London and a bit of Greenwich

On the first Friday of the program, the Cambridge group was scheduled to do a whirlwind day in London. Carter and I had some other plays we wanted to see as well, so we stayed overnight, and this gave us an opportunity to meet up with our friend John Conlee, who was at the tail end of teaching in Bath for the summer. John is the William and Mary English prof who got us hooked on coming to Britain lo those eighteen years ago, when Carter and John each drove a minivan filled with W&M students to as many Arthurian, Celtic, and Roman sites as John could think of - which is A LOT!. So here are the two profs, master and acolyte, still crazy after all these years:



Here's Carter on the Hungerford Bridge, with the dome of St. Paul's behind him to the right:



This blog is going to be disappointing in representing London in all its postcard-ready glory - we don't do much sight seeing any more. However,we have somehow never taken a boat ride up the Thames before, and finally we did!

But before we cruise the surface of the great and mighty Thames, it may interest folks to know that you can also walk under the Thames at Greenwich. We had to do this because I left my tote, with my all-important travel journal, running shoes, and hair dryer, on a train platform en route to Greenwich. You might think that it would be impossible to ever get said bag back in London, a city of upwards of 12 million people, but...you would be wrong! Due to (in my opinion) a combination of residual vigilant reflexes after years of IRA (and more recently, Jihadist) bombings, along with a very deep and very British belief in the orderliness of helping institutions, by the time I called, my bag had been found, inspected, and held by the transit police. Given the crazy traffic of a Sunday in London, as well as some problems with the trains, it was quicker to walk under the Thames in working our way back, so....we did:


Note: of all the many folks I talked to in person and on the phone during the process of getting my bag back, no one chastised me for my stupidity. In fact, as we always find in Britain, everyone was unfailingly helpful, professional, and reassuring. Hooray for the Brits! Glad this didn't happen in France! En France, there would have been some merde thrown around, for sure!

Anyway, here's Carter on the other side, with Greenwich and the huge London Eye up river in the distance:



Because of all this retracing of steps, we didn't get to do justice to Greenwich, but we did have time to see the Painted Hall at the Royal Naval Hospital. First, some info:

"The artist was Sir James Thornhill, and it took him nineteen years to complete the work, finishing in 1727. He was paid three pounds a square yard for the ceiling and one pound a square yard for the walls. The Hall was designed as a dining room for the pensioners, but proved to small for the population. It was not used for this purpose again until 1939, when the Navy used it as their Mess until 1998."
Check out this pensioner's "mess hall"!






Every surface is elaborately painted, perhaps to distract attention from the in-all-probability lousy food?
Here's Carter doing what many a pensioner might have after a heavy carb and fat loaded British meal: napping!


Anyway, back to the boat ride!
London has its areas that are oh-so-very modern...


(I love the gigantic egg-shaped building you see above, which close up looks almost Faberge in it's decoration. )
...as well as the more ancient:
Here are a few shots of the Tower Bridge, which is just impossibly grand from underneath...






Somehow the modern bridges don't quite have the same grandeur:




The Tower of London:

Here's the Globe:


The Tate Modern Museum, which used to be the Bankside Power Station and was conceived by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also designed the (formerly, in this age of cell phones) ubiquitous red British phone booth:


A bigger shot of the London Eye, each pod of which holds thirty people:

Note to Maxx and Zoe: It moves more slowly than a ferris wheel, but it is still BIG fun to ride and you can see forever!
And of course., the houses of Parliament and Big Ben:






That's all of London for now...more to come in a later blog.