Day 1 - London rain, the cost of sitting and bad bar food

Hugging bears. Hyde Park, London

I suppose it's a common practice for hotels near a train station to let you leave your bags before you can check in - makes perfect sense - so we probably over-thanked the nice Eastern European girls at the Norfolk Towers front desk for something they do all the time. Groggy, mutedly thrilled to be in London in the first hours of a two week adventure, I was thanking everybody within arm's reach.

Relieved of the bags, we thought we'd just head out and walk.

Hyde Park, London

Hyde Park, one of London's great green spaces, wasn't far, so we ambled down with Nikons around the neck and eyes on the sky. For a city so renowned for rain, the skies that day were curiously diffident. Drizzle here, sprinkle there, brightening and clearing, then rain, then mist. I had actually bought and brought a rain jacket for this trip, but I left it in the luggage (figures).

Outside the gates of the Park, a vendor was selling hand-painted pub sign miniatures, hundreds of them. Tourist commerce isn't usually our thing, but we were free agents in one of the world's great tourist cities, and we browsed, eventually settling on three.

Genuine pub sign facsimiles

It was a warmly validating experience to hand over some British currency. The guy said his dad started the business over forty years ago - they have to buy a very pricey monthly license from the City to sell at the Hyde Park gates. Even in the rain, though, it looked like business was okay. We did our part.

The rain ebbed and swelled as we strolled through the Park. I restrained myself from fearing that we would be dodging rain for the next two weeks. At one point we settled into a couple of vacant, old-fashioned beach chairs

Guy on the right sits for free - the rest of us, not so much.

perched under a large tree, minor shelter from the drizzle, until some lad with a genuinely bizarre accent came up to us and informed us that the cost of using the chairs was £2 per half hour. We thanked him - well, I did, because I was still thanking everyone - and vacated the chairs, which were pretty well soaked anyway.

We talked about what next. The Natural History Museum was just on the other side of the Park, which sounded closer than it really was, and while Sharon had talked about seeing it, we decided instead to do a cemetery, defiantly optimistic about the weather. We headed back to Paddington Station, where we discovered that the Paddington tube stop wasn't actually at Paddington Station, but across Praed Street and down a block or so.

Time for lunch.

Up the escalator at the Station, we found the Paddington Store, which is the only authorized outlet for genuine Paddington Bear stuff - books, mugs, pens, posters, bling, shirts, plush of all sizes (including a pretty pricey Steiff) ...and lots of copies of the DVD, which we already had. The nice young man (who I also thanked) told us that the DVD was still selling well, and that the film run was a Pretty Big Deal in London the prior December when it hit the cinema. Sharon found a nice little bronze miniature of the statue.

We sat down in a restaurant a few doors from the store, a dreary brass-rail chain joint with a projection TV showing Formula 1 racing and a handful of patrons noodling on their phones, ordered some forgettable bar nosh and left as soon as we could. I wasn't really hungry, and I don't think Sharon was either, but it seemed like the thing to do.

At some point, we thought we'd take the sleepless Sunday morning in London to head up to either Highgate or Kensal Green cemeteries, both members of the Magnificent Seven, but we had now reduced our available daylight hours, and still mindful of the weather we opted instead for Paddington Old Cemetery, which was sort of nearby Paddington Station on a subway map, but not really nearby on a shoeleather scale, and the weather wasn't encouraging for long walks...unlike 2013, when we ventured far from Chelsea to hit Fulham Palace Road and Margravine cemeteries, winding us around weird neighborhoods and hospitals and grim playgrounds and Costa bladder-relief stops.

Paddington Old Cemetery

It took some doing to figure out the Tube diagram, but we managed to find the right platform and boarded a train that would take us to Queen's Park, a non-descript neighborhood of NW London. The Tube stop was actually a mile or so from the cemetery, so we had a chance to walk a bit through a non-touristy section of London, a subtle indulgence that we both had come to appreciate on prior trips. Like any great city, London is characterized by its postcard-y landmarks and iconic locales, but it's also a place, with schools, dry cleaners, shops, houses, bus stops. Putting down the camera for a few minutes and just being there is part of the experience as well.  

Paddington Old Cemetery isn't particularly old, nor (as noted) particularly close to Paddington Station, but it was a well-kept, reasonably ordered Victorian graveyard, essentially laid out around a central chapel. The chapel appeared to be in pretty rough shape, fenced off and apparently undergoing repair.

Gothic revival chapel and gatehouse, Old Paddington Cemetery.

The Victorians took their burial stonework very seriously, and the combination of a century of toxic industrial air and London weather, as well as diminishing care through generations, leaves many of these graveyards in disrepair. Every Victorian cemetery we've encountered in London has a "Friends Of.." association to raise funds for the cemetery upkeep, and few if any of them ever have enough to keep up with the grinding ravishes of weather and neglect.

We strolled the neighborhood and outside the tube stop we encountered a girl - junkie, we presumed - panhandling for spare change, pleading that she hadn't eaten in two days. All I had on me was (inexplicably) some US coinage, which she wasn't interested in, and Sharon found her pushy and less than plausible as someone in genuine straits. We're generally sympathetic to struggling street folks, but her pleas were cheap and off-putting and we passed.

We headed back to the hotel, prowled the neighborhood a bit,

St Mary's Hospital, Paddington

and finally checked into our room. Impossibly tiny, the room was nonetheless comfortable and weirdly quiet, counter-intuitively the quietest hotel room we had on the whole trip.

After some chill time, we headed back out to a pub around the corner for an early dinner. Fountains Abbey, it was called, oddly named after the magnificent Cistercian abbey ruins in Yorkshire we had a chance to visit on our 2013 trip. The place was nice enough and the service was okay, but the food was pricey and not very good. We were both pretty whipped by this time, so after eating and downing a couple of pints (the bar was selling Coors Light, on draft - a cruel joke, I thought, in a country renowned for its ale, but it wouldn't be the last time we'd see it), we went back to the hotel, assembled our clothes and paperwork for the next day and konked out.    

 

The Arrival

Paddington says Hello, welcome to London and Mind the Gap.

We changed our arrive-in-London schedule to include our first night at a hotel. That wasn't the original plan when we started piecing together this little enterprise back in the spring, but a thing or two came up and we had enough in the budget. No biggie.  

At the risk of absurdest understatement, London has a lot of hotels, and rather than float our world-traveler dinghy out on Facebook soliciting London hotel recommendations (because, how seriously pretentious is that?), we figured proximity to lots of Tube options and ease of access to/from Heathrow made the most sense. We weren't planning to spend a lot of time at the hotel - just a bed, a TV with a sleep timer and wi-fi. We're easy.

I had also, in the last half-year, acquired a cheerfully inexplicable obsession with the film version of Paddington, which came out in the States last January, dragging Sharon to three showings in four weeks. I hadn't read the books as a kid, and was only dimly aware of the polite, quasi-refugee bear's iconic status as a children's book character in the UK, but the film version, well-received by critics on both sides of the puddle, really beguiled and charmed me. I kind of wanted to see the brass statue they erected at Paddington Station in London, and being a central Tube station...well, there ya go. We booked Sunday night at the Norfolk Towers Hotel, one of several dozen in the Paddington Station neighborhood. Affordable by London standards, which is a fairly daunting scale.

Strung out as expected by a four hour flight to Newark and eight hours to Heathrow, unmet at the airport, we collected our bags and went down the escalator at the futuristic Terminal 2 (The Queen's Terminal) to grab a smoke in a grubby little corner beside one of the taxi access lanes.  A handful of youngish Euro-types were thumbing their iPhones on the three prison-grade benches grudgingly provided for smokers. We propped up against the perspex divider wall and chatted with a twitchy 40-ish British RAF veteran with a nasty stutter and a grin yawning of missing teeth. He was clutching a bouquet of flowers, preparing to meet his wife arriving on a flight from Seattle. I think he said she was American, but his accent was a little deep for me, and I never really got a hang of his stutter rhythm, so I missed a lot of what he said to us. He said he liked the States, had been to Portland, Florida and Kansas. Why Kansas? came immediately to mind (no offense, Kansans...), but I thought better of pursuing that odd detail. He was friendly enough, wished us a good time on our holiday and sallied off to baggage claim to meet the missus.

We purchased a couple of express rail tickets to Paddington Station, our first chance to test our travel-advisory cleared credit cards (success!) and made our way to the platform, meeting up with an American couple from Chicago who were just starting their four week trip through England, Wales and Scotland. We briefly traded notes on travel through the country and our favorite places. They said they were expecting lousy weather in Edinburgh, which we understand is a pretty safe bet more or less any time.

The train was fast and comfortable - Paddington Station was a cavernous dissonance of garbled departure announcements, hissing train cars and the rush of luggage toting travelers moving in every direction. It had been a while since I'd been in a train station of any significance, and I had forgotten the somewhat chaotic navigation imperatives they impose. Consisting mostly of, if you don't know where you're going, don't stand out in the middle of traffic trying to figure it out.

I went up to information booth, caught the eye of the lady behind the counter and asked where the Paddington statue was. Platform 1, she pointed, seemingly a bit annoyed.

At the commencement of two weeks' worth of destination and photo-op musts, we were officially one for one.

We made our way out of the station and up the ramp leading to Praed Street, in the soft London drizzle.

Hello, England.