It's a rainy, windy, sit-inside-with-a-good-book-and-a-cup-of-tea weather right now. Basically, it looks like a typical winter day in Washington, or England, or anywhere else, for this matter, near the ocean at this particular latitude. Of course, my jeans are still wet halfway up the calves and my coat's hanging up to dry because I went out tromping through the rain anyway. But more on that later...
Two days ago, on a greyish Tuesday morning in London, I met Stephen outside the Victoria Palace theater doing what Brits do best: queueing. You see, if you go early in the morning to the theater, you can get cheap tickets for good seats for same-day performances, and that was what we were attempting to do, and sure enough, we secured two third-row tickets for Billy Elliot for £19.50 each--not bad. But that was for that evening, and what we were tackling that day was Greenwich.
Some very few of you may remember that this was not my first sojourn in Greenwich with Stephen. Almost exactly two years ago, I visited London for the first time in early January with Jewell, Chelly, and Edith. We were all on a budget and asked Stephen to take us to a cheap restaurant, and he said he knew one in Greenwich, which sounded good to us. However, Expert Guide Stephen got us off the Tube at the wrong stop, and although we got a good look at the O2 Center (which I lovingly call the Impaled Jellyfish, since it looks like a white jellyfish impaled on a yellow anemone), we had to hike for at least half an hour although dark roads through fields to get back to Greenwich, when the DLR stop we should have used was just around the corner from the restaurant. To top it off, the sweet-and-sour that Stephen and Edith ordered made them both feel queasy. We've never let Stephen forget it, and Greenwich has had...interesting memories attached ever since. On the plus side, we did get to see the brilliant green laser marking the Prime Meridian piercing the mud-colored sky overhead.
This time around, Stephen got the Tube stops right and we took the DLR train out to the right station. For the Whovians: I got very excited going through the Canary Wharf stop, laughing and pointing and generally embarrassing Stephen as I looked for signs of Dalek attacks. Unfortunately, when the Doctor sealed up the hole in space, all traces of alien invasion seem to have vanished. More's the pity.
We stepped out of the station in Greenwich to a nice English drizzle. From what I saw, Greenwich is a rather sweet collection of small shops and curvy streets on the banks of the Thames; it doesn't feel much like London at all. The trinity of blessings to the budget sightseer are the National Maritime Museum, the Queen's House, and the Observatory, all free admission. We popped into the museum first, looked at one exhibit about nautical exploration, and then Stephen decided he wanted to take the guided tour of the Queen's House, so we left again and went next door.
Apparently, the Queen's House is so called because it belonged to a couple different queens whose names I have forgotten (Wikipedia it if you want to know!) and was used to host parties and such--which, incidentally, it still does; you can rent out the house for weddings and such if you have £7,500 laying around). Now it is mostly empty, displaying a tiny percentage of their collection of nautical paintings--mostly dramatic pictures of boats. The major lulz here is that the house is built directly over a main road, with two wings on either side and then a bridge over the road so the masses could still use it as, y'know, a road. Apparently, the queens used to watch the commoners go by and, presumably, contemplate how glad they were to not be unwashed, ignorant peasants.
(Side note: Ski jumping is on in the background as I write this, and I didn't see the whole thing but it looks like one of the skiers' skis--there's no better word for this--exploded when he landed. Holy crap. I mean, if you're in a sport that consists entirely of skiing off cliffs and trying not to break every bone in your body when you land, the least you could expect is that your skis won't freaking explode when you touch down. The guy's okay, somehow. But still, damn.)
Anyway, it was lunchtime, so for old times' sake, we went to the same cheap Chinese place that had been so much trouble to get to the first time 'round, and Stephen very pointedly did not order the sweet-n-sour. With fuller stomachs and no trace of nausea, we braved the cold back to the NMM to look at more fancy boats. (The pieces of that guy's ski are still just lying there at the bottom of the run for other skiers to ski into. This is a sport for the spectacularly suicidal--no, that's not right, it's run and organized by serial killers. "What, after you ski off a ledge and fall hundreds of feet, you want to land on a smooth surface? Dude, we're looking for ratings here. The demolished pieces of ski are an extra challenge." WTF?) However, I'd heard that there was a planetarium show narrated by none other than David Tennant on, so we hiked up the hill to the observatory.
From the observatory's perch, we had a good view of the Docklands and Canary Wharf, with the Gherkin and St Paul's just visible as silhouettes in the misty distance. We found out that the show cost another £5 or so, and so we opted out and looked at astronomy pictures instead. We also got sucked in by a fun little simulation/game where you had to build and test out some kind of space probe, and if you did it wrong the computer would go on and on about how silly and incompetent you were. We even dragged one of the staff over to play with us and successfully launched a comet probe. We then finally got to see the house where the Greenwich Laser shoots out toward the Impaled Jellyfish and stood on the line marking the Prime Meridian, which was much more exciting for me than for Stephen.
Eventually the observatory closed, and we took a stroll in the direction of Blackheath to get a look at the church that Stephen will be married in. (Ask him, I don't know.) We took a bus to Waterloo and from there back to Victoria (over Westminster Bridge; no matter how many times I see it, the sight of the Eye and the Houses of Parliament lit up at night makes me very happy, especially from the front seat on the top deck of a red bus). At Victoria, we had a quick dinner at Wagamama (I didn't read the menu very closely, apparently, and missed the part where my soup was going to be spicy) before we headed back to the theater for our musical.
Billy Elliot is a musical, as mentioned, about a boy for a family of miners in Durham who turns out to have a great passion and talent for...ballet. Not expecting that, were you? Now, I assume many of you are Americans, and when I wrote "Durham" you just assumed that was some place you've never heard of and went on to the part of the sentence about ballet. That's fine, because pretty much all I've known about Durham for most of my life is that it has a hospital in it (because Stephen applied to do an internship there) and that it is somewhere north-ish. Now, this is key: it's in the north. Still nothing? Okay.
I really hope I'm not going to be stabbed by a bunch of English people for this, but like all dialect families, English in Britain is less like a jigsaw puzzle of distinct accents and more like a watercolor painting, where the accents all bleed into each other with certain distinguishing marks in different places. Yes, apparently, British people can place each other to a specific city by their accents, so there are some clear markers, but there are also general tendancies, from the famously posh and traditionally southern RP (think the Queen and Stephen Fry) up to Scouse in Liverpool and Geordie in Newcastle and on to the Scottish. In between is a whole continuum of accents. Am I boring you? I'm sorry. The point is, Durham is in the north, and the northern accent sounds nothing like the southern accent and is often unintelligible to me. Almost every character in the musical (accept for some comically posh southerners) spoke with this accent. If not for the months I've spent listening to Bethany, it would have taken much longer to figure out what on earth was coming out of these people's mouths.
(Bethany, if you ever read this: Yes, I know your accent is totally different from the Durham accent. Yes, I know that you are from Noath Yoaksher. I'm trying to illustrate a point here.)
Anyway, once I got over the shock and settled into the rhythm of the thing, the accent wasn't so hard to decypher. Apparently back in the day (not sure of the exact time period, but last hundred years-ish?) Durham was a big mining town, and there was a huge strike/class war over the miners' rights/pay/something important, during which time poor cute Billy was learning to dance. Of course, his dad wasn't having any of that rubbish, but finally learns to support his son and help him get into a ballet academy. Everyone is happy--well, actually, the miners' union gives in and the strike ends unsuccessfully, so all the miners have to give up and go back to work underground, and Billy leaves all his friends and family to try and make it as a ballet dancer as an underprivileged, undereducated, working-class, low-prestige-accent-speaking kid in a Royal Ballet Academy on his own. But, y'know, he's following his heart and all, so I'm sure that went without a hitch...
The next day, Stephen and I met at Victoria to catch another train--this one to Canterbury. I'd planned on doing Canterbury the first time I was in London and, like with Greenwich, never found the time. The centerpiece of Canterbury is, of course, the cathedral, which has been the seat of the archbishop of England for, like, a super long time. Way back in 15-something, Chaucer was writing about the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury; I'm sure you've heard of the Canterbury Tales. Have you ever wondered why the pilgrims were going there, though?
I'd always assumed it was because it was the archbishop's church, but that's only half the story. A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away...), Henry the Something-th (second? Third?) was squabbling with Pope and the Church about something (can this get any more vague? I'm sorry) and he wanted to have an archbishop on his side. He appointed his friend and adviser, Thomas Becket, to the post, but this did not go as planned. Becket got religion and became an outspoken defender of the Pope and the Church, enraging the king who'd put him in that position of power. After a while, the King burst out with a not-very-subtly-phrased wish that someone would get rid of that damn priest for him (possibly accompanied by some winking, nodding, and nudging) in the hearing of four of his knights, who promptly went off and killed the heck out of Becket by stabbing him and chopping the top of head off in his own church. But after they buried Becket, miracles started happening, and a cult grew up around the guy, who got sainted just a few years later. Thus the pilgrimages.
ANYWAY. Very pretty cathedral; big and soaring and full of stained glass, like a cathedral should be. We wandered around and petted the cathedral cat and took pictures, and Stephen ran into some people he knew from his hometown (England is a really small country). Any guesses what we did next? That's right: TEA. Stephen had found a teahouse online, so we went for cream tea with scones and clotted cream and jam. The whole world could do worse than adopt this food for daily consumption; it tastes like summertime and happiness. Anyway, it was getting late, so we hurried to the Roman Museum to look at some of the cool stuff they'd dug up from Roman Canterbury; apparently the Nazis helped with this by demolishing a lot of the buildings that stood over the remains, though I'm sure the inhabitants of these buildings weren't too thrilled with that at the time.
Stephen took an earlier train back to London, so I wandered on my own through the darkening streets of Canterbury. I found an Oxfam bookstore and treated myself to three new books, since my Kindle's acting up again and is unusable. I got dinner at Boot's and headed back to London and to my hostel to pack.
When I'd planned this trip, a flight at 6:25 am from Stansted sounded like a good idea. I would arrive in Hamburg before 9, so I'd have the whole day to explore instead of wasting the time en route. Great, huh? Yes. Except. For international flights, you're supposed to arrive two hours early; two hours before gate closing was 4am. It's an hour from London to Stansted, so I'd have to get one around 3 or a little earlier; and the bus left from Victoria, so I'd have to leave time to get from my hostel to there. All together, this meant leaving my hostel at 1am. I tell you, the guys at the front desk sure gave me weird looks when I presented myself before them at 1:05, all bundled up with my pack on my back and my arms full of my stripped bed linens, announcing that I wanted to check out.
Long story short, I got to Stansted at just after 3am, wide awake and wishing I wasn't. My bag, I was sure, was far too heavy. At check-in, I tried to make it look light by slinging it on one shoulder, and the guys at the counter didn't bother to ask, so I thought I was home free. Imagine my horror when we started boarding the plane and the guy at the counter had a scale sitting there and was asking people with bags smaller than mine to weigh them. One woman said that she'd just take her coat out of her bag, which was fine with him, but doesn't make any sense--you're still taking the exact same amount of weight onto the plane for the same price, so what difference does it make? Anyway, he had already pulled two people out of line to reconfigure their luggage, and I was bursting with impatience to get through before they rejoined the line, since there wasn't any room around the scale. The guy barely glanced at me and let me through no problem. I can't wait to get home and weigh the thing to see how much extra weight I got away with.
I slept fitfully on the plane and staggered back into Germany sleep-deprived and disgruntled at not being in England anymore. I got off the bus in Hamburg and found my way to my hostel, where I was way to early for checkin. Maybe it was how I was tottering and slurring my words, or maybe it was the bags under my eyes, but the kind receptionist checked me in anyway, and I went up to my room and collapsed into sleep. So much for extra time to explore. I am never doing that again.
I peeled myself out of bed around 4pm, feeling hungry. On the map, the town center didn't look too far away, so I started off walking. I detoured briefly out to a park with a view over Hamburg's harbor: the sun was just setting, a dirty gold on the horizon, mirrored in the thousands of orange lights sparkling over the water. The shipping cranes towered over labyrinths of shipping crates like enormous steel giraffes as a few ships went puttering serenely past.
The street I was on was mostly uninteresting until it suddenly transformed into the Reeperbahn. The Reeperbahn is Hamburg's main tourist attraction besides the harbor--it's the entertainment, clubbing and *cough* red light district. I was a little nervous and a little curious to walk through after dark, but since it was barely 6pm, the crowds hadn't gotten going yet.
Since I had no particular desire to see the inside of a strip club or sex shop, I kept going, getting hungrier as I went.A good two hours after I left the hostel, I arrived, footsore and rather hungry, at the Rathaus. Unfortunately, the Rathaus is located in what is, apparently, the main high-class shopping district, so there wasn't much in the way of affordable restaurants. I wandered through the streets, increasingly despairing of finding somewhere to eat, until I found a cute little Italian restaurant full of kind Italian staff who seated me right away and brought me some lovely tortelli. I don't know if it's rude to read a book when you're in a restaurant by yourself, but I did anyway. I took the S-Bahn home.
So, that brings us to this morning. My goal today was to take the free walking tour, but although yesterday had been clear, today was, as stated at the beginning, cold, drizzly, and windy. There were only six people, including me, who showed up for the tour, but our fearless Dutch guide led us through the wind and rain to all kinds of interesting buildings in Hamburg. We saw the Nikolaikirche, which had been the highest tower near the harbor in WWII, and as a result was the reference point for Allied bombers and was itself destroyed, leaving only a tower, now a war memorial, and a few ruined walls. We saw the building where a pest-control company made the Zyklon B gas, a form of cyanide used to murder people in the gas chambers; the two company heads had participated in the genocide, but the employees hadn't known what their product was being used for, and were horrified to discover it after the war. We saw the offices of a shipping company with a statue of a poodle on top, because the owner's pet name for his wife was "My dear poodle" because of her hair; apparently their ships are still called "poodles." We saw where the Great Fire of Hamburg started in 1842 because some jackass set a tobacco manufacturer on fire and subsequently destroyed 45% of the city. We heard about the firebombing of Hamburg in WWII that killed tens of thousands of people, because the dry weather and incendiary bombs created a firestorm over 800 C so that people trying to escape would sink into the melting pavement. And we saw Hamburg's work-in-progress, an orchestra house that the city hopes will become a symbol of the city like Sydney's operahouse, except some architects think the powerful winds from the harbor will blow it over.
After the tour, I made my way to the Hauptbahnhof to find tourist information for some recommendations, but the info guy was thoroughly unhelpful and I left no more informed than I'd entered. I decided instead to come back to the hostel and get warm and write this, which has taken rather a long time. So I'm going to get some dinner. Bye!
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