Fringey burny thingies

The morning seen me with a slight dullness from all the cider and beer we tossed down. Breakfast was interesting as the news was talking about US newest involvement in the Syrian conflict. Feh. It was good to hear the hostel owner (never got his name but he was a good guy) and Jess’s input as to how their countries deal with sending troops and the involvement we get in foreign affairs. They felt sorry for us as they knew the corporations had us by the balls and basically dictated our healthcare and what wars we entered. They all seemed to like us yanks, but our politics left something to be desired, though theirs were far from perfect. I think its pretty universal that regardless of where you live, you will bitch about your government. The only difference is they mostly think our current government and social setup is insane and wonder why the fuck we are putting up with it. The hostel owner asked if I thought if we would have some kind of armed revolution soon. Yah. Something needs to change.

It was sad leaving the place and saying goodbye to Jess, but that’s the way of backpacking and hostels. Sometimes you meet good people and sometimes your hostel mates are pains in the ass. The trip from London Bridge to Kings Crossing on the metro was quick and easy. I had about a ½ hour wait until my train left to Edinburgh. Minor annoyance, they said they were giving me a window seat but gave me an aisle instead. I’m traveling with an aunt and her niece and nephew. Good kids and adorable in their accents and polite manner. Their aunt was good enough to offer me the window seat, so I got a nice view regardless.

 Huh, looks like the aunt was actually their grandmother. And she has a PhD in political science. We had a long conversation about green energy technology and its effect (or lack of ) on the economy and political arena. The train ride was far more boring that I had anticipated. The land was flat and pretty bland, the only thing that stood out was an area with castle ruins and what looked like an early Roman aquaduct. It sped by too fast so I didn’t have a chance to take a picture.

I arrived in Edinburgh to a festival all over the city. The hostel itself was up a steep hill and it turns out I was not booked for the night. I must have either fucked up my booking, or something was screwy in how things were set up. Actually, I might have assumed it would take a night train to get to Edinburgh. Meh. I managed to get a bunk in a 12 bunk suite. So male dorm with a bunch of kids. Cest la vie. I can deal with it for a day. Even though the sheets are funky and there was a pair of pants in them. Yah.

Also First Tech fucked up AGAIN. They left a message and the lady gave the number so quickly that I had to listen to the message four times to get the information. Then when I called the “collect international” number, they didn’t have the case number that they gave me. So they had to look it up by my phone number, then couldn’t find it. Then my name and managed to find it. Then they said I had a travel alert that neglected to include Finland, Russia, Belarus, and Poland and was until the September 19th. They are, bar none, the most incompetent assholes I’ve ever had a credit card with. I made sure to slowly inform them in July everywhere that I would be. I even reiterated it in August. Didn’t matter.

On the plus side, the city itself is awesome. The buildings are medieval looking and the view on the hill I.m on is incredible. I won’t be taking any pictures today though. I want to wait until I’m settled into the four bunk room where it is a tad safer before leaving crap out.

Wandered around to get a bite to eat and the Fringe festival is insane. The streets are packed and there are live performances about 3-4 to a city block. I walked by a 12 year old that was singing like a 50 year old blues singer, an obnoxious bigoted comedian, a juggler with fire/apple/sword, three guitarists, two live plays, and a Scottish war reenactment. There is music, fireworks, and people with painted faces and costumes everywhere. Reminds me of Burning Man but with restaurants, cobblestone streets, and working toilets. It really is nuts with folks of all ages.

Next floor - bedsheets, women's lingerie, housewares, and the top of the bus

The morning started out fairly uneventful, I awoken early due to the heat in the hostel. The temperature outside is cool at night, but for whatever reason the hostel always seems to be stifling hot. Even when standing next to the open window. After a short breakfast I decided to head out randomly across the city. I ended up somewhere in the Holborn district near the royals courts.

One of the greatest pleasures I take in traveling is learning the pulse of the city. What are people wearing, work or leisure? Where are they eating? What snippets of conversation show the flow of daily life? What shops are being visited by folks or shopping sprees and which during daily life? What pedestrian flows happen at what time in what direction? Where do they go and where are they coming from? It takes about a week, but then you get the hang of the local metro and where the local stop for a bite. You no longer stand out like a sore thumb and you move in sync with the invisible hand of that city’s hive mentality.

I walked to city until about 3pm when I headed out to find one of the hop on/hop off open roof double decker busses. I figured I could take a rest off my feet and ride along for a couple hours enjoying the breeze. While waiting for the bus, I had to deal with some drunken British version of a redneck. His nose had obviously been broken many many times, he was missing teeth, and he had an umbrella in one hand and a half bottle of cheap wine in the other. He had just been kicked off the previous tour bus for scaring the women and children. He made some innocuous comments to me but never actually came out and be rude or confrontational. More of a high school “pushy push” type hope of escalation, so I answered his question about my tattoo then turned my back on him and ignored him to talk to the bus stop attendant. Just goes to show that there are assholes are everywhere.

The bus itself was great. The weather was overcast with promise a rain in the morning. So a nice cool breeze hit my face as we drove all around London, looking at all the neat buildings, parks, and statues. The two hours flew by fairly quickly. The view from the height made it better than walking in some cases, but made tree lined streets a royal pain in the ass as I couldn’t take pictures and had to occasionally hold my hat to prevent it from getting knocked off.

Back at the hostel, I dropped off my things at the room and picked up the laundry they did while I was away. Jess was there so we decided to go find some places to get drinks. I had walked by a pub called Lord Nelson that reminded me on the inside of Chuck’s art cars. All sorts of paintings and odd things hanging from the walls and ceiling. Very eclectic and artistic and obviously a local young bar hangout. I tried a sample of a frozen Pimm’s slushy and found it to be interesting but we settled on drinking a number of ciders and a beer. They also had an outdoor charcoal grill were they were cooking up beef, venison, or lamb burgers. We opted for the beef burgers and topped them with a salad mixture and grilled onions. It was interesting to talk to Jess about politics but I could tell she was initially apprehensive about WWII (naturally) though she warmed up when I talked about our treatment of the Native Americans and the Japanese concentration camps here during the same war. We had quite a long and interesting chat about all sorts of things. She was fun, its too bad I know I’ll never see her again as she would be a fun person to hang out with.

The proper stacking of rocks (which were being dicks)

The morning started out pleasant enough, waking early when Jeff the hostel mate left. Which wasn’t too bad as it meant I had the shower first so I didn’t have to stand in a bunch of water from the slow draining pipes. Then a breakfast downstairs whilst blogging until Jess came down and joined me. She’s a cool person, its good to hang out with her in the morning. She’s off to a palace an hour away while I decided to stick to Kensington Palace, which is where Prince William and his wife will shortly settle into. It was neat in that they explained the different progression of rooms. In early days, the farther into the palace you went, the higher your social status and likelihood you would get a position or boon from the royal family. The neat art exhibits shown how the different rulers lived there and their history. So less gallery art and more cool small exhibits. One especially cool thing they did was they had a number of exhibits where an old phonograph was attached and they played gossip whispers that were common in the house of lords at that time.

One sad note was it chronicled the fall of the house of Stewart. The last queen had 18 children, all of which died before the age of 5 except Prince William. He died 3 days after his 11th birthday and had been the hope of the nation from due to his cleverness and interest in military matters. This left a hole as they then no longer had anyone capable of being the royal family. Parliament set strict Protestant based rules and they went in search of a suitable king, eventually starting the line for King George the First.

After the palace I strolled through the rain in the palace gardens connected to Hyde park. They have a beautiful Italian Gardens that King Albert made for Queen Victoria and was eventually rebuilt by Tiffany’s of New York. I took a quick lunch break at this point across the park from the street in a hotel. Caesar salad, wild mushroom linguini, a pint of Strongarm cider, some Navy Rum (delicious), and chocolate cake and I’m ready to head back to Hyde Park.

This is the first example from this artist called Rock on Top of Another Rock, prior to his other famous works Rock Next to Another Rock and his masterpiece Oh For Fuck’s Sake, It’s Just a Goddamn Rock…

Hyde park was huge. Not as big as Forest Park, but few places are in terms of city parks. It is likely the biggest front lawn for a place I’ve ever seen. Large ponds, some big enough for boats and requiring bridges. I walked down to the corner of the park to see the Wellington Arch and then Buckingham palace. The arch was cool, but Buckingham is hidden behind tall brick walls with razor wire on the top. It appears more than God saves the queen.

I headed down to the metro and headed back to the hostel. My feet were getting blistered so I decided to hunker down with a book and let my feet heal a bit after walking all day. I ended up sleeping til about 10pm, waking up to take my antibiotic, and then falling right back down to sleep.

Tomorrow, washing clothes, riding on top of some touristy thing, and wandering about.

Wow, the British Royalty sure were a bunch of arseholes.

Had a standard English breakfast (or "fry up") across the street from the hostel at a place called the Island. Eggs, toast, ham, sausage, slice of tomato, and some baked beans. Pretty standard fare when it comes to breakfast here. After this began a casual stroll across London Bridge and wandering down the bank boardwalk to the Tower of London. Oddly enough it was quite small compared to the building around it, but I'm sure it was quite impressive back in the day.

The bottom part, where the lawn is located, was the moat area and had a connection to the Thames. Then there is a small castle wall with a taller inner wall beyond that. In the middle of all that is a four story building called the White Tower, where a bunch of kings and queens lived back in the early days of the British royalty. The ruins were built on the Roman ruins when they got conquered by Trajan. Much later on, in 1033, William the Conqueror decided "enough of that rot" and tossed the Romans out at the expense of having bland food from then on. Its still in contest as tot whether that was a good idea, though conquering India helped bring that mysterious thing called "spices" back into the culinary scene.

The tour was filled to the brim with tourists, making even the simplest wait a 1/2 to 1 hour ordeal. I started with an amusing free tour guide with a beefeater. Each beefeater must have 20 years of service in the military and are chosen carefully. So tour guide isn't a bad gig really, add that on their pension and that they get to meet people and tell bad jokes to a captive audience and it all makes it worth it. For about a hour or two I was regaled with tales of this and that person getting their heads chopped off. Priests, kings, queens, authors, etc. They didn't seem to be a cheery lot really. I then stood in a ridiculously long line to be whisked by the crown jewels, which while impressive in their huge jewelly bits, was not worth standing in line for that long.

After this it was a walk through the White Tower in the middle where the longest running tourist attraction was running. There had been suits of armor and mock up horses and wooden mannequins of rulers.The tower used to house and armory, so there was many different sections on the floor shown firearms, cannon, suits of armor, etc. There even used to be exotic animals housed for the visitors than can from the early 1600s to present day. It was interesting but my threshold for dealing with tourists was quickly reached. I took a quick walk around the outer parapets, and had an interesting lunch, before I headed back into town around 5pm.


I walked back just in time to find out that the London Experience closed. I figure I'll hit that first thing, then move on to Kennsington Palace and a walk through Hyde Park and listen to loonies talk about the end of the world.

NoHos in SoHo

Monday night after blogging, I decided to get a bite to eat somewhere and wandered down Union towards the Westminster area. One of my greatest joys in visiting a city is getting lost and finding new and fun places tucked away in corners of the city. I passed a bar that would have had my friend Chuck green with envy, it was garishly decorated and the inside had all manor of bizarre antiques and lighting on the walls. I didn't stop in as I was looking for a bite to eat. I ended up walking to the Westminster bridge and then walking down to the boardwalk along the Thames.

This is a common area for the locals as they seemed to be enjoying themselves taking night strolls along the water. I passed a number of higher end bars and restaurants and eventually settled on a curry wrap on Borough High Street.

The next morning I was determined to see the famous SoHo area, though I stopped by a neat art installation I missed taking a picture of the prior morning. The lights changed colors and sometimes made patterns.

 I wanted to hit SoHo in part as this was a famous shopping district and part as it was also the "seedy" area of London. Well, its pretty much been gentrified as between all the fun crafty, antique, and mall shops - there was a tiny two block area with sex shops. At no time did anything seem seedy or dangerous. Meh. I left and walked over to the British museum area was located and had a nice pizza and mint lemonade. Unfortunately, my elbow started bothering me again, so I opted to head back and find a pharmacy where I could get an ice pack. I figured I could stay in a relax, read a book, and nap. The best way to cure ills is eating well, resting, and letting your body take care of itself.

I had met my first hostelmate on Monday, a 20 year military man from Canada named Jeff. Good guy and he was staying until his folks came into town on vacation and he was to head out with them to see Edinburgh. He would be leaving Edinburgh about the time I arrived, so timing was off on that one. Too bad, as he was a good guy and it would have been fun to share a pint or two with him at night there. Tuesday when I came back to the hostel to rest I met my other hostelmate, Jess. A German student that was on vacation in London for 9 days until her boyfriend came into town and they were to drive to Edinburgh. Cute blonde gal but she was having a tough time with English. We hung out and had dinner, then went to have a couple pints at the hostel where we met up with Jeff. Apparently the night before, a gal got beaten and her stuff taken a couple blocks from here. I figure I'll make myself available at night if she needs an escort to get dinner and such.

This morning, after doing the bloggy thing, I figure I'll head down to London Tower and teabag the Crown Jewels. Family jewels, meet family jewels.

Oh the scary scary Socialist health care system

So before I get to the juicy bits, lets have a quick rundown of the first day in cheery England. I'd also like to apologize for the first blog post. There are two styles of adding new blog posts, a compose method and an HTML method. The compose method is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get - for my non-tech friends). There is a spellchecker, you can drop pictures or links directly into the post, videos, etc.). Unfortunately, Microsoft and Google are still having hissyfits at each other. So IE8 doesn't work with the compose method and it never will (unsupported browser). Whatever. I downloaded Chrome.

I was awoken early in the morning by a hostelmate, a cute Asian gal apparently into shopping as judging by the designer shopping bags she left. Having no idea what time it was beyond that there was light in the sky, I showered and prepped for the new day. Only to find that it was prior to the hostel's free breakfast. So I hung out in back until 7am. Two eggs, some cereal, coffee, two toast with jam, and an OJ later - I was ready to face the world. I started off by walking down some of the more unused street to head over to the tower bridge. Along the way I noticed a neat dichotomy. The bulk of buildings were either aged brick buildings all in need of minor repairs, or they were modern glass and steel buildings of modern architecture.

Tucked into a little brick alcove next to a bridge beside a busy road, I found an old brick church.Beside the church a statute of Our Lady with a tiny pool/offering bowl in front. Its stark white beauty belied the weathered brick lining the archway to the bridge where traffic whizzed by overhead. Then around the corner an art installation of colored lights placed into the walls of the other side of the bridgeway. It was a refreshing walk down to the tower bridge, occasionally spotted by a giant "fuck you" of traditional brick buildings set amidst the towering steel monstrosities of our modern society.

The walk continued down to the waterfront for a cup of coffee at Starbucks (oddly enough, they didn't have a lot of options in that respect) at the base of the bridge. The tower bridge itself was quite interesting, you could pay to go in the towers themselves where they described the people that built them and had galleries of the famous bridges across the world. Afterwards you got to go down into the engine room to view the old steam workings of the draw bridge and the massive counterweights. All in all it was pretty cool. The only problem is that the only exit was back on the other side of the bridge, where I had originally come from. Meh. I figured I'd just hit the London Bridge area and see what's up.

I wandered down by the boulevard lining the Thames. There were small artsy shopping regions and one of the coolest steampunk/Baron Munchhousen style fountains I'd ever seen. Unfortunately, my right elbow was swelling up, turning red, and was hot to the touch. This had been going on since Thursday (3-4 days) and was getting progressively worse. Fuck. Not good and I realized I needed to see a doctor. And the only way to do that, I found after asking a pharmacist, was to go to the urgent care (our emergency room).

So I headed down to St. Guy's and checked into the urgent care. They asked my name, where I was staying, and a phone number. I offered to go back to the hostel and get my insurance card number but she told me to just relax and they would call me. They let you eat lunch in the waiting room so I had the salted beef with pickle deli sandwich, dandelion and burdock soda, and Greek salad. About 1/2 hour later I went in to see a nurse practitioner. She took one look at my elbow and said cellulitis. We then chatted a bit about my work and such. She wrote me out a prescription for antibiotics and told me to ask for a low grade steroid cream when I talked to the pharmacy. When I asked her how much the visit was going to cost me, she looked at me weird and said "nothing". Also the medicine cost 12 pounds for both. So an emergency room visit in London cost me a total of less than 20 bucks. When I told her how much it would have costed in the US, she said "Are you fucking serious? Sounds like your insurance companies have you lot by the balls."

Yah. They do. <insert sad panda face>

For all those folks bitching about socialized medicine, bite me. We're getting fucked hard and paying the bill for it through all sorts of ways. Establish a public option already and lets be done with all that bullshit.

Anyway, I headed back to the hostel after that and decided to have a nap and do some reading. Which ended up being a prolonged nap with a Kindle. Currently, I'm sitting alone in the back patio of the Rose and Crown having a pint of Bulmer's cider (cider rocks here - they have a huge variety and its very dry and tasty). Thinking of wandering around, possibly to the London Dungeon. a tourist attraction by the London Bridge.

Just taking the Picadilly Line to Cockfoster.

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