UK 2013 Day 4 London

Day 4 – Tuesday, June 11 2013: London

Following breakfast at the hotel, we once again boarded the Underground, this time heading over to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Upon entry we received their self-guided audio tour, but we had planned instead to share the Rick Steve’s audio tour that I’d loaded up on our phones – but for some reason we couldn’t get it working so we resorted back to the one they’d given us. A very interesting tour. From there we were off to the Museum of London, where we spent about 90 minutes touring the exhibits and then grabbed lunch in their onsite café. On the way out we stopped at their shop and I picked up a great book, The Times Atlas of London, which traces the history of the growth of London through a series of maps. I LOVE this kind of thing!

Andrew gets into the spirit of things at the Museum of London. Here, he contemplates being tortured.

The post-lunch plan had been a self-guided walking tour of the square mile of “original” London, taking in several key historic buildings, including a planned stop at the Bank of England (where you can apparently lift a genuine gold bar in their museum). The plan went awry, however, because whatever route instructions I’d printed out didn’t seem to work – we had trouble finding the streets we were looking for. (Note that the link to the tour I have here is NOT the tour I'd originally downloaded. I think the one I linked looks better than the one I had.) And on top of that my cell phone wasn’t getting reception among the tall buildings so I couldn’t bring up Google Maps. So we just kind of wandered randomly in “the general direction” until we finally found Leadenhall Market, where we dutifully looked up a filming location from the Harry Potter movies.

One of the open-air passages through Leadenhall Market. Someday I'd like to explore this place a bit more.

The blue doorway was used as a filming location in one of the Harry Potter movies. The dude walking around the corner was NOT featured in the movie.

30 St Mary Axe, aka "The Gherkin".

Eventually, we got to what was the planned end of our walking tour: The Monument. I had expected that we’d see The Monument while approaching it. I hadn’t expected it to be tucked into a small square amongst a lot of more modern, taller buildings. In fact, as we walked down the road that was actually (correctly) taking us there we had serious doubts that we were in the right place. Some construction workers obviously had no trouble figuring out that we were confused tourists and, hearing what our intended destination was, confirmed that we were just a block or two away.

At the end of our uncertain wandering, we finally came to The Monument.

Neither Robert nor Eileen wanted to make the ascent, so Andrew and I purchased tickets and climbed up to the top. From there we had some nice views on this overcast day.

A nice unobstructed view of Tower Bridge from the top of The Monument.

The museum ship HMS Belfast, with the blob of London City Hall on the shore behind it.

The Tower of London peeking out behind the rooftoop of a modern office building.

The proud climbers.

Why we're so proud of ourselves: 311 steps.

Because our walk through historic London didn’t really work out as expected,we ended up finishing up our day’s plan about 90 minutes early, so we took advantage of this to take an enjoyable stroll west along the Thames rather than just hopping immediately on the Underground. We eventually made our way back to St. Paul’s and from thence caught the Underground back to the hotel.

One of many nice viewing spots along the Thames. Our original plans didn't include a Thames-side walk in London, but this turned out to be a nice way to pass some time! London Bridge in the background, and the lower floors of the 95-story The Shard can be seen on the other side of the river.

In the foreground, a random Thames cruise boat. In the background, Pickford's wharf, warehouses dating from 1864 but now converted to luxury apartments.

The recreated Globe Theater.

St. Paul's, approaching from the south on our way back up from the Thames. There were a couple of buskers working the pedestrians along this path.

Millennium Bridge (with the pedestrians). Behind it, the much more substantial (and substantially uglier) Blackfriar's train bridge, and behind that the Blackfriar's road bridge.

Once back at the hotel we chilled out at watched some TV. It was here we made our first great cultural discovery: the panel show QI, hosted by Stephen Fry. It was described by the on-screen guide as a show “…hosted by poly-math Stephen Fry…” I was familiar with Fry as part of Fry & Laurie and also Blackadder, so I figured there’d be some humor involved. Basically, what we got was a combo of some great history, trivia, and comedy. We were hooked and caught the show as often as we could while in the UK (and later watched it on YouTube once we got home).

We also decided to make a change to our dinner plan for this night. We had been thinking about going to Roti Chai, a very well-reviewed Indian restaurant, but the boys weren’t much interested in that. So instead we hopped on a bus and went further into Bayswater to Tequila Tex-Mex where we had a nice dinner and some fun.