The following events took place on February 10th, 2003. (I’m just reusing the tagline because I didn’t have another good way to start this one.)

The morning started off late because we were using the BigClock alarm (Palm software) and it didn’t go off, so we almost missed breakfast. I’d ‘slept in’ after having woken up around 2 in the morning and been unable to sleep — with nothing better to do, I’d taken the Palm and keyboard upstairs to the breakfast room and typed up my thoughts on the previous days’ activites. It’s a little-known ‘feature’ of the Belkin keyboards that, while they certainly kick ass, they don’t interact particularly well with some other Palm software — BigClock happens to be one of them, making the whole program not ‘beep’ when an alarm kicks off. This meant that I typed until about 5am, crashed, and the alarm to wake us up… didn’t.

I find in my notes another mention of the uncomfortable bed. I really liked the location and price of the Woodville House, but after the nights I spent there, I wonder if I’d stay there again — maybe I’d sleep on our room’s bunkbed’s (it was a ‘family suite’) — they were fairly comfortable still, due to relative lack of use since they were put into use (somewhere around the last British Civil War, if the compression of bed springs is any indicator).
To counteract that, the shower in the basement (actually a bathroom converted from a sort of mini-greenhouse on the back of the house) was amazing, especially for Britain: shockingly hot if called for, with great water pressure. Rachael confided that it was the best shower in the house — I’m convinced it was the best shower south of Soho.

This day was a lesson in me biting off more than the group as a whole could chew. We wandered up Victoria Street past Westminster Cathedral and New Scotland Yard, then actually stopped at Westminster Abbey (no relation) for the next 3 or 4 hours.

See, this is where I realized things had gone seriously awry in the (read: “my”) planning. While most of our stops at historical or noteworthy sites were in fact about 1 or 2 hours (what I’d anticipated for the Abbey), this was our first real stop in London, and the sheer wealth of stuff to look at (mostly the burial spots of lots and lots and lots of dead guys) just overloaded us. We tried to see it all. Pity us.

Afterwards, we ducked into the Westminster Station and made use of the shockingly suave and well-kept restrooms. (Pink and lavish tissue in the Ladies, and fine watercolor-style art painted onto the tiles over each urinal in the Gents’, which I think must have been a sort of artistic dilema: enjoy the amazing amount of exposure, or be mortified at the placement?)

From there, we hopped over to the station neares the huge London Eye (that would be Waterloo Station, which, while the closest to the Eye, was by no means *close*), but there were extensive queues of school-age kids there, so we rode a shuttle over to the Tate Modern instead, munching like starved wharf rats on Margie’s homemade gorp/trailmix. You’d think we hadn’t eaten since… oh.

Waterloo is the UK’s largest station, covering an area of 24.5 acres. One of the most notable features of the station is the Victory Arch, in Portland Stone, which commemorates the London and South Western and the Southern Railway men who gave their lives in the First and Second World Wars.

So we ate first once we got to the Tate Modern. The best thing I can say about the cafe at the top of the Tate is that is has a wonderful view of the city across the river.

A word on the skyline of London: how is it that Spiderman is located in New York city, where interesting buildings to swing from are in fairly short supply, while the visually AMAZING skyline of London goes without one decent cable-swinger? Does that seem right to you?

The food was more impressive and less expensive than the art at this, one of the largest collections of modern art in the world, but that’s the best thing I can say — it doesn’t in any way imply that the food was good or cheap. I get that the point of modern art is to show that you so completely understand the ‘rules’ of art that you don’t need to obey them anymore — but FIRST, please prove that you can create something USING the rules; otherwise, you’re just masturbating and getting paid for it. (Or, you could accidentally take a picture with your finger half over the lens, call it “fetus descending” and get a grant.)

“Barry, why are you staring at that painting?” “There’s something odd about it.” “I thought you said modern art was… what did you call it?” “Mule cum.”

Aside from that, the viewer must ALSO know the rules you’re breaking in order to really ‘get’ how great you are — I’m not an art major, so you’ll have to forgive me to finding this entire collection a shocking waste of a really interesting building.

“Those who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing they enjoy.” We weren’t, so we didn’t.

My over-hopeful plan after the Tate (and god knows we needed to see SOMETHING interesting after that) was to visit the rebuilt Globe Theatre next door and check out the rumored-to-be-very-interesting presentation on the era — no one was interested by that point — again, I blame the Tate Modern; as my life goes on, there may be a great number of indignities and crimes against humanity that I’ll see fit to blame on the Tate Modern — I plan to start now.

Anyway, we stood on the almost-as-pointless-as-the-Tate-Modern “Millenium Bridge” (at least as timeless, useful, and worthwhile as everything else with ‘Millenium’ in the name) for awhile, freezing our asses off while we tried to figure out where to go next. We finally settled on an early supper in Chinatown (just north of Leicester Square) and hope that something would be starting up to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The Chinese Food was, like most food would have on the trip, “good, but not what I expected”.

Everyone was pretty footsore and beat down by this point, so we limped back to the London Eye and spent a quiet half-hour riding around the enormous Ferris Wheel-like thing, taking pictures of nighttime London from our large egg-shaped capsule. The view was great, everyone chilled out, and afterwards we headed back to the B&B and crashed.

I decided to charge my Palm.