Lambently London

Hello All!

Icons of London*

Lambent - glowing or gleaming with a soft radiance.

The year will be over in a few hours and I feel obliged to at least finish telling you about my London adventures by then.  Since I originally started to write this post on Dec 15 (vacationing around Europe after London was very hectic), I will finish it in the tense I started ... it'll be more exciting that way, I promise.

I am so sad that my program has come to an end, but it’s also a relief to be finished with the semester.  My parents and boyfriend, Ben, have joined me on these continuing adventures and, boy, what a last weekend in London it was!

Friday was a bit of a mess.  After moving all my stuff from one end of South Kensington to the other (out of the dorm to our hotel), we all went to the Western Marble Arch for a very lively and extensive Shabbat dinner.  I think they served six or seven courses!

Challah and dipping sauces

Fish

Matzo Ball soup

Chicken and veggies

Whiskey (yes, this was served all by itself, which we thought implied the end of the meal … haha, WRONG!)

Red meats

Dessert

With extremely full bellies and lots of jet lag, we all fell asleep pretty quick that night.  But, at the tender hour of 1:28am, the fire alarms started to blare in the tiny hallways of the hotel.  We threw on our coats and tried not to trip down the stairs as all the visitors filed outside onto the sidewalk.  I'm not sure how much my coat actually helped because I was still standing in 30 degree weather in shorts.  Apparently someone had been smoking in their room.  One man voiced his discontent by loudly informing everyone around him that he had to get up very early for work the next day ... like any of us could do something about it.  Long story short, we were eventually allowed back inside.

Santas in front of The Sherlock Holmes

The rest of the weekend was filled with fun visits to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum (both free, by the way).  I highly recommend the V&A - there are so many cool things to see there and the exhibits are always changing or rotating what is on display, which is probably why I found myself there so often.

After a delicious meal out in Soho on Saturday night, Ben and I ventured out in a very windy and somewhat wet London in search of a good time.  Our first stop was the Sherlock Holmes pub, located just a block off of Trafalgar Square.  The interior was decorated with SH everything and there were even specialty ales on tap named after Holmes and Dr. Watson.  But, the best part of our visit was unique to that night: there were a dozen or two people dressed up in Santa suits!  When we asked them what was going on (because we had already seen a number of people on the streets in similar garb), they told us that there had been a Santa-Con (convention) that night.  In fact, every year on that night there is a Santa-Con in London.  They turned out to be super cool people and we ended up staying a few drinks longer than we expected!  A bunch of them were particularly fond of Ben's newly acquired bowler hat (he literally picked it up between dinner and the pub that night).  In fact, upon learning that we were American, one of them said that because "that is a great hat, I could forgive anything in that hat!"  They liked the hat so much that when they asked me to snap a picture of all of the Santas together, Ben was pulled into the shot.  And thus the bowler was immortalized .... as you will see in this and later posts, that hat became the most iconic item on our magical mystery tour across Europe!

Big Ben, Westminster

The Bowler

I realize that I don't look as dapper in the hat as Ben, but it IS a great hat!

We ended our night down at Westminster, listening to Big Ben strike 11pm.  Due to the less than optimal weather, there weren't many people about, but we were approached by a Chaplin man who wanted us to pay him to act like Chaplin.  I have to say other than the white face and Chaplin mustache, he didn't really look like the famous Charlie ... about 100 pounds too fat, in my opinion.

I really hope you enjoyed reading about London and experiencing it with me.  Of course, I could not cover everything in these posts, but I tried my best to tell you the most exciting parts.  It was certainly a lot of fun to write these posts (don't worry they don't end here!), and I hope they've inspired you to take your own to trip to London.


* "Icons of London" photo: I really love this photo because it has the Red Telephone booth, a Red Route Master bus, a glimpse of the Houses of Parliament, and the stairs of Westminster Tube station ... the very same steps that Daniel Craig vaulted up onto Whitehall Road in Skyfall!