Three days in London

This was a much easier travel day, because all we had to do was take the train down from Liverpool, which takes about 2 hours. We ended up in a nice place nominally in the West End (Edgware Road was the closest Tube station for those of you in the know.) London is, as you all know, a massive city which is still suffused in money, even post-Brexit and which has people from so many walks of life that trying to say that you met the "average Londoner" is akin to saying you met the "average human." The common expression and dialogue on the Tube leads one to believe in the stereotypical "dreary English" type as the grain of truth to said stereotype, but it struck me that most of that distraction was more typical of people engaged in the boundless energy required of major city life. I have spent time in NYC, Chicago, LA, Miami, New Orleans, Seattle and, of course, Detroit (where I grew up) so that kind of life and the personal intensity that it often requires isn't unfamiliar to me. But it struck me that London is still quite obviously one of the loci of human engagement; again, even after the idiotic departure from the EU.

Tricia had been to London once before, but unless you're a regular user, the Tube system takes a little time to pick up. By the third day, we were easily finding our way across routes and beating Google Maps' suggestions for how to get to places. As with most major public transit systems, where you are often defines how good they are. The main line off of Edgware is the Bakerloo line, which is populated by older trains, without digital readouts, with speakers that left the automated announcers' voices muffled ("Mind the gap!" should have been a band name by now, as it does have its own Wikipedia entry), and with trains that reminded me of 80s NYC, where you had to open and close doors to proceed from one car to another. In contrast, the Elizabeth and Victoria lines are much more modern, with wider, more comfortable cars, digital readouts displaying the current stop and the next one both on the interior and exterior of the cars, and flexible joins between cars, so each train is essentially one long carriage. The latter two lines, of course, service the more wealthy parts of town. They were also the ones that produced the standard London, Business Capital of the World encounters, when groups of mostly men would enter the car still engaged in whatever dealmaking they had been pursuing (often overloud, to declare their importance and intent.) That was echoed in some ways by the number of people I saw pursuing a behavior that has largely gone out of style in the States about a decade ago: walking and conducting a phone conversation that only they can hear through ear buds. Back in the day, it was Nokia or Blackberry earpieces. Now it's earbuds, but it's the same behavior: walking along and half-shouting your half of the conversation. That's a rare event as far as I can tell in the States anymore, but every fifth or sixth person we passed in London was doing it. Maybe it does still happen on the regular in larger cities here? Dunno.

When we got in on our first day, we rushed across town and managed to check in before flitting off to Soho for a Music and Pub tour. It was pretty cool. Our guide pointed out a bunch of studios where everyone from Bowie to Hendrix had worked and then the bars that they frequently got drunk in. The highlight for me was visiting the Dog and Duck; Orwell's favorite haunt and where he wrote most of 1984, Then we went on a mildly absurd excursion known as the Bustronome. It's a glass-topped bus that drives around the major sites of London while serving you a six-course meal. It was entertaining, except that they played pop music instead of announcing things we were driving past (sometimes quite quickly) and the food was good (the best course was probably a salmon mosaic that was served first, unfortunately), but I don't think it was worth either the time or the money.

We got up early the next day to do a four hour walking tour of many of those major sites (The Tower, Parliament, St. Paul's, etc.) Our guide was an ex-cop and a total Tory, failing to hide his contempt for the protesters outside Parliament and for particular members of the royal family who didn't conform to the wishes of the recently-deceased queen (Diana, Fergie, etc.) Apparently he'd been a member of the Queen's Guard unit at some point and he displayed all of the attitudes and perspectives that you might expect from someone like that. He was also a West Ham fan. Nice enough guy, though. He gave us the tickets that he collected for the Tower so that we could use them to go back in and look around some more.

That night we went to one of the highlights of the whole trip for me: a performance of Much Ado About Nothing at The Globe, the recreation of William Shakespeare's theater. Just like at Anfield, I was totally geeked to be there. It was an excellent performance and they added a few musical elements to it which worked really well. The theater is fantastic, except that sitting on the edges of the various levels might be a bit problematic for those with longer legs, like I have, as I basically couldn't sit comfortably without my knees intruding on the spaces next to me (which, thankfully, were Tricia who has very short legs and the aisleway.) The next day, we came back to do a tour of the theater and our guide was an unabashed fan of the Bard, talking about how he didn't have complex plots but had a) compelling characters because they acted like actual humans and b) had them because he was interested in telling a story, which is why he breaks the Fourth Wall so readily in most of his plays. He's talking to the audience because he and they are aware of the fact that he's telling them a story. Tricia turned to me at one point and said: "It sounds like I'm listening to you." I was like: "Yes! Because that's the point! That's why Shakespeare works! His characters are  real people, not just levers to the plot, and he's, first and foremost, telling a story!" (This, of course, is a constant refrain in my movie and TV criticism here. The guide pointed out that the Game of Thrones TV series worked because it had compelling characters, while House of the Dragon doesn't because its characters are all ciphers to drive the plot. (Bingo!)) The fact that our guide's name was also mine (albeit spelled with a "k") just made it feel that much more like I was listening to one of my own rants.

We later went to a couple of the stores that Tricia wanted to see, like Pick 'N Cheese, which is a conveyor belt of two dozen different (mainly English) cheeses with various accompaniments. Made a whole meal out of that. That night, we met a friend that I've known for years only electronically, via the board game site (ThereWillBe.Games) and his wife, as they introduced us to a nice vegetarian place in town (Plants by Etta.) One thing I have noticed is that English restaurants in both Liverpool and London are extremely conscious of vegan and vegetarian options. It's growing in the US, but it's still often in the form of "Has a vegetarian option" or "Ask about said option", while in the UK those options were main choices on the menu almost everywhere we went. That kind of segues into what seemed to me to be the strongest cultural icon of England at the moment: Pret a' Manger (which, of course, is a French phrase...) It's a higher-end sandwich shop and it's everywhere. EVERYWHERE. We saw them constantly in Liverpool. We saw them in every neighborhood we went to in London. The night we were on the bus, we were driving past the city center and passed two of them on the same stretch of road, thirty seconds apart. We did not, of course, stop to try one because we usually avoid chains, but the English do love this one.

But one of the more ridiculous moments also took place that night, when we went to get a drink after dinner with our friends. The aggravation for me in drinking both in the UK and Iceland (and Germany, five years ago) is that everything is mass-produced lagers, whether English, American, or Icelandic. There are some ventures into IPAs, which I'm not a huge fan of, and I discovered that Guiness, when it's fresh (i.e. was produced in the neighboring island maybe a couple weeks ago at most, as opposed to the months getting to the US) is actually pretty great. (You can taste the caramelization of the grain!) But, still, just like in Germany, I was constantly on the hunt for something red or dark that wasn't Guiness and always failing. We did find a couple nice local ales on the Pub and Music tour, but that's about it. So, on our last night, we roll into a bar and I see the usual selection of lagers and I ask one of the bartenders if they have a porter. His response: "What's a porter?" I had to stop and blink a couple times. It was invented here! In this city! And this kid doesn't even know what it is. So, yeah, it's safe to say that we are spoiled for cboice here in Michigan and the craft brewing movement still has a long way to go to get anywhere in most of Europe.

We lit out at 4:30 in the morning for our return to Iceland (after having watched a fox simply stroll across the road in the middle of London. Our driver said they're basically pets, which reminded me that I hadn't seen as many squirrels as I'd expect with the number of trees in the city.... We made it to the airport with what we thought was enough time, but then turned out to be the first time I've been sprinting through an airport to catch a flight in many years. Luton Airport is not the most organized of places, just FYI.