Tourist Sites

Day Two in London was a day of walking. We began the day with a lesson or two, but even that was a little too much for John and myself. We had to take morning naps.

Mid-morning, we braved the light rain and headed off to Tottenham Court Road for a walking tour (a two hour walking tour). It was John's choice: a walking tour called "The Magical Mystery Tour." Yes, the Beatles (for those who are unaware, John is a Beatles fan). More information about that below.

Then, we went back to the flat to organize the return of Joe's Kindle (an electronic book), which was accidentally left in the car that delivered us to London. Once that was done and we had had some lunch, we ventured back out. We walked back to the Notting Hill Gate tube stop. It's a longer walk (about 20 minutes), but it's on the Central Line (the closer tube stop, Ladbroke Grove, is on the Hammersmith and City Line, which seems slow and inefficient).

We took the kids to the British Museum. By this time, everyone was tired, but we looked around some impressive Assyrian stuff, plus Greek and Egyptian stuff. We also took a partial tour of early Christian relics. Our first stop, which is the first stop for most tourists, was the Rosetta Stone.

We stayed at the British Museum until about 7:00 and then took the bus back to the flat. We sat in the front seats on the top level of a double-decker bus (the #7 from Tottenham Court Road to Portobello Road) and enjoyed the sights.

Today, we will begin with lessons and then we'll go off to a museum or two. The forecast calls for, guess what?, rain this afternoon, so we'll stick to indoor activities. Perhaps not quite so much walking.

Cheers,
Susan

John: I went to the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour!! It is a walking tour of London to show you where the Beatles recorded some of their songs, where Beatlemania started (the Palladium Theater; we saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang there), and where their last concert was. We started at Tottenham Court Road, then to Soho Square to see Paul McCartney's London office. We saw where John Lennon met Yoko Ono and the "Gentleman's Toilet" where John appeared in a skit on television.

During the tour we walked by a fancy supermarket, the only store in London where you can get Skippy peanut butter and fluff!

The last stop on the tour was Abbey Road studios and the famous cross walk, right near the studios. We, along with lots and lots of other tourists, got our picture taken walking on the crosswalk.

The London Flat as Metaphor
On one level, everything in London seems familiar: there are cars, buses, museums, restaurants; they speak English and watch a lot of the same movies we do; and so on. But it is also all just a bit different. The British accents and vocabulary are different from ours and sometimes hard to understand. Familiar as we were with the tube after spending five months here in 2004, we found it hard to figure out which passes to buy. The food looks familiar, but it's all slightly different.

Our efforts to live in this little flat perfectly illustrate the paradox of seeming familiarity combined with utter strangeness. Everything in the flat looks familiar and recognizable. There are electrical outlets, radiators, sinks, appliances, beds, etc. But everything is different, and some of it has been quite a challenge to figure out. The beds seem not to have top sheets: there are bottom, fitted sheets, and the comforters have washable covers, but there are no separate flat sheets below the comforter as there would be in the US. I would have assumed this was due to the (relative) inexpensiveness of this flat, with its all-Ikea furnishings, but that's how the beds on the QM2 were done as well.

When we arrived, the hot water didn't work. As it happens, the hot water heater is on the wall in the kitchen, in its own more or less attractive white container. A red light was flashing, which clearly meant that something was wrong but it was unclear exactly what. It appears that this unit heats water only on-demand, but periodically goes on the fritz for no particularly apparent reason. (Fellows Road was like this also). Some previous renter had scrawled directions in pencil for resetting the unit, and so far that worked.

Next was the challenge of turning on the tv, for which we were at least given directions.

Then came the big tests: could we wash our clothes in the washer/dryer with mysterious controls marked with obscure hieroglyphics rather than words, and could we heat our frozen pizzas in the oven?

The washer, at least, came with two sets of directions. In the apartment renters' manual, we were given a simple set of directions and warned sternly against overloading the unit when it its drying mode. Unlike our dryer at home, which is vented and fans hot air through the clothes as they spin, this unit seems to heat the clothes and desultorily flop them about only intermittently, as the mood strikes it. We were glad to find the handy drying rack tucked away beside one of the wardrobes, so that we can get our clothes dry. The second time we used the washer/dryer, the drying cycle came on spontaneously -- which worried us, since the directions had warned us against letting a whole load of laundry go into the drying cycle. Luckily, the dire prediction in the manual -- that we would need to hire an engineer to open the over-loaded unit, at a cost of £90 -- did not come to pass.

The next challenge was the oven, which was also marked by mysterious graphics, but for which no directions were given.

Here, below, are the controls that confronted us:

The knob on the right sets the temperatures (in centigrade, naturally) but the middle one mystified us. Luckily, all the owners' manuals to all the appliances were stuffed in a bottom kitchen drawer, and some digging turned up the manual for the oven. Elaborate explanations about the right settings for cooking all different cuts of meat were given, and one or two spoke of how to prepare delicate pastries, but in the end we still just had to make a guess about what to do with our pizzas. After doing all that, the darned thing still didn't work — as it happens, all the appliances in the kitchen are on their own individual switches (in addition to the circuit breakers in a box on the wall). After the power came on, we had to program the timer, then guess a setting, then cook our pizzas. By the time the pizzas were ready, we were mighty hungry and ready to eat!