Visiting Charles Dickens (and other trips around London)

“You can find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” -- Samuel Johnson

Revisiting

I spent the next two weeks after my family left working my way through my list of London to-do’s. Since Dad, Beth, Grace and I had arrived at the Tower of London too late to go on the Yeoman Warder tour or go into most of the buildings, the Tower was again high on my list. Felicia and I went back on a rainy Tuesday and got off at the correct tube stop during a perfectly timed break in the rain. (Side note: That’s one out of three times to the Tower that I got there on the first attempt. I’d say that’s improving.)

The Tudor style wooden houses above the entrance to the Tower.

We walked under the portcullis just as a group of people was gathering around an older Yeoman Warder for the last tour of the day.  It wasn’t long until he roared “Laaaadies and gent’lmen!” in a thick Scottish accent and led us away into the Tower.

 

I loved everything about the tour. Not only was our guide’s deep, booming voice and Scottish accent fun to listen to, but he was the kind of man who is fond of telling corny, pun-tastic jokes that pretty much match my sense of humor. (Did you hear about the fight that happened in the London fish and chip shop? A lot of fish got battered!) (Ba-dum-tss)

He paused outside of one of the towers surrounding the White Tower and talked about the dungeon at the bottom and the old methods of torture employed there. “Now it is my duty; I must inform you that it is still a torture chamber to this very day. So when you go inside you have to look closely, for it is cunningly disguised as a gift shop.” Everyone laughed and the men put their hands inside their pockets as if to guard their wallets from the kids, wives and girlfriends who had just turned excited faces toward them.

He took us around the courtyards, highlighting monuments and towers to paint a rich picture of the Tower’s history. We stopped again at the glass pillow monument over the old execution site, where, in addition to listing the famous names that met their end on the spot, our Yeoman guide explained that beheading with an axe, as the English preferred, wasn’t nearly as clean as the French guillotine. Apparently, the tools used to sever people’s heads weren’t always as sharp as they needed to be, and the men swinging them were hardly skilled in taking aim.

Take John Ketch, commonly known as Jack Ketch, for instance. He was hired as an executioner by King Charles II and quickly gained a reputation as somewhat less than proficient at his job. James Scott, the first Duke of Monmouth, mounted the scaffold on July 15, 1685 for his execution and said to Ketch, “Here are six guineas for you and do not hack me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard you struck him four or five times; if you strike me twice, I cannot promise you not to stir.” The first stroke merely wounded the Duke a little, and he rose and glared at the executioner as a result. Upon the second blow he appeared to suffer greatly as his body began to convulse and thrash with pain. Ketch threw his ax down and refused to go on, but after much admonition from the crowd and sheriff he picked it up again and delivered another two blows to finally kill the Duke. Though dead, his head ultimately had to be cut loose from his body with a butcher’s knife brought from the kitchens. According to records though, the Duke showed less bravery than Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, who sustained 11 blows before her head parted from her shoulders.

Once the warder had finished describing the executions, he began to lead us, much to my delight, toward the small chapel behind us. Unfortunately there was no photography or video recording allowed inside the chapel, but I was happy just being allowed to enter this time. I was particularly interested in the chapel because the bodies of the people who were executed in the courtyard had been carried into the chapel and buried beneath the giant slabs of stone on the floor. That meant the Chapel was the grave of three British queens - Anne Boleyn, Jane Grey and Catherine Howard - and two Catholic saints - Sir Thomas More and John Fischer - in addition to many other prominent people from history.  Most of the bodies have since been re-interred in the Tower’s crypt.

The current Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula, or Saint Peter in Chains, was built inside the Tower of London in 1520 for Henry VIII. The current building is the third chapel to stand on the spot, the first one having been included in the castle by Henry III in the 1200’s and the second being rebuilt during Edward I’s reign. The small chapel is built almost completely of stone, and monuments commemorating officers and other residents of the Tower cover the cold, grey walls and floor inside. It is still used as a place of worship for the roughly 150 people who live at the fortress.

After thanking our guide on our way out of the chapel, we meandered toward the Crown Jewels and the White Tower. I hadn’t been inside the White Tower before, mostly because I didn’t previously realize you could go inside, but we found the entrance and began to walk through the museum-like exhibits on the ground floor. They had suits of armor that were worn by various kings, including Henry VIII’s armor from when he was a child through his old age. It was kind of funny to see his growth, starting as a skinny, short child and shooting up and then out. Once his height peaked, the suits began to widen until they were almost as wide as they were high. He also became quite generous with his…er…cup size, as he got older. On one of the later suits, the cup stuck straight out quite noticeably from the rest of the armor.

Henry VIII's suit of armor

We climbed the stairs to the upper floors and found another chapel made of white stone with a vaulted roof and arches ringing the small oval room. It felt very medieval and was bare of decorations, providing a stark contrast to the chapel outside. Further along was a futuristic looking metal dragon before a final opening leading to the last room we could enter near the top of the Tower.

On the ground floor near the suits of armor were life-sized
wooden horse statues. They looked like the horses from the
animated movie Spirit were modeled after them.

Just inside the door was a glossy, black wall with nothing but a white handprint and the words “Touch this,” also painted in white. The only thing visible when standing outside of the door was the black wall.

Felicia and I stopped several feet from the entrance and stared at the wall, trying to figure out what it was and why we should touch it. Confused, we slowly walked forward, eyes fixed on the black wall ahead, raised our hands gingerly and finally, came to a stop with our palms resting flat against its surface.

Nothing happened.

We looked at each other in confusion, and, in doing so, saw the rest of the room to either side of the wall, which was full of weapon reproductions and other objects that the “touch this” was clearly referring to.

We sheepishly pulled our hands back, laughing. I’m not entirely sure what we expected to happen when we touched the wall; maybe it would light up, maybe audio would begin to play, maybe it would slide down into the floor and reveal the batcave. To be fair though, the instructions weren’t exactly clear. We did have fun picking up medieval weapons and feeling mystery cloths and crops once we were inside the room.

By the time we left the White Tower, it had begun raining again in earnest. We headed across the street after leaving the Tower to a little shopping plaza and ducked into a Starbucks. Warm drinks in hand, we sat on cozy chairs by the window and watched the rain, waiting for a break so we could head back to the Tube and catch a train to meet Maggie at Winter Wonderland.

Maggie with an incredibly creepy dancing Santa

Winter Wonderland (Again)

As you know, I had been to Winter Wonderland with my family the week before. However, taking all of the awesome things into consideration - the mass amounts of Christmas lights that made it feel like the best holiday season ever, the chestnuts roasted on an almost-open-fire, the bow and arrow game that allowed you to feel like Legolas-Katniss-AND-Hawk-Eye all at once - one visit was not enough.

We met Maggie at the entrance and began to pick our way towards the bow and arrow booth, where I did considerably better this time, popping four balloons out of the five required to win as opposed to popping none last time. The rain had almost completely stopped by now, but the still-wet ground reflected the lights in a magical way. We got candyfloss and watched ice-skaters turn around the large, ovular ice rink in the middle of the park before catching a train back to Northwick Park station.

Fun with candyfloss

Felicia, refusing to dance with creepy Santa

One of Felicia's favorite types photos to take are bad close ups of
my face. I have so many photos like to this one.

Charles Dickens House Museum

“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts” --Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

My first encounter with Charles Dickens was during my freshman year of high school when I read Great Expectations. I was enchanted by the rich descriptions of Miss Havisham, the tattered remnants of her wedding that never was and the fledgling romance between Pip and Estella, and when we read A Tale of Two Cities the next year the crush I’d developed on Dickens evolved into a full blown love affair. It grew as I read A Christmas Carol and started to re-read A Tale of Two Cities, then stumbled when I tried to read Oliver Twist five different times and found myself unable to finish because it was too depressing, but finally made a comeback with Hard Times, which I read while I was in London.  Visiting the museum in Charles Dickens’ London home was pretty close to the top of my list of “to-do’s,” and I finally made it with Palak and Shruti one crisp, lazy day in early December.

Palak, Shruti and I walking down their street in Feltham to
the train station.

48 Doughty St.

The streets we walked through around the museum were wide and open, with tall, simple looking row houses making up a well-to-do, quiet neighborhood. Dickens’ house itself was under renovation and had large sheets of plastic hung over metal scaffolding so that the house, and consequently the Blue Plaque, weren’t visible. Even covered in plastic, it was awesome to stand in front of 48 Doughty St. This was the house where Dickens had lived between 1837 and 1839. Two of his daughters were born in the house, his 17-year-old sister-in-law, Mary, died in the upstairs bedroom, and The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickelby and Barnaby Rudge were written here. This was where Dickens lived in the middle of his rise to incredible fame.

We walked through the front door (Charles Dickens’ front door!) and into the gift shop to the left to get tickets and guides before taking the stairs down to the basement level to watch a video about Charles Dickens’ life.

Charles was born in 1812 as the second of eight children and had a peaceful, pleasant childhood, spending long hours outside, reading voraciously and even having the opportunity to attend a private school for several years. Due to financial difficulties, his father moved the family to Camden Town in London when Charles was 11, and when Charles was 12, his father was arrested and sent to debtors’ prison where he was joined not long after by his wife and Dickens’ younger siblings. Charles was forced to leave school to work ten-hour days at a Warren’s Blacking Warehouse on Hungerford Stairs near what is now Charring Cross station to pay for his board with an older, impoverished woman and to help pay his family’s debts. After a few months of this, Charles’ great-grandmother died, leaving his family a large sum of money that allowed them to leave debtors prison and move to his great-grandmother’s old house. Though the situation only lasted for a few months, the experience left a deep impression on Charles that can be seen in his sympathy to the lower classes in his books.

The video went on to speak about his journey to becoming one of the world’s first modern celebrities, his experiences dabbling in acting, and his affairs. His works and his time were widely demanded during much of his lifetime, and though he first resisted, he eventually regularly hosted public readings that were said to be amazingly vivid.

After the video was over, we wandered back into a room to the side of the stairs where an official-looking woman sat before a wooden table piled with books. She paused in her reading when we came in to smile and explain that the books on the table in front of her were early editions of Charles Dickens’ books. Some of them were even first editions, she added, gently handing me a copy of Pickwick Papers.

“Like that one you’re holding now,” she said, smiling. “That’s a first edition of Pickwick Papers, which was one of the books that Dickens’ wrote while he lived here in this house.”

I nearly dropped the book in surprise. I had thought the first edition copies of Dickens’ books would be safely locked behind a glass display case upstairs, not on a table where I could pick them up and flip through them. I turned the pages carefully, reading the copyright page at the front and a few paragraphs on the first page before staring in awe at the cover and handing it on to Palak.

As we were on our way to see the upper floors, we got sidetracked by the smell of pastries and wound up in front of the café counter on the ground floor. Several minutes later we were nestled around a small table by the window looking out onto Dickens’ small back garden with large cups of tea, hot chocolate and pastries. It was just starting to get dark and the sky was glowing twilight blue, illuminating the charming back yard in a soft, even light. A pamphlet on the table detailed a group that met weekly in the reading room to read and discuss Dickens’ works. I wished I had known about it earlier, but I guess that’s something I’m going to have to do when I move back to London someday.

We spent nearly an hour chatting, laughing and sipping our warm drinks before finally rousting ourselves and climbing the stairs to the two upper floors. The rest of the house was decorated for the holidays in traditional 19^th century Christmas fashion. The rooms have been carefully restored so that period furniture similar to what Dickens would have had is in each room, and in many cases his own furniture has been found and returned to the house. Original sketches and famous depictions of Dickens and his works are also framed and hung on the walls, and his writing desk where he penned the last pages of his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (which shall forever remain a mystery since Dickens took the ending to the grave with him), is sitting in front of a window alcove upstairs.

We walked through Dickens’ bedroom, the room where his sister-in-law lived and died and the other rooms where the great author wrote and lived with his family, and when we had finished being awed over the rooms and items upstairs, we found ourselves once again in the gift shop.

This was definitely one of my favorite museums, partly because of how helpful and friendly the staff was. The woman in the gift shop chatted with us for almost half an hour while we browsed and collected keepsakes. When we came to the dish cabinet and they didn’t have the white mugs and saucers that said “Charles Dickens Museum, London,” in a delicate, brown scrawl from the café for sale, the woman went and got one from the kitchen for me and only charged me 7 pounds.

We left after spending almost 2 hours inside with quite a dent in each of our debit cards and took the train back to Feltham.

That night I was playing with my camera in the kitchen while the three of us sat and talked, taking photos of the black and white checkered tiles, the aluminum cups that were always on the table and the pineapples waiting to be juiced by Palak and Shruti’s mom on the counter.

“You’re taking photos as if you’re not going to be here ever again,” Palak complained, avoiding the depressing fact that I was leaving in 19 days.

“I won’t soon,” I answered. “Not for a while anyway.”

Other Photos

Christmas at the Tower

Bungalows in Palak and Shruti's neighborhood in Feltham

Bungalows in Feltham

A random, old phone booth in someone's yard in Feltham

What does that say?

Ah, Good Enough College. Interesting choice of name.

RLO - Topping up

Going to London and getting a cell phone was so much easier than getting a cell phone in America, and it was nice to be able to pop over to a convenience store and top up either my phone or my Oyster card when I needed to go into London or add more minutes to my mobile. Their pay-as-you-go system is so much simpler and more accessible than the many contracts and options available in America. This was definitely an area where I would say the UK wins in terms of ease and convenience.

Londonisms

Have(ing) a go - give it a try (i.e. “I can’t open this jar. Have a go, will you?”)

Cracking up - to mentally snap. (i.e. “He was shouting about something. I think he’s cracking up.”)

Good on ya mate - Well done, good for you

Rank - disgusting (i.e. “That smells rank,” Or “I took the rubbish out because the bin was rank.”)

One off - a special, one-time event (i.e. “The show was a one off.”)

Cracking - splendid, brilliant. (i.e. “It was a cracking film!”)

Crackers - Crazy

Hang a left/right - turn left/right

Parky - a word used to describe the weather when it’s cold. (i.e. “It’s rather parky today.”)

Now and Then

Ipswich, December 2011

London, July 2007

For My Grandfather (Family Visit, Part 2)

Day 4 - the long drive

Every time I asked my Grandfather on my dad’s side about Scotland, his eyes would crinkle. He would pat my arm gently and chuckle, a faraway look settling onto his face. He had grown up in Scotland before immigrating to the United States with his family when he was 12.

“Oh Scotland,” he’d say before launching into a story about the lace factories in his small, east Ayrshire hometown of Newmilns, or talking about his sister, Kathleen, who died at eleven and whose name I share in part. As he got older and his memory started to go, Scotland became the main thing that he remembered and one of the only things that could make him smile. He died in January of 2010. Nearly two years later, my family and I set out from London on a journey to the town where he was born and grew up; the town that became a backdrop for so many of his most lasting memories and the stories we heard for years.

After packing our things and bidding our London room farewell, we piled into a black Audi with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car in front of the hotel. The sky was cloudy and threatened rain: the perfect weather for a road trip.

Once we had inched through London for over an hour and then through more traffic outside of the city for another two hours, we were getting a little stir crazy. It had taken more than three hours to go 40 miles or so. I had thought that driving around on the famously crowded Southern California freeways so often would have prepared me to handle any kind of traffic, but now I’m inclined to say I hardly knew traffic at all before trying to drive in London. Neil Gaiman put it well in his novel, Neverwhere, when he said London was a city “in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn or, more recently, motorized, and the needs of pedestrians.”

We took a break and got lunch at one of the travel stops along the way, enjoying the array of sub-par English dishes before loading up on British junk food, which runs more along the lines of salt and vinegar Walkers crisps, peach raspberry soothers and Cadbury chocolate bars instead of Doritos, jerky and ring pops. Compared to American road trip food, it was rather high class.

We had to walk through Glasgow
Central Station back and forth
from our car to our rooms. 

Scotland

It was dark by the time we arrived in Glasgow, which made it quite difficult finding our hotel. We finally found it adjacent to the Glasgow Central Station, and after finding parking and pulling our suitcases up to our rooms, we had room service, showers and fell quickly asleep.

Day 5

The next morning, we woke and ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant before driving over the many bridges and past the mix of modern and ancient buildings of Glasgow until the city faded away, leaving open fields and small towns. If I had thought England was green, it was because I hadn’t seen the Scottish countryside yet. The sky was grey with clouds and rain fell intermittently in the mist, but through the haze I could see hills rolling under a carpet of thick, unending green, broken occasionally by trees, charming houses and fluffy white sheep. Dad, who drove the entire trip, did a great job navigating on the unfamiliar roads on the unfamiliar left side. The only scary parts were the roundabouts, where we all instinctively looked the wrong way before driving on and then jumped when we heard honking that let us know we had nearly been hit.

Newmilns, Scotland

Some interesting facts about Newmilns:

• It officially became a town on January 9, 1490.
• It’s the oldest town in Ayrshire not on the coast.
• Earliest signs of inhabitance date back to 2000 BC.
• A Neolithic burial mound lies underneath the seventh green at the golf course.
• The town is known for its weaving, handloom and lace industries, which caused the population to rise from 500 to 2,000 in 1850 alone.
• Robert Burns visited the town quite a few times.

A sign for Loudon Castle passed about 40 minutes outside of Glasgow, and one for Newmilns did quickly after. Old-looking houses built from weathered stone, some brown and others whitewashed, began to pass on either side. A small white tolbooth on what was clearly the high street came into view. We drove through the side streets, looking at the old houses and wondering which one Grandpa had lived in, where his friends had lived, and where he played as a young boy.

The white tolbooth is in the middle.

After parking just off the high street, we got out to walk around, pulling our scarves and coats tight to keep out the now steadily falling rain. Finding the town library across the street from our car, we slipped inside to look around and ask the librarian a few questions.

“Hallo there!” a slightly plump, middle-aged woman said, smiling in welcome. “How’re ya doin’ today?”

“We’re doing well, thanks,” I answered.

She looked surprised to hear the accent, and said, “Americans! What brings you out here?”

“My Dad is from here,” my own Dad said, beaming with pride.

A warm conversation was struck up immediately about the town, how the main lace mill where my family had worked was now closed and other changes since the early 1900s. I half listened as I wandered over to the few shelves of ancient, worn-looking books next to the door and ran my hand over their spines, wondering if Grandpa or his siblings had pulled them off the shelves when they lived here.

We purchased two books about the town and got directions to the Catholic cemetery before walking back out into the rain. A protestant church stands near the library, and even though Kathleen wouldn’t have been buried there because she was Catholic, we walked around the back into the cemetery anyway.

The grass was lush and the tombstones were so old and weathered that quite a few of them had broken over the years. The stone walls around the graveyard were lined with stones that had been moved when the graves became so old that no one alive remembered the people buried beneath them and the space was needed again. We walked along the riverbank briefly and back a little ways down the high street before getting back in the car and following the directions to the Catholic cemetery.

This one had a lot to say...

...especially compared with this one.

The road lead out of town to a turn that the lady at the library had told us to take. The new road went on far too long and took us only to empty fields with scattered sheep. We tried going the other way, turning first left and then right. One way dead-ended in the closed-for-the-day Loudon Castle, while the other lead us to a cul-de-sac by the river. We went back and asked an older man walking his dog for directions, and received a set that was completely different that the first one yet no more correct. One more attempt, another series of wrong turns and we finally gave up. It seemed like we’d driven almost every street in or around the small Scottish town, so I can’t imagine where the cemetery actually is, but we were content with our efforts to find it so we drove on.

When the old man touched the dog's nose, the corners of its
mouth turned up into a smile.  

Side story: When we drove up into the hills and fields around Newmilns while looking for the Catholic Cemetery and found nothing but sheep, we stopped because I wanted to take photos of them. Every time I opened my car door though, they bolted. Finally I managed to get a photo before they had gotten 20 feet away because the sheep we had pulled over by had frozen for a second. I was really excited until I looked at the photo and saw that the second sheep was kind enough to start peeing the minute I got out, ruining the otherwise nice photo. I think it's safe to say that in the war of photographer vs. sheep, the sheep won this battle.

Stupid, peeing sheep.

Dundonald Castle

Before we left the hotel in the morning, we had asked the information desk where we could find castles near Newmilns. It had been dad’s idea, and at first it seemed like a silly, stereotypical question to me. When the man at the information desk started listing off castle after castle though, I realized how many castles there actually were in Scotland. I guess that isn’t just a stereotype because there was a sign for a castle at nearly every roundabout.

After quite a few wrong turns (thanks to yours truly acting as navigator) we found Dundonald Castle and parked the car at the bottom of the hill. The castle loomed above us with a steep, gravel path, slick with the still-falling rain snaking it’s way up the hillside toward it.

“I think I’ll wait here,” Beth said, looking skeptically out at the soggy hillside.

“Me too,” Grace said quickly.

My dad began an impassioned speech about being in a foreign country, having driven all this way and being Donohues (who are apparently not bothered by rain) and convinced (guilted) both of them to come along. Several minutes later, we were working our way up the hill, rainwater dripping from our noses and eyelashes.

The climb. Photos rarely show how steep a trail is very well.

Grace and Dad finally reaching the ruins at the very top of the hill.

You can't quite tell here, but everyone is rather wet. 

The castle was built for Robert the Bruce’s grandson, Robert II, when he ascended to the Scottish throne in 1371, and it remained his favorite home until he died in the castle in 1390. It was used as a royal residence by Stewart kings for the next 150 years. The castle was badly damaged in the 1500’s when Scotland was at war with England, and though it is left in ruins now, it is still impressive. It rises on a tall hill, square, grey and strong looking. Even in the rain it was easy to spot from a distance.

An old story also survives to shroud the castle in legend. It begins with a rhyme:

“Donald Din

Built his house without a pin.”

The legend refers to the fact that the castle appears to have been built entirely out of stone, without the use of wood. It says the hero Donald Din, or Din Donald, a poor man who dreamt lucky dreams, built the castle. One night, while still a poor, castle-less man, he dreamt three times that if he went to London Bridge he would become wealthy. He went to the bridge and found a man looking into the water. After a little conversation, he told the man why he had come, and the man said he was foolish for coming because he himself had had a similar dream. He had dreamt that if he went to a certain spot in Ayrshire, Scotland, he would become wealthy, but he had never thought to follow the dream. The man recognized the spot as his own cabbage patch in front of his house, and returned immediately to destroy the cabbages and, indeed, find a large pot full of gold coins. He built a castle on a hill for himself and began a family there. That castle remains today as Dundonald castle.

Although I would love to believe the legend, it is similar to many that have been prevalent throughout Europe and the Middle East, and appears to be nothing more than a story. The earliest legend is in a poem by 13^th Century poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, titled “In Baghdad, dreaming of Cairo; in Cairo, dreaming of Baghdad.”

The Sea

From the castle we drove out to the coast and walked along the beach. There was a thick band of brush separating the sand from the road, giving the coast a wild, untamed look.  Dad and I walked across the brush while Beth and Grace walked around the small parking lot where we had stopped. The ocean was grey, stormy and beautiful, and it was easy to read dad’s thoughts about his late father walking there was as a child. It was great to share the moment with him.

We left the coast and stopped at a charming looking restaurant by the sea in the next town we came to. While the outside looked quaint, the inside was the weirdest mix of decorations: bright colors practically glowed on the walls, Asian inspired décor was all around and mixed with modern lamps and furniture, a few animal statues and some hunting influences. The food was decent though, and after finishing we drove back into Glasgow.

Glasgow

Having recently learned to knit, and being that we were in what seemed to be the land of several thousand sheep, I wanted to get woolen yarn as a souvenir. I managed to find a store that wasn’t closed yet in Glasgow. Ironically, they didn’t have any Scottish-spun yarn. I would have to go to Edinburgh for that, they said. I settled for some pretty blue woolen yarn made in Italy instead, content with the fact that I had bought it in Glasgow.

We concluded the night with a lovely dinner at an Italian restaurant downtown. While I wish we had been able to explore Glasgow itself more, it was really neat to be able to see Newmilns, Dundonald Castle and the some of the other towns in Ayrshire.

Plus, now I have an excuse to go back.

Day 6

After another long drive back to London, we checked in at a hotel in Harrow up the street from my campus. Dad and I endeavored to drive the car back to the hotel in central London, embarking a 13-mile trip that took a torturous hour and 40 minutes. We moved unbelievably slow - stopping for five minutes or more before inching a few feet. I now completely understand the popularity of the Tube, because after dropping the car off dad and I grabbed sausage rolls and took a 30-minute Tube ride, 10 minutes waiting when we switched lines and 20 minutes actually traveling, to get back to Harrow. Despite the terrible drive, it was fun spending time with my dad and getting to share the familiar Tube ride and one of my favorite savory pastries with him.

Once back at campus, we ordered pizza with my flatmates and had a relaxed last night together in London.

Other Photos

Dad walking through Glasgow Central Station.

Newmilns, Scotland

Another photo of the high street, taken by Beth.

More Newmilns, also taken by Beth.

The river in Newmilns.

The ruined wall of Dundonald Castle, looking down on the
town of Dundonald. 

The misty hills of Ayrshire.

My dad and I

Dundonald, Scotland

My stepmom and I on the windy Scottish coast.

RLO - Getting Lost in London

While I understand that I have an almost otherworldly ability to get lost and no amount of excuses will change that, it is easier to get lost in London than in most other cities I’ve been to.  It wasn’t planned out on a grid or laid out along broad avenues like Chicago or Paris. No, London was first settled as a major city by the Roman Empire several times, and then as an Anglo-Saxon settlement. It was invaded by Vikings on numerous occasions, and burned to the ground more than once. Because of this rich, old history, no single group of people sat down and laid out the streets. Instead, an amalgamation of settlements and cities in the area that is now London grew until they ran into each other and merged into one city.

A lot of the streets have their origins in the middle ages or as cow paths and are thus short, winding and  make little sense in the context of a mass, modern-day metropolis. This sort of layout makes the city great for literature, especially given the often-misty weather, but while it provides the perfect hazy maze for Sherlock to chase criminals around in and is also a beautiful and interesting place to walk around, it is not the easiest place to not get lost in.

As much of the UK was developed in the same manner, I would say my navigation skills, which would have been considered dismal if I had been in LA, were not bad at all for Britain. High five, self, high five.

Londonisms

Nosh - food (i.e. “This is some excellent nosh.”)

On about - talking about (i.e. “What are you on about?”)

Flog - to sell something (“You could flog that.”)

Gutted - really upset about something. ( i.e. “Ug, I’m gutted that Liverpool lost!.”)

Smashing - great; fantastic

Wanker - jerk

Tosser - also means jerk

Whinge - whine. (i.e. “You winge about everything.”)

Yakking - talking on and on (i.e. “What are you yakking on about?”)

Prat - mildly insulting name for someone, like brat