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Greg and I went to London over Halloween this year while he was visiting me in Ireland. We didn’t plan for it to be Halloween; things just worked out that way. My students at UL told me this was probably a good thing; apparently–like every other holiday, it seems–Halloween is big at UL. Students prank each other by throwing rotten eggs, they play practical jokes, and they party hard–as usual. The strangest prank they told me about was ‘ketchupping’ someone’s door. You smear ketchup all over someone’s door so that when they come to go to class, they get it all over them. I don’t understand it; it’s just what happens.

So after our eventful trip to the airport, the rest of our travels were uneventful. We arrived in London around 10pm and safely made it to our hotel. As I mentioned in my previous post, I always expect too much from my London accommodations because of the high prices you have to pay for even moderate hotels and B&Bs. It’s all about location, location, location. So, based on the recommendation of Sally’s Mitchell’s guide to doing research in London (I am an academic, after all; I have to do my research and I listen to other experts in the field), I chose the mid-range Langland Hotel B&B in the heart of Bloomsbury (a neighborhood I tend to gravitate to because of its proximity to the British Library and its historical literary associations with Virginia Woolf and British Modernism). I had excellent luck with this resource during my last research trip to England in 2006; based on her recommendation, I had a very successful, quiet, and cheap stay at the University of London, right around the corner from the library and Euston Station.

We didn’t have much of a plan for what we were going to do in the next two days other than go to the Tate museums. The Tate Modern was having an exhibit on Mark Rothko, one of my favorite Modern American painters, and the Tate Britain was hosting a Francis Bacon exhibit (one of my favorite British painters) as well as the finalists for the annual Turner Prize in Art and the always present acclaimed Turner collection (which I think is going to come to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. in a few years–the only time this collection has ever left Britain).  As soon as we arrived at the airport, I had an epiphany: we could go to the theater. It’s funny how living in rural New England makes on forget that there are things like professional theater, musicals, and experimental art out there in the world. I never even thought about the possibility of going to see something like Wicked or The Lion King–two musicals I’ve been wanting to see for years–when we were in London. But as soon as we arrived at the airport, i saw signs everywhere and determined that was what we would do the following evening. I knew you could go to Leicester Square in the mornings and get half-priced theater tickets, so that’s what we planned to do.

We had a bit of a rough night at the hotel because there was a group of six college students staying there are well; they came home late and had to be buzzed in by a very loud doorbell by the night manager. Our room, which was en suite, was just outside the shared bath for our hall, however, and right underneath the stairs, so we heard a lot of traffic. After a good English breakfast–complete with beans and a fried tomato–we headed out to Leicester Square.

It was a beautiful day, sunny but cold, and there were not many people about yet. However, when we arrived in Leicester Square we saw a long queue outside of the Odeon Theater. This was odd; people waiting in line for a theater at 9:30am? When we looked up, we saw a huge promotion poster for Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond film, and we realized we were looking at the theater where the film had actually premiered just two nights before. These people were in line waiting for the very first showing–imagine: the opening of a James Bond film. In London. We were tempted, but we decided that we would see the sites and then determine whether we were up for a film in the evening.

We went to TKTS, the non-profit ticket seller on Leicester Square, but they didn’t have any tickets for the two shows I was really interested in. There shops after shops all along the square purporting to sell discounted tickets to almost every show imaginable, including the ones I wanted to see. Tickets for Wicked were as low as 18 BP per person, but we decided that (a) we would be too tired to enjoy it, (b) it was too expensive, and (c) we hadn’t packed theater clothes. So, after the whole trip out of our way to go to Leicester Square, we decided to bag the whole idea and head over to the museum.

After about 2-3 hours touring the Tate Modern, we walked along the Thames, taking in the sites like the Globe Theater, Millennium Bridge, distant views of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and found an English pub called “The Anchor” for our lunch of traditional fish and chips. It must have been a school holiday, because London was packed with traveling Brits that day. I’ve always visited the city in the summer, which is what I always considered the height of tourist season, but I’ve never seen as many people at sites as I did on Halloween.

After lunch, Greg decided he wanted to explore St. Paul’s Cathedral more fully, so we crossed the Thames on the Millennium footbridge and went for a tour. The bad thing about touring all of the churches in London is that although you pay a high admission fee (10 BP per person, which translated into about $32 total for our two hours), you are not allowed to take any photos within the actual building. And this is a beautiful building; many of you will remember it as the site of Prince Charles’ and Princess Diana’s wedding in 1981. The ceilings are painted with elaborate murals;the pulpit is ornately carved wood. There are gold fixtures everywhere and gigantic marble sculptures. No pictures. Sigh. All we were able to get were some detailed photos of the exterior which you can see here and here.

The really fun part, though, is that they were having rehearsals for a BBC broadcast that evening for best British youth chorister, so we were in St. Paul’s all afternoon listening to talented young performers sing hymns. The acoustics were amazing.

Your ticket allows you to tour the main floor, the crypts, and the galleries, which are walkways up within the rotunda and even further above along the rooftops of the cathedral. So, Greg and I climbed over 120 stairs to get to the first gallery–the whisper gallery–located at the base of the famous dome of the cathedral. From our perch above, we could look down on the BBC rehearsals, see the layout of the church floor more clearly, and conversely look up to see the details of the ceiling murals more clearly. The acoustics are so designed that you can whisper on one side of the dome and have a person on the other side hear you perfectly. We decided to continue up to the next gallery, which brought us out on the outside of the cathedral dome, above all of London. We took several pictures of the city, the river Thames, and the square surrounding the cathedral. Greg took an excellent picture of the famous Tower Bridge as well. There was even another gallery further up by the steeple, but by this point I was already having thigh flashbacks to my visit to Bunratty Castle, so Greg went up alone and took even more pictures. I recommend it to anyone who can make the stairs. I believe there were over 350 steps from the floor of the cathedral to the highest gallery–and you had to descend the same number as well. Not for the faint-hearted. Or weak-legged.

After we descended from the galleries, we went into the bowels of the church and visited the crypt where many famous Englishmen are buried (note I say EnglishMEN here; I don’t think I saw ANY women’s graves in the crypt. What’s up with that?). We saw the tombs of: Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Christopher Wren (architect of St. Paul’s and much of Oxford U), and John Donne–17th century poet and Dean of St. Paul’s.

We exited St. Paul’s at around 3pm and had to make a decision: what to do next? We were still close to the embankment, so I insisted Greg see the Tower of London. This is one of my favorite places to visit in the city, and I recommend it to everyone. But more on that in the next post.

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