On my way back from a shopping expedition to Frankfurt today, I had a revelation. For the longest time, I thought that the announcement in the train was Es besteht Uebergang zur S-Bahn sowieso uebrigen Regionalverkehr (”You can change over to the S-Bahn and other regional transit systems”). I was very confused, trying to fit this usage of sowieso in with the dictionary’s translations of “anyway” and “in any event”.
Today I realised my mistake; the announcement is actually Es besteht Uebergang zur S-Bahn sowie zum uebrigen Regionalverkehr. And thus all became right with the world.
That is all. Carry on.
No time to sleep in and let my feet recover from last night’s new-shoes abuse: there’s a plane to catch.
The morning’s only adventure was a quick sidetrip to Picadilly Square on my way to Heathrow; I had seen a tie shop there and was hoping to pick something up for CRL before leaving the island. The place was of coursed closed and so I was forced to spend that tie money on an espresso around the corner.
Perhaps “adventure” isn’t the right word.
The trip back to Germany was the best kind: uneventful. The Tube was running smoothly, there were no problems at Heathrow, Frankfurt or anywhere in between. All train connections on the way from Frankfurt Flughafen Fernbahnhof to Germersheim Gleis 3 were made without incident.
Time to start planning the next trip — I have a flight from Frankfurt to Atlanta on 29 March and it’s not like I’m going to spend that 16 days in southern Rheinland-Pfalz.
The bulk of Sunday was spent investigating this whole “kings and queens” thing:
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I had heard from one of the bartenders at the hostel that I should go check out the Camden Market, just up the road from the hostel. Because I had several other things scheduled for the day, I went up to the market at 9:00 or so, which turned out to be much too early. While most of the vendors hadn’t yet arrived — and those that had were visibly waiting for their coffee to kick in and/or nursing near-fatal hangovers — there were still some stalls to check out. The market alternated between tourist-marketed punk crap (spiked collars, pre-ripped jean jackets, etc) and tourist-marketed non-punk crap (every variety of “I went to London and bought a shirt” shirt you could want), plus a handful of food places catering to the locals.
Confession: I bought a shirt there, though in my defense, there’s nothing on it that says, “I bought this in London”. I mention that enough on my own.
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After the market, I headed to Buckingham Palace to see the Changing of the Guard.
For those that aren’t familiar, the Changing of the Guard involves a bunch of guys wearing funny hats walking back and forth for a long, long time while you struggle to see something, anything through the thousands-strong crowd blocking your view. Eventually, music is played. The old and new guard both have bands with them and after there’s been enough marching, music stands are produced — much to the delight of all present. One might expect that, since they’re standing outside the Queen’s — shall we say, “crib” — the guard is going to play music befitting the actual or symbolic presence of The Sovereign of the Realm. In the case that one approaches this musical interlude with such assumptions, one (by which I mean “several thousand persons”) will stand with their mouth agape when the band strikes up a medley of “Dancing Queen”, “Gimme Gimme Gimme” and “SOS”.
That is to say, Swedish pop music was performed by men charged with protecting the Queen of England.
It seems “Mamma Mia” had just started a new run in London and that Her Royal Highness is getting to be a bit of a prankster in her old age.
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After getting over my disappointment at not having had some sort of recording device to prove that The Queen’s Own Guard had indeed played Abba, I set off for Windor Castle.
After paying a double-digit admission fare, I was allowed to visit the royal china room, the royal dollhouses, the royal Hans Holbein collection, the royal this, the royal that. Most impressive royal thing: the hallway that lists every single member of The Order of the Garter dating back to the Order’s founding in 1340-something.
Note: I wouldn’t recommend going on a Sunday: on Sundays, the castle’s church is closed to visitors. On the other hand, there are plenty of fuzzy-hat-wearing Guardsmen just dying to be a part of your vacation photos.
After returning from Windsor, I headed to the Trafalgar Square area, where a week-early St. Patrick’s Day festival was being held. After a bit of wandering around, I grabbed a bite to eat at a local pub, catching the last 40 minutes of an England-South Africa Seven Nations game. I spent much of this time trying to remember the rules to rugby, in between pints of Guinness.
The evening’s activities were concluded with a four-hour walk through the Chelsea and Kennsington boroughs. Perhaps “walk” is the wrong word, as that makes it sound like I knew where I was — this was not the case. For four hours I was very, very lost on empty streets. I finally found my way to the Thames, just across from the Battersea generating station; at night, it very much resembles a mad scientist’s lair.
Saturday can be summed up fairly succinctly: I spent the whole day in the British Museum. Done. Time for coffee.
More details? What more do you want? Click the link, read the Wikipedia article, let me get my damn coffee already.
Fine.
I shouldn’t say the whole day was spent at the British Museum. After breakfast, I went walking around the Leicester Square/Trafalgar Square area, eventually making my way down to Buckingham Palace, curious as to when the next changing of the Guard would occur (answer: the next day).
With that taken care of, I headed off to the British Museum, getting fairly lost in the process. The very moment I finally figured out what street I needed to take, a family of American tourists came up and asked me for directions to the Museum; they seemed somewhat shocked when I offered to take them there myself. Who knew foreigners were so friendly?
British Museum pros and cons:
Executive summary: you walk and walk and walk and walk and walk and you look at this and you look at that and you think, “wow, how interesting”, and after five hours of on-your-feet looking-at-old-stuff you’ve finally had enough and say, “I swear to God, if I see another piece of Roman statuary, I will start killing people”.
On the other hand, seeing the Rosetta Stone in person was pretty cool. Downside: they no longer have King Tut on display. Lots of other mummies, but no King Tut. I guess I have another excuse to go see Egypt some day.
After the museum, I wandered around some more, eventually making my way to the super-posh shopping district surrounding Knightsbridge. Further wanderings (though I can’t remember exactly where) commenced, ending with dinner (at a Moroccan place I had discovered earlier near Knightsbridge). Dinner was followed by some night-time sightseeing at Tower Bridge and the Tower of London itself. Thereafter, I spent about 30 minutes quite turned around in the area immediately north of the Tower Hill Tube station, due in part to a closed Aldgate station.
In preparation for the next day’s out-of-London excursion, bedtime was fairly early. “Cheers” to the crowd of under-18s dancing in the bar/club part of the hostel until the wee hours of the morning; I’m glad there were two floors of rooms between us.
On 7th March, I’m walking back to my apartment from campus, wishing it weren’t so cold, when I get a call from the BBC. I had been in talks with them for about a week or so about flying up to England for an interview with their New Media division. This was the same HR person: schedules had been arranged, rooms reserved and they wanted me at the White City tube stop Friday afternoon.
Some hurriedly arranged (and preposterously expensive) plane tickets later, I’m walking on air. I’m an excellent fit for the position, right up my alley skillwise; I’m planning to head up to Frankfurt on Wednesday or Thursday to go buy a more modern suit to wear for the interview. Things, as they say, are going well.
Thursday morning comes. I roll out of bed and head for the train station, destined for a particular French-style suit I remembered from the last time I was in Frankfurt. The BBC calls back.
BBC HR: “Hi, Collin, it seems we’ve got a bit of a situation. You don’t have a UK work visa by chance, do you?”
Me: “No, but I qualify for one. You need a job first in order to get one, though, right?”
BBC HR: “Well, yes, but since you don’t already have a visa, I’m afraid we’re going to have to cancel the interview. We can only hire candidates who are already allowed to work in the UK.”
Me: “Ah, I see.”
BBC HR: “Have you already bought your plane ticket?”
Me: “Um…yes.” (The interview was scheduled for 28 hours later)
BBC HR: “Oh. Well, then. I hope you enjoy London.”
Good thing they caught me before I bought the suit.
So now, rather than spending a decent bit of money to go to London for a job interview, I was just spending a decent bit of money to go to London.
Anyway. Friday morning, I get up at a ridiculous time of morning and catch a train to the main Frankfurt airport. I pass through the four (yes, four) security checkpoints fairly quickly and catch my flight without any hassle.
The hassle, it seems, had merely been lying in wait on the other side of the Channel. The plane lands, no trouble, and I make my way to Her Majesty’s Ye Olde Customse Deske. The trap was sprung.
I’m surprised this woman didn’t make me submit to a DNA scan and an anal probe. She wanted to know the following things:
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How long do you plan to stay in the UK?
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What was the nature of your business?
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Where will you be staying?
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What’s the address of your hostel?
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What do you do in the US?
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If you’re a student, how are you paying for this trip?
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How much cash do you have on you? (At this point, she actually makes me present all my cash (in euros, pounds and Swiss francs); she proceeds to count it out twice.)
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Do you know anyone in the UK?
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If you don’t know anyone, what would I be doing for four days?
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What landmarks will you be visiting? (She makes me list off 6 or 7 places I plan to visit.)
After all this, she grudgingly stamps my passport and lets me into the country. I was afraid she was simply going to say, “Nope, sorry, you’re going to have to stay in the airport until your flight back.”
On the plus side, the London Underground proved far simpler to navigate on first exposure than did the Paris Metro system. This may have been because all the signs were in English, I dunno.
Sidebar: before leaving for England, I had the conscious thought, “hey, I’ll be able to ask directions in English. Wow…”
First order of business: drop my stuff at the hostel. I head up to Camden Town station (I’ve uploaded a map of the Tube for the curious), check in and head back underground. Destination: Westminster Abbey.
Let me admit something: I had no idea that Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament were neighbors. So, I was accordingly surprised to come out of Westminster station to find myself absolutely surrounded by tourists taking pictures of Big Ben. I got in on the act, but determined to be slightly less touristy than those around me, I headed to the other side of the Thames to grab my photos of That Big Clock and the Palace of Westminster (I quite like the latter image).
Next up was Westminster Abbey itself. The cathedral feels much small and less open than some I’ve been to (Notre Dame de Bayeux comes to mind). Most impressive to me were the graves that can be found in the Abbey: King Henry III, Mary Queen of Scots, Issac Newton, Charles Darwin, Saint Edward the Confessor, William Pitt, Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dr Johnson, the list goes on.
After this, I headed over to St. James Park and spent the next few hours walking through the band of parks and green spaces that cover almost all of London between Victoria station and Notting Hill. Between the four of them, St. James Park, Hyde Park, Green Park and Kennsington Gardens certainly took care of whatever desires I might have had for long walks in rainy-ish London weather.
My next stop was Covent Garden, though how I picked that particular place, I’m not sure. In any case, the area around the Tube station proved to be a fantastic shopping Mecca; verily do I pray in its direction. I grabbed dinner in the same area, at a we’re-trying-sooooo-hard-to-be-Mexican-but-still-failing-miserably Mexican restaurant on (of course) Langley Street, right next door to The Langley, an eatry I can only assume to be as classy as its namesake.
Following a brief dinner, I re-entered the Tube system and made my way to Blackfriars and the area around the Tate Modern. Some Weird Internet People just happened to be having an informal soiree that evening, and being in town as I was, dropping by for a pint with people I’ve never met before sounded like a fabulous idea.
A good bit of Guinness, several hours and some new friends later, I returned to the hostel, turning in early in preparation for my big museum tour the next day.
My cousin and her husband, being young, rich and without tiny humans to concern themselves with, tend to take a lot of snap-decision trips to far-off locales. They’re currently on the last days of one such mini-vacation: a week in sunny (read: cold, wet, generally miserable) Germany. They’re in Frankfurt at the moment, so I headed up last night to meet them for dinner.
Once the words, “I’ll be coming on the 17:57 from Mannheim” crossed my lips, it became inevitable that I would, under no circumstances, make it to Frankfurt even close to 6PM. There was a decent bit of snow on the ground (12-14cm), and given that it was rush hour, it was no surprise that all the trains were running behind schedule.
From the very start of the trip, things went awry: my train to Speyer was a few minutes late, meaning that I was just in time to watch my connection to Mannheim pull away. I caught the next train to Mannheim, 30 minutes later, meaning that I had missed my InterCity Express from Mannheim to Frankfurt.
I finally arrived at the central Frankfurt station around 7:05PM. I walked around a bit before finding Christy and Mark, then we headed off to a restaurant they had picked out on the other side of the Main, the main (pardon the pun) river that flows through Frankfurt.
The place was a nice Apfelwein tavern, serving exclusively the local Hessian apple wine. I got to play translator and interpreter for the others, since they don’t speak any German — reading a menu to someone never gets any less strange the more times I do it. Over the meal, we swapped stories of our respective continental travels and they provided me news from the relatives back in the States.
After a leisurely dinner, they dropped me back off at the train station and I headed back to Germersheim. Of course, now that I didn’t have any time obligations to meet, all the trains ran on schedule.
