon pirate activity and invasions. It was slowly
abandoned in the 400's and German farmers settled outside the city's Roman
walls.
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| Modern skyline |
The city itself was basically abandoned for 400 years until a Saxon
king reestablished the city within the original Roman walls in about 800.
Then the Danes “duked” it out with the Germanic tribes. Under
Danish rule lots of Scandinavians moved into town. Edward the Confessor
(Anglo-Saxon) had control for a measly 2 decades. William the Conqueror (Normans=the Vikings who settled
in northern France) snatched the reins, opening the floodgates for the French
in 1066. London must have been a horrible stinky disease ridden place in
the middle ages (which lasted from 400's-1500's).
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| hmmm. |
The bubonic plague came from China, and hit England for the first
time in the mid 1300's, decimating the population by about 50% (40,000 people
died). The plague struck on and off through about the 1600's in England.
The plague hit again in the mid 1600's killing 7000 a week till 100,000
of the population died off.
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| London Bridge |
Henry the 8th basically spearheaded the religious reformation (more less
for his own political reasons) in 1534 when the pope wouldn't grant him a
divorce from Katherine of Aragon (His royal Spanish wife was none other than
the daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand of Castile, funders of Columbus voyage).
He got pissed off, and basically destroyed the churches and abbeys; he took
over the property that was owned by the church and sold it off, which happened
to be 2/3 of London.
The "Great fire of London" happened in 1666, and
destroyed a large portion of the city, dropping the population by something
like 70% and taking 30 years to rebuild.
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| classic nicht skyline |
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| Trafalgar Square |
The 1500's and 1600's were full of turmoil. It was not a good
time to be a Londoner. What a
mess: Disease, a disastrous fire, religious zealotry, (Puritanism), civil war
between those who supported the monarchy and those who didn't...ultimately
resulting in the end of sovereign rule of the monarchy. King Charles I, who
thought he ruled by “divine right,” was executed in 1649. Oliver
Cromwell, who led the fight for a parliamentary system (end of the monarchy)
was a controversial guy. After he
and his supporters got rid of the monarchy he basically stepped in and ruled
like a dictator/monster from 1653 until he died in 1658. In 1660 the
parliament said “enough of this,” and VOTED to reinstate the monarchy and asked
the son of the beheaded Charles I, (now 30 years old) Charles II (who had been
living in exile for 10 years) to take the thrown. Then just to make a show of it, they dug up Cromwell’s
decayed body, and HUNG it. They left his head on a spike at Westminster Hall as
a reminder. Charles II known as
the “merry monarch” was personally all for religious tolerance, but the milieu
of the time was the opposite (particularly anti-catholic), and he had to make
things work with parliament, so he didn’t always get his way. He was first cousin with King Louis XIV
of France (the extravagant "Sun King" supporter of the arts and
builder of Versailles, and ardent catholic, who ruled 72years). 2 fun loving cousins who became kings
at about the same time…I wonder what Grandma Medici would have had to say about their management styles. Charles II had the same problem as so
many of the nobility, handfuls of illegitimate kids, but no legitimate kids (heirs) with their queens.
A docent at Kensington house stated that that the lines of
succession were anything but straight forward. She said that throughout Europe,
inbreeding to keep wealth and power in the family, resulted in a higher
mortality/lower conception rate of royal babies than in the general population,
and hence lack of clear heirs meant they were always fighting over
succession. Genetic mutations like
“the Hapsburg chin”, hemophilia, suppressed immune system, mental impairment,
were other effects of inbreeding.
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| A laugh along the Thames |
And what about Will and Kate you ask? Turns out they are 11th cousins, and probably
less related to each other than most other Britains are to each other.
What we learned at
the Imperial War museum
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| night alive with color |
The Imperial War Museum just got a face-lift. 2014 is the
hundredth year anniversary of WWI. The recently opened WW1 exhibit was
phenomenal. Personal items, letters, live footage, an interactive format,
brought life to the exhibit and gave a real sense of what it must have been
like to be in Europe at that time in history. It gave emphasis to how devastating the war was to the
people and the landscape. I have always felt very deficient in my
understanding of WW1. There is a lot of controversy over how it started,
but the straw that broke the camel’s back was the assassination in 1914 of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sofie, heir to the Austro-Hungarian by a
Serbian. Russia took sides with Serbia, Germany took sides with A-H;
then France and Britain were thrown in the mix. The aristocracy had been
intermarrying since the middle ages, but it still seemed rather odd to me that
3 of the key players, monarchs in Russia, Britain, and Austro-Hungaria ( Nikky,
Georgie, and Willie) were first cousins, all having Queen Victoria as their
grandma (unfortunately she wasn't alive to put a stop to it). The royal
family, whom we now know as the “Windsor’s,” were actually the Sachsen-Coburg
und Gotha, but changed their name in 1917 (to the name of one of their
castles) because of anti-German sentiment.
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| Wow, this is done by hand! |
The US was only involved towards the very end of the war.
German submarines off the US coast, threatening to involve Mexico were
apparently the straw that broke the camels back to getting the US to fight
against Germany. The thing that struck me most was how impacted everyone's
lives were in Europe. Posters emphasized the need to reduce resources to
be patriotic...mend your clothes rather than buy new ones, public education
campaigns on food rationing (how much sugar, fat, meat to eat a day), fuel was
of course very limited. Men of fighting age were shamed into joining up
via poster campaigns and sometimes by their neighbors. The second thing
that impacted me was how much of the war was fought in trenches in France,
under horrible conditions; a very high price in terms of death and suffering
was paid for a few yards of territory here and there. The German's violated a previous
pact and used poison gas. Then the allies resorted to the same. The landscape,
especially in France was a deforested, muddy wasteland of trenches and barbed
wire...tree stumps on a moonscape. In 1914, as with the preceding wars,
British uniformed soldiers charged on horseback. But by 1918 technological
advances, including using planes, and developing tanks, and grenade shooting guns
gave the allies the edge. Though the war ended in an armistice, it was
basically won by the English and their allies.
Leaving London
We thought we had plenty of time…It would be a relaxing day to get
from London to Trier Germany, where we would pick up the rental car at the
train station…and drive to our friends house in the German countryside.
What a comedy of errors…banana peels thrown under our feet at every
step.
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| Imperial War Museum |
These were my incorrect assumptions when I booked the flight. 1. England and Germany are in the same time zone, 2. There would be a convenient train from
the Luxembourg airport to Trier train station 3. The rental car agency would be open late hours.
Better late than never, the night before, I learned that these
assumptions were incorrect…Germany is an hour ahead, there is no train from the
airport…but there was a direct bus, the last one of the day, and if we could catch that last bus direct
to Trier, Germany we could get to the car rental company before it
closed…probably.
After 5 days we thought we were London Underground experts and were
not prepared for the unbelievable volume…we made our way to the first station where
we could catch a train to Gatwick on the Central line; were so put off by the
volume, we went to the next station…and it was better, but as soon as we were
about to buy our train tickets to Gatwick, bedlam ensued when it was announced
over the loudspeaker that all trains to the Gatwick Airport were cancelled for
the “foreseeable future”…WHAT!!!!!
Christmas week, thousands of travelers, trying to get to Gatwick to catch
flights. We ran to check if we
could catch a bus…talked to people about sharing a taxi…all futile solutions,
since the rail and roads were gridlocked with holiday traffic. Our only hope was that a train line
would open up. I intended to be
right at the front of the line if it did.
The train employees were frantic and nobody knew what was going on. While Drew tried to figure out an
alternative flight, I eavesdropped on an employee on her radio and heard her
get a message that line 16 opened up and a train was about to leave; she told a family
to “RUN FOR IT!!!” I must have
been the only one to hear this, ran to the ticket counter (that had been roped
off), and asked to buy a ticket…the guy sold me a ticket, “will I make it?” I
eagerly asked, “I have no idea,” he said with complete lack of emotion. I grabbed Drew and we RAN for it,
jumping on the train seconds before it pulled away from the station. It was about then that I asked those
around us…Is this train going to Gatwick?
Yes! We made our flight.
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| Classic British souvenirs |
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| How can they sit on a horse and not smile? |
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| Classic Fortnum's Christmas gift |
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| What is Figgy pudding anyway? |
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| 2 for tea |
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| Aslan! |
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| London |
When we arrived at the Luxembourg Airport we had to get through
customs, and were thrilled that for once, not being EU citizens put us
in the shorter, faster moving line.
We got through, leaving us with only 3 minutes to catch the one and only
direct bus to Trier. We RAN to
information, and were casually pointed in the direction of the bus stop
outside. We RAN outside to the bus
stop. There were 2 buses, neither
was the correct one…I frantically snagged a guy in a yellow vest…”The bus to
Trier!?” He pointed to a bus that
only just stopped long enough to pick up passengers who were there at the
precise minute that it arrived…we MADE it. I told the bus driver he was part of our "good karma." Knowing he had no idea what I was talking about.
40 min later we were in Trier.
Drew used his GPS on his phone to navigate us to the train station on
foot, and with 15 minutes to spare, we picked up the rental car before the
office closed. Off to Salm to
spend Christmas holidays with friends.
What an adrenalin fueled travel day! Not what we had anticipated
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| Peace in the sky |
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