Greetings from London!
As many of you know, I arrived in London this morning from Dulles en route to Mallorca. I'm spending the night here before meeting my traveling companion at Heathrow tomorrow morning to fly two hours south to sunny Palma....
My hotel is walking distance from Paddington Station, so I came in on the Heathrow Express train and then walked around the neighborhoods of Paddington and Marylebone. I saw the Sherlock Holmes Museum and Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. I discovered the beautiful Queen Mary's Gardens in Regent's Park -- it has endless beds of roses and lawns that are flat enough to play bocci on, and very civilized green cloth lawn chairs everywhere. It was very windy here today, so most of the lawn chairs had blown inside out. People lie around on this lawn the same way people lie on the lawns around the Leaning Tower of Pisa or at the Getty in LA. Flat on their backs, silent for hours....smiling. I also met the very diverse collection of ducks in the boating lake in this park. Baby ducks were learning to swim and mommy ducks were making sure daddy ducks didn't interfere. Baby ducks look like floating lint. I couldn't figure out how the mommy duck knew which piece of floating flint was hers and not some other duck's.
Regent's Park also has an outdoor theatre which is showing a Midsummer's Night Dream and Henry IV Part One. I could hear the actors' voices and the period music floating over the flower beds. London's largest mosque is near the boating lake, so even though Shakespeare was in the air, most of my fellow park goers were Arab.
I saw 2 funny signs:
1. “Brighter Loos -- a Westminster Initiative.” (Government poster)
2. “You wouldn't spray your kids with artificial fertilizer, so we don't spray your raspberry's either” (for organic produce).
Now I'm drinking a mocha frappuccino in a Starbucks next to a statute of Field Marshall Sir George Stuart White, who won the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Afghan War of 1879. Across the street is a Hijab shop, full of Arab women and girls picking among rows and rows of seemingly identical black head coverings. My walk back to my hotel will take me past St. Marylebone Parish Church, where Elizabeth Barret and Robert Browning got married in 1846. I think I like this part of London.
As many of you know, I arrived in London this morning from Dulles en route to Mallorca. I'm spending the night here before meeting my traveling companion at Heathrow tomorrow morning to fly two hours south to sunny Palma....
My hotel is walking distance from Paddington Station, so I came in on the Heathrow Express train and then walked around the neighborhoods of Paddington and Marylebone. I saw the Sherlock Holmes Museum and Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. I discovered the beautiful Queen Mary's Gardens in Regent's Park -- it has endless beds of roses and lawns that are flat enough to play bocci on, and very civilized green cloth lawn chairs everywhere. It was very windy here today, so most of the lawn chairs had blown inside out. People lie around on this lawn the same way people lie on the lawns around the Leaning Tower of Pisa or at the Getty in LA. Flat on their backs, silent for hours....smiling. I also met the very diverse collection of ducks in the boating lake in this park. Baby ducks were learning to swim and mommy ducks were making sure daddy ducks didn't interfere. Baby ducks look like floating lint. I couldn't figure out how the mommy duck knew which piece of floating flint was hers and not some other duck's.
Regent's Park also has an outdoor theatre which is showing a Midsummer's Night Dream and Henry IV Part One. I could hear the actors' voices and the period music floating over the flower beds. London's largest mosque is near the boating lake, so even though Shakespeare was in the air, most of my fellow park goers were Arab.
I saw 2 funny signs:
1. “Brighter Loos -- a Westminster Initiative.” (Government poster)
2. “You wouldn't spray your kids with artificial fertilizer, so we don't spray your raspberry's either” (for organic produce).
Now I'm drinking a mocha frappuccino in a Starbucks next to a statute of Field Marshall Sir George Stuart White, who won the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Afghan War of 1879. Across the street is a Hijab shop, full of Arab women and girls picking among rows and rows of seemingly identical black head coverings. My walk back to my hotel will take me past St. Marylebone Parish Church, where Elizabeth Barret and Robert Browning got married in 1846. I think I like this part of London.
posted by Anonymous @ 11:06 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home