| Current mood: |  laggy |
| Current music: | frogs! outside! this is a new sound for me |
| Entry tags: | life, travel |
my british tour diarrhea
wednesday 5 april: flew to london, landed at gatwick. had weird pressure brain bubble on landing and felt really bad for a while. recovered with tea on the gatwick express, goggled at the weird houses and stuff (on the return trip this morning they'd stopped seeming weird). struggled to stay awake all day. went on three walking trips from the hotel. ate unappetizing-yet-huge portions of pad thai. saw some of hyde park, the royal albert hall, the victoria & something museum of decorative art, more stuff, hard to remember, finally mercifully fell asleep.
thursday 6 april: thought about Gosh (a comic store), asked the hotel concierge where Gt Russell St was, he said it was just past Bond St. he was either lying or just wrong. walked miles and miles to Tottenham Ct Rd. all very interesting, but my feet became incredibly sore and more or less stayed that way all through the holiday. went to Gosh. Hope introduced me to the clerk because I was reluctant and/or shy and feeling slightly culture-shocked. they were waiting for us and made us sign a shitload of books! it was a good time. got to use the internet, posted here. went to the British Museum afterwards (it's across the street) and looked mostly at Egypt. prints & drawings wing was sadly closed. discovered a bibimbap restaurant just down the street, ate a small lunch, it was great. i think we went to the Tate Modern after that and then walked along the Thames and Tower Bridge at which point we were completely fatigued and insane. couldn't find any food. struggled back to London Bridge stn, probably got some curry or something and collapsed into bed.
friday 7 april: made definite plans to hit the Tower of London first thing in the morning, which we did. it was actually quite lovely and entertaining. walked to the Design Museum afterwards which had a Designer of the Year exhibit including Jamie Hewlett. Large gallery of prints and a huge array of his original pencil work under glass. conversation revolved around how if Corey Lewis was there he totally would shit. quite likely that we went shopping afterwards. Hope bought shoes and then we essentially gave up, because Friday night on Oxford is nuts.
saturday 8 april: checked out of hotel. had brunch at fancy restaurant next to the Ritz with Mr Edgar Wright Jr. he also took us to Forbidden Planet, which didn't carry our books, and then we parted ways. we went to Paddington to get a train to Bath. checked in at the YMCA. changed money. toured the Roman Baths, which was good, although long and the audio tour was shit. went to the grocery store, bought hummus (houmous?) and bread and veggies for dinner. we ate this almost every night and never got sick of it. restaurant food makes us roly-poly and unpleasant. that night we walked up Bath, which is in a valley and is basically just uphill the entire way. strenuous, yet lovely.
sunday 9 april: left Bath immediately upon waking. train to Salisbury. wandered Salisbury looking for a hotel. became very cranky. ended up almost where we started, and got a room at the Cat Tavern, a pub. this, although slightly unsavoury, was probably an essential experience. a band played beneath us that night and lulled us to sleep with rollicking classic rock covers. we ate a fancy lunch at Anokaa, a posh Indian place, which was completely excellent.
monday 10 april: got up and took a bus to Avebury (location of a stone age monument, older than Stonehenge apparently). saw Wiltshire from the bus, the quaint English countryside tickling our fancy etc. accidentally got off the bus several miles too early. wandered farmers' fields, climbed a large hill, saw standing stones in the distance. eventually got there. ate lunch under a standing stone. walked up a steep hill, saw an ancient burial mound from afar. went back, decided to follow the standing stones (they line the road) and ended up finding Avebury, which we'd apparently approached from the wrong angle. felt very accomplished, having gone off the beaten trail. tried to pet grazing lambs, but they ran away from us. saw a kitty on someone's garden walk. the first cat we'd seen in the UK.
tuesday 11 april: left the Cat Tavern and took a train back to London, switched to King's Cross, got another train north to York. York train was boring other than the way it speeds through tunnels and makes your ears pop. saw a viking tourist thing in York. extremely silly, like Epcott Centre or something except smellier, lower-budget and even more ridiculous. wandered the streets in circles, ate dinner at vegetarian cafe El Piano. stayed in a very new Ikea-looking hotel where you had to plug your keycard in to turn on the electricity. kind of neat.
wednesday 12 april: walked up the tower of the York Minster (largest cathedral in Britain apparently). this was not totally fun for me, although not as bad as climbing the Statue of Liberty when I was a kid (please never do that). toured the crypt and undercroft later, which was actually very interesting. found York's comic store later (a branch of the Traveling Man) which had Hope's new book, but none of mine. shopped at H&M where we both bought a bunch of clothing (unprecedented!). then to the York Castle Museum, which is so incredibly long and full of stuff. a history of Britain through objects, rooms and streets. by halfway, we kind of just wanted to run screaming, but there was a ton of good stuff in there. it got rainy and we were very tired so we wussed out and got Pizza Hut (the middle ground between overpriced sit-down English pizza and shitty takeout Lebanese pizza). and we watched more BBC.
thursday 13 april: got a train to Nottingham. wandered confusedly a bit and eventually found Page 45 (a comic shop) where they (Tom, Caroline and world-famous retailer Stephen L. Holland) were happy to see us! Tom took us to lunch at a great vegetarian cafe where we were probably terrible company while we ravenously stuffed our faces. tried to go to Sherwood, postponed it to tomorrow. decided to check out "the caves" (which are accessed through a mall). this is kind of depressing because they actually did build this terrible shopping centre over the caves and amazing-looking narrow streets in the 70s, demoloshing much of it. what remains is quite evocative. later Stephen took us to his house, we walked through the countryside a bit, made stirfry (from a packet) and then headed back to town where i got pretty drunk. most other people got drunker and kept apologizing for being drunk, but it was actually much like a night on the town in Halifax.
friday 14 april: went to Sherwood Forest first. i felt nervous on the bus because i was really cold, it was full of obnoxious Chinese tourists, and i was paranoid that we were on the wrong bus or something. the Forest was what you might call a valuable disappointment, whittled down to probably a few hundred acres and nowhere near as primeval as I'd always dreamed. chintzy-ass tourist village at the front too. a cautionary tale! the woods out back of my house are practically as good. then we had our signing, which went smashingly well, better and smoother than i maybe would have predicted. Stephen knows how to run a show. I ate Twiglets and probably looked like an idiot, but we both had a steady flow of fans or whatever for a solid three hours, at which point it ended in a very orderly fashion. afterwards we went out for sushi. i was goaded into ordering probably the most expensive sushi platter. it was excellent although some of the bits were odd and unexpected (a pile of imitation crab meat and a pile of shrimp, apropos of nothing). the sashimi was very very good. relatively early night, although we had scintillating conversation with Stephen, Tom and Caroline, who are all lovely and you should all go to Page 45 at earliest convenience.
saturday 15 april: up early, left Stephen's house, train back to London. too early to check in to our hotel, so we left our bags there and headed back to Gt Russell St, where we both ate bibimbap (delicious - on Museum St, please go there). went back to Gosh. Hope sold them some minicomics. back to the British Museum for a bit. some European stuff this time and Prehistory, which had us both all tingly and whatnot. wandered Soho for a while. Hope wanted vegan chocolate but we couldn't find any. went back and checked in to the hotel. cruddiest hotel we'd stayed in, but hey it was cheap. ate more hummus and bread and veggies for dinner, something like the 6th package of hummus we'd eaten. went for a short walk later. watched Chocolat on BBC2 i think. no commercials. fell asleep.
sunday 16 april: came home. took a long time. not very interesting. purchased and read "The Rules of Attraction" (Hope bought "Catch-22"). no brain bubbles this time, so that was good. jetlagged and writing this thing in an effort to not fall asleep too early.
EDIT: ps, had a 100% great time. Forgot to mention that last night in the rush to get it all down. i was trying to restrain myself because I thought not everybody would be interested in our personal approach to England which did not include any "young persons" activities such as clubbing or doing drugs and meeting strange people etc.
good morning jetlag.
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destroyerzooey) wrote,
