Day 4: London

Wednesday, June 12

I am going to need to obtain a thesaurus because there's only so many times i can use the word “breathtaking” before i start making you feel like you're watching the credits to Top Gun on repeat.

But perhaps i should start at the beginning.

After breakfast, we left the Arsenal Tavern headed for the Tubes. On the way we saw what appeared to be a fistfight getting broken up at a local shop. So that's comforting.

First thing we did was pick up our London Passes, which are kind of exactly what they sound like. For one low fee, you get admission to many of London's attractions, saving you a bundle. From there, we immediately set about using the hell out of them, and Tubed our way over to St. Paul's Cathedral, where Amanda attempted to kill me.

We first took the brief tour with a guide, lasting approximately 20 minutes and just going over the highlights of the church, which was founded in 604. The church has been completely destroyed a couple of times in the ensuing 1400 years, but the current building has stood since 1677.

And here's where i break out the “breathtaking.” People may wonder why Amanda and i, neither being at all religious, spend so much of our vacations touring churches. It's because, say what you will about religion, it's inspired countless people over the ages to create the most ambitious works of art and architecture possible, all in the name of a deity whose existence they cannot verify. What i'm saying is it's damn impressive.

Walking around the ground floor, which is so large that from the pipe organ up by the altar to where the final pipe ends at the back of the congregation there is a 9 second delay in sound, we were already exposed to a multitude of huge, impressive sculptures and astonishing works of glass. Words? Words don't exist. These are things you need to see, preferably with your own eyes, but in full 1080p high def isn't bad either. Too bad photography and video are vehemently prohibited in the cathedral.

Below ground is a crypt. There, we visited the final resting places of The Duke of Wellington, Florence Nightingale, at least four former New Zealand governors, and literally hundreds of other notable British people whose names were lost on us.

Many of them were buried in the floor, with large stone slabs covering their graves, replacing the regular stone tilework in those areas. And some asshole built a closet over half of one of them. I also have to wonder how many tombs are underneath the carpet of the gift shop, also located on that floor.

Also of note in the basement of St. Paul's is the Oculus. Let me attempt to describe it. So you've got a square room, something like 20 feet by 20 feet. Now imagine that three of the walls have church-style windows in them, squared at the bottom and rounding up into a point on the top, running from floor to ceiling. But instead of windows, they are projector screens, and all nine of them, all around you, are showing a film, which is continuous through each of the nine screens. Does that make sense? I'm saying that all nine make up one screen, it's super, super wide, so the film is playing all around you. They are showing crazy graphics depicting the church's timeline, and sometimes video shot within the church, and most impressively a 360 degree view from the top of its spire. Keep in mind that from 1710 until 1962, it was the tallest building in London.

Now we get to the part where Amanda attempted my murder. I'd say that we got a hell of a workout, but that phrasing is probably some kind of sacrilege. We'd already been downstairs, see, so the only way to go now was up.

257 steps up from the ground floor is the Whispering Gallery, which is a narrow row of seating around the church's dome, and just beyond the guard rail is a wide opening straight down into the church proper, a 30 meter drop. The Capitol building in Madison has something like this; i don't know if other Capitols do that, or other churches with domes, but it's the only frame of reference that i've got. They call it the Whispering Gallery because its acoustics are so great that you can hear someone on the complete opposite end of the dome whisper as though you were right there with them.

Those 257 steps to the Whispering Gallery are on a spiral staircase. It's fancy, and it's wide, and pretty manageable. In fact there is a lift straight up the middle of it for those who can't take the stairs. I didn't think it would be a big deal, so i didn't even mention the lift to Amanda. As we were about halfway up, i mentioned to her that it wasn't so bad, this staircase had to be about three times as wide as the one we climbed at Christchurch Cathedral in New Zealand.

So that was fun, let's head back down and get on with our...no. No, this is only the WHISPERING Gallery. Let's go see the Stone Gallery! Into the next staircase!

Opened the door and...well, this looks familiar. The staircase to the next gallery is EXACTLY like the one in New Zealand. It's about a meter wide, made of rough stone, and not at all polished for public viewing. You get what you get. The Stone Gallery is an additional 23 meters, bringing us to 53 meters off the ground and 376 steps climbed. There is no lift between the Whispering and Stone Galleries.

Unlike the Whispering Gallery, the Stone Gallery is outside. We got a pretty great view of London from being up that high, though it was windy and chilly outside and Amanda doesn't appreciate that sort of thing. Once outside of the building, they allow you to take photos, so i've got some pretty impressive video of London from the air. And my legs are destroying me.

But that wasn't the end, either! There is a third gallery, 85 meters from the ground, an additional 152 steps from the Stone Gallery. This is the Golden Gallery, and yes, Amanda dragged my fat ass up to that one too.

Getting to the Golden Gallery brings you through a metal spiral staircase, about as wide as the stone one that got us up to the Stone Gallery, except that instead of being claustrophobically enclosed in bricks, you are climbing a rusty metal spiral staircase through the nothingness between the church's new walls and its old roof. Yeah, it's really wide open. I've probably got a sci-fi reference to some huge, wide open ship that i could bust out but it's failing me. Oh wait, how about the mother ship in Independence Day? Imagine a staircase going through that. Or a Dyson Sphere. Or inside the second Death Star. Or in V'Ger. See? Wide open space. We may as well have been climbing Jack's beanstalk.

When you're nearly to the top, there is a small room where you can rest for a moment that has about a two foot wide window in the floor. Through it, you can look all the way down to the center of the floor of the church, over 80 meters below. There is a staff person in that room, and they allow you to take pictures through that window. I shot a little video, it triggers a certain primal reaction in me. You know the one. The HOLY SHIT I'M GOING TO FALL OFF OF A CHURCH one.

So it's just a couple more meters up another metal staircase from there to the Golden Gallery, which is an indescribably thin perch almost to the top of the former tallest building in London. And on the outside, naturally. With the thinnest railing of all to hold you on. Seriously, in order to make a complete circle around this gallery, i had to turn sideways and watch my feet. But i got some hella cool video from up there, for reals.

Then we climbed back down all 528 steps. The return journey does not use the same staircases as the ascent. On the way back down, some of them are WOOD. I crossed those as quickly as possible.

Then i kissed the sweet, sweet ground.

Just kidding. But it's not much of an exaggeration.

So all of that stair climbing made us pretty hungry. The first restaurant i saw once we were out of the cathedral was called Yo! Burger, so i suggested it, and after a very minimal amount of convincing, Amanda went with me on it.

We walked in and were immediately hit by a wave of awe and confusion.

The kitchen was right in the middle of the place, with a bar running all around it and stools at said bar. A conveyor belt circled between the kitchen and bar, with little bowls of food on it. There were foot-tall rods of light sticking up from the bar at every other seat. We were seriously unsure what we had just walked into.

After getting seated, a server approached us and started to ask about things, but we told her we'd never been there before, and she backed up and explained it to us. See, all you need to do is grab whatever you want off of the conveyor belt, and when you're done, they count up how much you owe based on the color of the bowl the food was in. There were six different prices, all explained in the menu, so you could just take what you wanted without having to wait for the server and the kitchen to make it for you. Unless, of course, you wanted hot food; that still had to be ordered and would take about ten minutes.

As it turned out, the name of the place was not Yo! Burger, the Yo! Burger just happened to be their new product which was plastered all over the outside of the building for promotion. The establishment is actually called Yo! Sushi. I ordered a Yo! Burger though, because i was intrigued by it. It was made with rice patties for buns, and the meat was tilapia. I'm not sure what the other things on the burger were, or what the sides they served me with it were, but it was unique and delicious. I don't even want to know what the sides were because i'd like my memories of the place to stay at “delicious.” Amanda ordered a hot noodle dish, and from the conveyor we took some potstickers and a bowl full of edamame. Later we also ordered some avocado sushi. It was expensive, but i really feel that the atmosphere of the place made it practically an attraction in its own right.

On to the Tower of London, the castle in the middle of the city. This is the fortress that the city expanded out from. Also, it's actually twenty towers, and by today's standards they aren't really towers at all, but still. Our London Passes got us an hour-long guided tour of the facility, in which our guide related to us the hilarious stories of torture and death that make up the bulk of England's history. We explored the White Tower, which was the home to England's kings and queens for 500 years before ending up as a museum, which is somewhat less dignified. I sat on a 1,000 year old toilet (inoperable, of course, it was just a display). We got a look into the history of weaponry, money, and astronomy, all of which used to be developed within the Tower. We saw the actual spot where King Henry VIII had Anne Boleyn executed. We went through a former prison, whose walls were carved out with the graffiti of hundreds of years' worth of prisoners. And what they call “graffiti” i call “great works of art,” because these are some serious stone carvings. Realistic portraits and such! These prisoners should have been artists!

Actually, i think a number of them were...

And, in what actually turned out to be the least interesting part of the Tower of London, we got to see the actual Crown Jewels.

On the way out, we walked through an exhibit on the history of torture, which was somehow not very awesome. There were just a couple of torture devices on display (The Rack [of course], Manacles, and The Woodsman's Daughter), and the whole of it was clearly watered down to be family-friendly. If i can't get a good look at medieval torture devices inside the actual castle where they were used in the Dark Ages, where the hell can i?!

At this point we had been on our feet pretty well all day and were getting pooped out. We stopped just outside the castle at a fish & chips place and ate fish & chips in London, because when you're in London, you eat fish & chips. Right? Anyway i'm not really sure how that caught on as the default meal of the country, they're really not that awesome of a combo. It's just fish and fries, they don't really compliment each other in any way. But i digress.

It was not even 6:00 yet, but things were starting to close, and the weather was turning all Londony, by which i mean it was starting to rain. Literally every other thing that Amanda wanted us to do today was either closing or outside, or both, and a cold, wet Amanda is not a thing that anyone wants on their hands. We talked about packing it in an heading for the hostel, but it seemed a waste.

Looking through our handbook on how to use the London Pass, we discovered that it actually got us some stuff at that arcade i mentioned yesterday, the Namco Funscape. I had been disappointed in myself for not shooting any video in there yesterday anyhow, and with the promise of three free tokens each, we thought it would be good to hit the Tubes and return to that part of town. But first, Amanda wanted to stop at the Monument to the Great Fire of London, just to see it for a few minutes.

We took the subway to the Monument station, and by the time we came up from the Underground, it was raining in earnest. We aimlessly trod the streets for several minutes before admitting that we could not, somehow, find the giant monument on Monument Street. So we pulled out the map, and somehow, the monument which has a name and a subway station named after it was not important enough to put on the travelers' map. She ended up finding it in our London Pass handbook, despite the fact that the monument requires no money and has nothing at all to do with the London Pass. So we got reoriented, went followed the directions to it, and lo and behold, we had not actually been on Monument Street. We looked at the monument for a few minutes from underneath a nearby awning, then turned around and walked back to the subway station.

After reentering that station, we discovered that we are idiots, and the monument is just outside of the other exit to said station, beyond several clearly marked signs which are visible as soon as you come up the escalators to the ground floor. The monument is literally right outside of that exit. So, we looked at it for another moment from that angle, and then sunk into the Underground.

The arcade is right by the London Eye, that big horrible Ferris wheel thing that Amanda wants me to go on, and although she didn't want to ride it in the rain, she thought we could dip into the ticket office and purchase our tickets to ride it tomorrow. There, we discovered that it would be just under twenty pounds per person to get on this glorified Ferris wheel. If you're not up on your exchange rates, that comes out to roughly $70 for the two of us. To ride a Ferris wheel. She began to defend it, saying how cool it was when she rode it ten years ago, but all i had to say was, “Is it $70 worth of cool?” Despite my personal feelings on getting in this technological horror anyway, if she had come back and said that yes, it was $70 worth of cool, i would (probably) have gone along with her. But her shoulders drooped and her face fell, and it didn't take long for her to admit that no, it's not $70 worth of cool.

So we will not be going on the London Eye during this trip.

The Namco Funscape turned out to be even more expansive than i had previously thought. Yeah, it's three floors of gaming goodness, including bowling, gambling, 30 or so claw machines, and a plethora of good ol' video games, but there was a whole wing that we somehow missed yesterday that included many more video games and FUCKING BUMPER CARS.

We hung around the Funscape for a while, burning through our three tokens pretty quickly, since we're both bad at arcade games, and throwing a little bit of money into it also (ok, it was only 50 pence, which translates to roughly 75 cents, but still, their promotion got me to spend some actual money, right?), before finally calling it a night and going back to the hostel. It had quit raining while we were gaming, so the walk back to the Tube station was not quite as miserable as before. We saw two cowboys on the bridge, one painted gold and the other silver. I'm not sure what their deal is, but yesterday we saw them harassing some other tourists, so they must hang out there a lot. Some kind of street performers, i guess. Or maybe they work the pancake stand. Yeah, today there was a pancake stand just across the street from Big Ben. Yeah. Street pancakes. Because when i'm walking down the street, the thing i need is definitely a pancake. I'm not even sure if that's sarcasm, i do love pancakes.

Upon return to the hostel, we inquired about the food specials that we get at the actual Arsenal Tavern as residents of the Arsenal Tavern Backpackers Hostel, only to find that the Tavern, as of today, has shut down its kitchen until they are done renovating. Yesterday they closed early, today they tell us they will not be opening again for months. Dammit. But the pizza place across the street had a 2-for-1 deal going on, so we ended up being alright.

So i think that's about it for today, and it's only 11:30, which means it took me almost two hours to write this journal entry. We've got all day tomorrow in London yet, and then we board a train to Paris. I've just downloaded a program to my phone that will translate anything French into English for me, just by taking a picture of it. Technology is amazing.

We live in the future.