england #10 – could it be near the end???

Of the London Tales, at least? So we can move on to the countryside?? Maybe! Of course I’m having Internet Issues tonight and suddenly it seems to be flickering on and off, so this may be waiting till tomorrow. I’ll give it a shot, though. It probably would have been helpful had I actually noted what day it really was that I was posting about, since some of my posts have stretched way over one day. For example, this was not the tenth day of the trip – just the tenth entry. We were only in London seven days. The British Museum and St. Paul’s were on Friday. By now we’re wailing that we can’t BELIEVE our London week is almost OVER!!!!

After our St. Paul’s Cathedral tour, it was already getting dark. One of the things I had on my list of stuff I really really wanted to see was….

The Black Books bookshop! Which is an actual bookstore on Leigh Street. They only used it to film the outside scenes, but still. I really really wanted to see it. We LOVE Black Books. It was kind of like a little pilgrimage. It’s not that far from Piccadilly Circus so we decided to go back to Soho and have a beer, and make a side trip to the bookshop.

My pictures didn’t turn out all that well, sadly. I think Kim got some much better ones, but I STILL haven’t seen hers yet. For now, my dark and blurry one will have to do:

It was so exciting to be standing in front of Black Books that I had to call Baker B and tell him! If only Bernard, Fran, and Manny had been there…

But… I did see Manny in the tube!

Quite a few times, actually –

SO. We went back to Piccadilly Circus and wandered around there, and wandered around Soho, and tried to find a place to have a beer and everything was PACKED. I can’t even remember what we ended up doing now, oddly — we did stop somewhere but I THINK it was a Starbucks. A packed Starbucks. I believe we just loaded up on more caffine and kept going, then stopped at the pub near where we were staying. We did that quite a few times – it was very conveniently located halfway between our house and the Stratford tube station, so was a great place for a break and a beer.

ANYWAY, oddly I don’t remember what exactly we did in Soho. I just remember it was very crowded and I was exhausted. I think by that point we were getting really worn out from the non-stop running. I do recall that several times we commented on what a good idea it was to do the London leg first — that way we’d be ready for a rest when we got to the countryside and the canal boat!

Hahahahahaha!!!!!

But whatever! Here are some fun Night in Soho and Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square pictures:

There really WAS a circus! Well, a little carnival –

Fun with lights!

And the Tube-

Okay, I’ll preface this next one by saying that this is a TERRIBLE picture of Kim. It’s a bad, bad picture and she would doubtless kill me for posting it. She’s exhausted, the light is awful, the angle is even worse… but I just have to as a Odd Characters on the Tube portrait. Not Kim, but the guys she’s sitting beside. The one right beside her was all scrunched up and trying to appear deeply involved in his book. No doubt because  the guy beside him was laughing and muttering happily to himself the entire ride. It was pretty amusing. From my vantage point on the opposite side of the car.

I loved riding the tube. Well, not so much when it was jam-packed, as it was every morning since we were traveling at the same time as everyone going to work. And they were doing a LOT of work on the lines (I think in preparation for the Olympics in 2012- at least that’s my theory) so there were constantly lines down and alternate routes and that made it even more crowded. But the vast, vast majority of tube riders were extremely polite and considerate. I’m used to America, where rudeness and pushiness is the norm — it was just amazing to be crammed into a teeny little tin can with a whole bunch of other people and have them ALL be polite and considerate. There was ONE instance of people trying to get in an overly full car and shoving everyone else, which was just bizarre (by that time we’d been there long enough to have gotten used to the politeness) -they were probably American. And we were witness to a near-altercation in another jam-packed car, where a man who was standing right behind us kept accusing a woman who was sitting of shoving him with her knees — they started bickering, and then to our astonishment another guy stepped in and offered with shocking calmness to trade spots with the guy who was claiming the woman was shoving him. The supposedly-shoved guy kept trying to argue and the peacemaker kept trying very calmly to make peace, and it went on till the woman got off. At that point the angry supposedly-shoved guy took her seat… then a couple of minutes later offered it to me.

What was amazing to us is that although the two bickering riders who were claiming each shoved the other were bickering angrily, they were also bickering fairly quietly, and not even a dammit was uttered. And the mediator- guy was very pleasant and friendly to both of them. It was really bizarre. We marveled later that if we were on an American subway, at best the bickerers would have been screaming and swearing and slapping and FUCK YOU NO FUCK YOU!!!ing and at worst there would have been gunfire.

I LOVE England.