London: Food

London has its reputation for bad food, but pre-trip research suggested the cuisine has greatly improved over the past 5-10 years. Using Yelp and our knowledgable housemate, we were able to find some pretty cool and delicious places. Some highlights (in chronological order):

• Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese – a tavern on Fleet Street that has been there since the 1600s…our first meal, and probably our most authentically British. Steak & ale pie, cold vegetables, and chips/fries. Very cool environment, though: in the main entrance there’s a table by a fireplace where Charles Dickens liked to sit.

• Towpath café – breakfast the second day, this was a café along a canal’s walking/biking path. Along with pastries and coffee, we tried some breakfast porridge.

• Gordon’s wine & cheese bar – for lunch near Trafalgar square on the 2^nd day, we got a cheese plate and some mushroom lasagna in this 120-year-old cavernous pub. Check out the cellar seating area...

• Fish & Chips – found a place with really good fish in the West End. Complete with mushy peas, which I decided I like better than regular peas. Not that I'll ever make or order them anywhere else, but just for the record.

• Borough Market – trying to save money, we found it economical to eat at markets by combining several snacks into a meal. Here, we went to several different stands and got Chorizo and Rocket Rolls (in England, it's not arugula, it's "rocket"), mango smoothies, and some really good coffee.

• Wahaca – one pattern among all the restaurants was that the less English the staff could speak, the better the food. Our last meal was a "Mexican market" place (imagine tapas-size dishes but Mexican-style food) with really good tacos and quesadillas, followed by simple but delicious desserts. Pictured below are the tostadas (shrimp and scallop ceviche in the foreground, chicken guajillo in the background) and vanilla ice cream with roasted pumpkin seeds and a salted caramel sauce...

London: Museums

Once you torture your wallet getting to London, it’s actually pretty cheap to keep yourself entertained. Nearly all of the city’s biggest museums are free, allowing you to walk in and out at your leisure. They charge for audio tours, but we found some free ones in itunes that you can download and play on your ipod. Earbuds in tow, we made it to four of the museums...

(Disclaimer: the elevated-vantage-point picture for the British Museum and the external shots of the Tate & National Gallery are from Google. None of ours quite captured these--probably because I complained about taking too many pictures)

• British Museum – a giant venue full of archaeological artifacts from the Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, and Roman Empires. Most notable are the Rosetta Stone and a collection of marble sculptures that used to adorn the Parthenon. There’s some controversy here because Britain basically stole everything in the building. Greece, for example, would really like the rest of its Parthenon back. For a while, the British argued that Greece didn’t have any museum space in which to properly show these sculptures. Over the past few years, Greece actually built such a space, so…Britain changed its argument. Now, they claim that these artifacts are so connected to the history of Western architecture and art that, really, they belong to all of us now.

• Tate Modern – a former power plant, this really cool building was emptied out and converted into a place where you can debate about what counts as art and what doesn’t. Walking through all the exhibitions, I kept thinking of an essay that reviewed a “modern” novel, saying something along the lines of “it should never take more effort to understand a piece than it does to make it”. There were a few things here that violated this rule. Some exhibits were really cool, though.

• National Gallery – Britain’s biggest collection of paintings, they’ve got over 2,300 works covering a span of about 800 years. This is also a popular place for afternoon tea, with a tea room/café that overlooks Trafalgar Square. Pictured is our "cream tea": lighter (and $15 cheaper per person) than a full afternoon tea, it comes with just tea, a scone, jam, and clotted cream. The scone in the picture looks a bit ho-hum, but was amazingly delicious with the cream & jam. Possibly my favorite thing we ate all week.

• Victoria and Albert Museum – technically a museum of “decorative arts and design”, this seems to be where you store anything really old but not so ancient/historic that it belongs in the British Museum. Victorian dresses, Islamic rugs, Asian swords, and more! One highlight here was listening to a pair of little girls walk around the museum, reminding me of home movies of Amy and Emily. The older would lead the way, narrating her findings, “I found….some people lying down!” (effigy casts of Henry II and family), “I found…a castle!” (casts of gothic spires), etc., followed by the younger echoing her enthusiasm: “some people!”, “castle!”. In the center of the museum is also a really pretty courtyard and fountain, very popular among London’s still-in-diapers crowd. Pictured below are the courtyard and Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, followed by replicas of Medieval tunics and a knight's gauntlet that you could try on.

London: Logistics

I figured this would be an efficient venue to share some London anecdotes and pictures. It was a great trip overall--we should definitely go there as a family sometime. Maybe on our way to Italy.

Rather than detail the events of each day in succession (which would probably read, "we did this, then we did this, then we did this, ..."), it’ll probably be better to focus on activities by category. First: logistics!...

Our red-eye flight was really not too bad—airlines have definitely upped their entertainment game. In addition to a pretty good selection of free on-demand movies and shows, ours also offered a bunch of games, including some like trivia, poker, and chess that you could play with other people on the flight. Even though it seemed like the trivia had a bit of a European bias (all the sports questions were about cricket or soccer), we managed to set the all time high scores for our plane:

We really lucked out with our accommodations for the week. One of Khristy’s former co-workers who used to live in London recommended a guest-house in Islington, a neighborhood in North London. The narrow-but-tall (4 tiny stories) house had several bedrooms, but only one other person (a local and friend of the owner), was there during our stay. She was very friendly and helped offer restaurant suggestions all week.

Not only was the house itself beautiful(and remarkably inexpensive, relative to other options), but it was a short walk away from Upper Street, the restaurant-rich main road in Islington. We found out after the trip that this 1-mile street actually has more restaurants than any other street in the UK. What luck! More about these restaurants in the food post in a couple days.

For transportation around the city, we invested in 7-day travel cards which give you unlimited bus and subway rides. This turned out to be a great decision—we would have spent ~3x as much had we bought tickets individually. Plus, in the rare event that we got on the wrong bus or train (never ever my fault, of course), it didn’t cost us anything extra to correct our mistake. The buses went everywhere…there are over 700 routes, and trying to figure them out was impossible until I found a life-saving iPad app that would tell you which buses you could use to travel between any two points. Meredith: If there’s a New York version, I’d highly recommend it. Here I am calling the app's developers to tell them what a good job they did:

Still to come: museums, other sites, and food!