Okay, FINE—in an attempt to back away slowly from the slippery slope ending in All Sheep, All The Time, we will now turn our attention to our delightful London &c Trip.
After my parents went back home, we had a few weeks to ourselves before Stephan’s sister (Ronda) and brother-in-law (Bill) arrived in London.
[A Note: I unequivocally adore London. I've been there on eight or so separate occasions, mostly for work, and I can't get enough. And I don't even really do anything except walk around and look at things—it's not like I'm out hitting clubs and going to concerts and art galleries and the theatre. Apparently I just really like old buildings and reliable public transportation.
It's like my good friend Samuel Johnson used to say: "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life," which does not say much for Stephan's potential joie de vivre. (Incidentally, the eye-rolling transatlantic equivalent is John Updike's "The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.")]
So I was quite happy to spend three whole days in London during which I could things like sleep in and not spend 12 hours a day in a remote office building. Stephan and I drove down to a station at the end of a tube line and, for the first time, bought Oyster cards (top-upable electronic tickets that you can use on all of London’s public transportation systems, including river boats). They are infinitely cooler than having to carry around a paper ticket that’s only good for one day—you can’t be a Londoner without an Oyster card. Bonus: ours featured a special commemorative design left over from the Royal Wedding nay but 3.5 weeks previous.
We met Bill and Ronda at Trafalgar Square and managed to find some lunch before Bill wandered back to their hotel for a jetlag-induced nap. The rest of us took a walk along the Embankment; past Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, et al.; and through St James’s Park toward Buckingham Palace. And oh, Internets—the pollen. I don’t know what provoked every plane tree in the city to release all of its pollen into the air simultaneously, but it was horrible. And I say this as a heretofore completely allergy-free person. The sneezing! The choking! The crying! I can’t imagine having to go through that for weeks on end every spring.
We had a short reprieve upon reaching Buckingham Palace, as the public side is paved and completely barren of plant life. So there we were, minding our own business, when our path was blocked by a big silver van with tinted windows (you know, like the ones they used at the aforementioned Royal Wedding for the lesser royals):
Several seconds later, our route cleared and we were able to continue on to Bill and Ronda’s hotel, a mere two roads and one big park (Green Park) away. From their penthouse room (some people have all the randomly upgraded luck!), we could see right over the tops of all those stupid, stupid trees to Buckingham Palace, atop which now flew the Royal Standard:
This is the flag that is flown wherever the Queen is hanging out, and according to Bill it hadn’t been there very long. As this was the day before Barack Obama arrived from Ireland for his slumber party (pillow fights, truth or dare, prank calling David Cameron…), we concluded that since:
a) the Queen probably needed to arrive the day before to tidy up the place a bit
and
b) when the Queen is not on official business and/or otherwise doesn’t want people to know what she’s up to, she probably rides around in one of those big silver vans you can’t see into, just exactly like the one we had to wait for at Buckingham Palace,
Therefore,
YOU GUYS—THE QUEEN TOTALLY SAW US.
QED
