London, Day 1

I've returned from London!  A and I returned to Kandern at about eight-thirty last night after a busy nine days in Englan'ds capital.  We saw and did so many things that I'm not sure I'll be able to write about them here without making a post that takes thirty minutes to scroll through.  I definitely won't show all my photos here because I took upwards of six hundred.

Our first day in London was very bookish.  We went to 221B Baker Street, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, the BBC Sherlock's filming location on Gower Street, Speedy's Sandwich Bar and Cafe, Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross Station (an important location in the Harry Potter books), and the British Library.

I love that Sherlock Holmes is such a big deal that there is a Tube stop specifically called Baker Street.  The walls of the station are decorated with profiles of the Great Detective, and the moment you step outside of the station, you see a towering statue of him with his pipe and hat. 

A and I arrived at the Museum at about nine-thirty and were a bit shocked to see the line that was already there.  It trailed down the block, dozens of people from all nationalities here to see Sherlock Holmes' abode.  A and I decided to go to Regent's Park for a bit and come back later in the hopes that the crowd might've cleared up a bit.

Regent's Park was very pretty.  It was quiet with only a handful of other people in it.  There were open grassy spaces with benches and sidewalks, a river/pond with a little bridge and manmade islands in it, and funny waterbirds with oddly speckled feet.

After enjoying the Park, we went to Gower Street, which is where 221B Baker Street in the BBC Sherlock series was filmed.  We went into Speedy's and got some tea and an apple pie (you know you're on vacation when you have dessert before lunch).  The cafe was very tiny.  It had green painted walls with mirrors and framed photos of the BBC Sherlock on the walls.  The staff was friendly if a bit hurried because there were a lot of people squeezed in there, ordering and eating.  The tea was good, and the apple pie was excellent. 

After eating the apple pie, A and I realized we were hungry for lunch, so we ate at a place we'd stumbled across online: The Mac'n'Cheese Factory.  It's a New York-inspired British chain restaurant serving gourmet macaroni and cheese.  I'm sure it was extremely unhealthy, but it tasted SO GOOD.

We then returned to Baker Street to see how the crowd looked.  It had thinned a little, and the line was shorter.  Still about twenty to thirty feet long but better than it had been that morning.  I think maybe lots of early bird people had arrived and backed up the line this morning, and that was why it was so packed.  We bought our tickets and lined up.  The line moved fairly quickly, and we got inside pretty soon after lining up.  It was pretty much how I remembered it from my visit in 2016.  I like all the little trinkets and things scattered around the rooms, almost all of which are from the books: the Persian slipper, the pipes, the bust of Napoleon.  Portraits of famous criminals of Holmes's day hung on the walls of one room.  I asked a staff person if he knew who these people had been.  He said yes and named several of them and their crimes.  He explained that back in Holmes's time, people would go to trials and executions as a form of entertainment, and at these events, vendors would sell portraits of the criminal as souvenirs.  People would collect these and put them up at home, like we do with our more lighthearted souvenirs today, and oftentimes use them as polite conversation starters.  I found that rather morbid yet fascinating.

We then rode the Tube to the King's Cross Train Station to see Platform 9 3/4.  In the Harry Potter series, young wizards and witches heading to Hogwarts for school go to this platform to board the Hogwarts Express.  The platform is hidden from regular humans - Muggles - by magic, so to get onto the platform, people have to go through a seemingly solid brick wall.  And usually the students have luggage on luggage carts that they're pushing, so they push the cart ahead of them and disappear into the wall, emerging onto Platform 9 3/4 on the other side. 

It wasn't hard to find the platform.  The thick throng of people gave it away.  Everybody was lined up, waiting for a turn at getting a photo at the wall marked Platform 9 3/4.  Half of a luggage cart was embedded in the brick wall.  People took turns holding onto the cart handle and getting their photos taken by the professional photographer.  Hogwarts House scarves of all four colors were available to wear too, and there was an employee whose sole job was to stretch out the scarf behind the person and, when the photographer said, "Scarf!" let it go so that it bounced and sprang into the air.  The photographer snapped the picture and, ideally, it looked like the person was about to go through the wall to Hogwarts with a stiff breeze blowing the scarf behind them.  That little touch was rather amusing.

We didn't get a photo with the luggage cart and the scarf because the line was too long, but we did go into the shop.  It was full of Harry Potter merchandise of all Hogwarts houses.  It was very crowded in the shop too.  Employees asked everybody to wear backpacks in front instead of in back so that they didn't accidentally knock stuff off the shelves.

Then we walked to the British Library.  We had hoped to find a huge library in which we could peruse books, wander down aisles, and find quiet corners in which to sit and read.  However, it wasn't quite what we expected.  It was very big and maybe there were quiet corners to sit in, but we weren't allowed in them.  Turns out you have to be a member of the library to access the reading rooms and even then there aren't any books in the reading rooms.  They're all in storage, and you have to call ahead of time to have them brought up.  It's more of an archive than a library.  That was a bit disappointing, but at least we'd been there and seen it.  There was a large glass-enclosed collection of old books right on the second floor of the foyer that was pretty to look at. 

We finished up our day of sightseeing after that and went out to pizza with the family who was hosting us.  The area of town we ate pizza in was called Crystal Palace.  It's kind of its own little town on the edge of London but still part of London, I think.  I didn't take my camera with me so didn't get any pictures, but it was a lovely little neighborhood.  It had once housed a crystal palace made for a world fair, but the palace had burnt down, leaving only the stone foundations.  The neighborhood used to be a bit on the rougher side, but recently it's gotten nicer with cute boutiques and good restaurants opening their doors.  It's on top of a hill too, so it offered a view down on London.  We ate at a place called La Mediterranea, our host family's favorite pizza place, and it was delicious.  It was run by an Italian couple who sourced all their ingredients from Italy and clearly knew what they were doing when it came to pizza.  Then we walked around Crystal Palace - the neighborhood is shaped like a triangle, so it makes a nice loop walk - and returned to the house for the night.