London

My roommate Eunice and I spent the better part of last spring planning our European adventures. And though she'd already visited me in Paris, I hadn't gotten a chance to see what she had done with her year abroad. So a few weeks ago I finally booked my ticket across the Channel to spend a long weekend with Eunice.

Some of you may have heard of this amazing innovation called the Eurostar. Supposedly it's this rapid train that can get you from Paris to London in two hours. But me, I don't trust new-fangled contraptions like that. So instead, I booked a ticket on an overnight bus that involves 8-hours and one 3:00 A.M. ferry ride. Because that was clearly the most efficient option.

The other great thing about bus travel is that it gets you into London at 5:20 A.M! Trust me, Eunice was really excited too. She was even more excited when she found out that I wasn't leaving until late Sunday night, approximately 15 hours before she had to turn in an 8-page paper on humanitarian intervention. But she pulled through, and took me to basically every important spot in London. Here, in no order, are the highlights:

5) Westminster Abbey

Europeans love dead people. I have visited cemeteries in almost every country I have traveled to. Still, Westminster might have the highest concentration of famous corpses that I have ever seen. In the space of an hour we paid our respects to Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I, Bloody Mary, Dickens, Chaucer, Handel, Olivier, Churchill, Darwin, Browning, Hardy, Newton, Tennyson and more. Plus, all of them were safely tucked away beneath pretty headstones, unlike those at the last cemetery Eunice and I visited together...

Of course, the Abbey's main function is as a house of worship, not a burial place. And the building itself is pretty magnificent. Henry VII's Lady Chapel is one of the most beautiful rooms I have ever stepped into.

And to top it all off, Jeremy Irons (aka Scar) narrated our complimentary audioguides. Eunice had to restrain me from performing "Be Prepared" on the main altar. All in all, a successful visit.

4) Greenwich Meridian

A quick tube ride from the city center is the famed Greenwich Meridian, aka longitude line 0. If you stand with one foot on either side of the meridian you are standing in both the eastern and western hemispheres. That's right, you can stand in two places at once! (Yes, I did make a reference to A Walk to Remember. Eunice was very disappointed until I assured her that I have not watched that movie since its release, and that I believe Nicholas Sparks deserves his own special place in literary hell for comparing himself to Ernest Freaking Hemingway. Seriously.)

Anyway, the meridian itself was pretty cool. We took the obligatory meridian pictures. You can't tell, but I'm standing with one foot on Paris latitude and the other on Chicago latitude.



As an added bonus, the Royal Observatory is surrounded by Greenwich Park, which was just starting to show signs of spring.



3) The museums

So Eunice has been whining all year about how London is so expensive. And then I get there to find that all the good museums are free. And I felt compelled to point out that the Louvre costs 9.50 euros (well, technically I get in for free. But still.)

So Eunice and I went to the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the V&A, the Tate Modern and about 97 others completely free of charge. And they're great museums. My two favorites were the British Museum and the V&A. The British Museum, because I am a huge nerd who listens to podcasts where they talk about ancient spearheads and stuff, and the V&A because they have collections of pretty much everything (theater, music, gold and silver, jewelry, sculpture, fashion, stained glass, architecture, snuffboxes...).

So at the British Museum we learned that this rock is really old (and also that British people like to steal things from other countries):


And at the V&A, we learned that Mick Jagger was really skinny.

2) British Library

This one wasn't even a scheduled stop. We were headed to King's Cross Station when we passed by the British Library and saw several intriguing ads, including the words "The Beatles" and "free."

Turns out, the British Library has a freakishly impressive collection that includes two Gutenberg Bibles, several copies of the Magna Carta, the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf and the original score to Handel's Messiah, Beethoven's tuning fork and Jane Austen's writing desk (!). But the biggest attraction for most people is probably an exhibit of original lyrics from The Beatles. As in, the first time that Lennon and McCartney (or Harrison or Starr, to be fair) put their lyrics on paper. We saw "Michelle" written on the back of an envelope and "Eight Days A Week" scribbled onto John Lennon's son's birthday card. The words have reached such mythic proportions in the subsequent decades that it's good to be reminded of how they started: with a few scribblings on scraps of paper.

1) Food

If there's one thing Eunice and I learned about each other during our marathon Italy trip, it was that we both love food. A lot. So it makes sense that our first stop would be at Borough Market, one of the most epic collections of food in the world. You could cobble together a three-course meal just from the free samples you get walking around. Of course that wasn't enough for me, so I ordered up the ambiguously named "game sandwich," which turned out to be a sausage made of wild boar and venison mixed with apricots and red wine. Or, as the friendly vendor reminded me, "Mmmm...Bambi's delicious!" And he really was.

Sunday we went less traditional with a visit to Brick Lane in the East End. It's a long street packed with clothing and food markets. It's more international than Borough Market, think Moroccan, Vietnamese, Ethiopian and (especially) Indian food. You can't go to London without sampling the curry, and it did not disappoint.

Between market trips we also indulged in typical pub food (mushroom and steak pie, anyone?), tea and scones and some wild card meals (eel). Who ever said British food was terrible?