The London/Paris Adventures - Entry #4

London Bridge is Falling Down...

Our First Sight of London.

We have arrived!!!!  It was an early August day and yet here we were in the beautiful weather of London and not back in the humid, hot days of home.  As the taxi cab zipped along into the heart of London and heading towards Kensington where our hotel was located on Queens Gate.  I couldn't keep my eyes from the windows.  I should be tired and I was.  We had been awake at that point for over twenty hours.  Yet, the thought of being in London and seeing buildings and fields and parks I hadn't seen before was so exciting.

My first sight of London, other than Heathrow, was of course waiting in line for the cute cabs.  My second was as we were driving to our hotel.  The first thing I saw out of the ordinary along the drive was a park full of ponies.  Ponies with big, bushy, hairy feet.  There were several parks we passed like that.  Finally though I started to notice the increase in traffic as we kept turning down road after road.  Several of the roads I looked down were narrower than in the United States but not as narrow as I remembered when I lived in France.  The names of the streets were much different as well.  After about twenty minutes we pulled up outside of our hotel...The Hotel Regency.  From the outside with its long awning and steps up to a glass door it looked so inviting.  We stepped out of the cab to the sight of this quaint hotel on the tree lined street that stretched too far for me to see all the way down. All the buildings were tall, white and looked almost like color coordinated row houses like in DC.

The porter took our bags and was very solicitous of us.  We stepped into an elegant lobby and checked into our hotel where no one behind the lobby desk was British. There was Italian and German and other nationalities but amusingly it did not seem that anyone that worked at the hotel was actually British.  The porter followed us to our floor in the elevator and set our bags inside.  He had to explain to me twice, mostly because I couldn't understand his foreign Italian accent at first, that the key card had to be placed into a slot and kept there for the lights in the room to work.  Good thing we got two keys. We kept one in that slot the whole time because we didn't want the air conditioning going out.  It was not humidly hot like in DC but hotel rooms still get stuffy. That is when TC noticed that the air conditioning does not go lower than 19 degrees Celsius.  Everywhere we went it seemed that air conditioning was not like in the United States.  Places were warmer in temperature. They were still comfortable but England definitely controls their AC usage.

After the porter left we look around the room and out the tiny window that sat high up the far wall.  There was a step on that side of the room with a chair and a place to put the big red monster and keep our items out of the way.  There was a desk and hanging from the wall a nice big TV.  The bed sat lower to the ground than I was used to but it was actually a comfortable bed.  It wasn't so soft and squishy like many hotels I have been in where you couldn't get comfortable.  Either that or....we were just that exhausted.

We walked the halls of the hotel a bit and then went to get something to eat.  Luckily when we were pulling up outside of our hotel I noticed a Gourmet Burger Kitchen just down the road on the opposite corner.  It was so close and I knew with how tired we were that is what we would be eating that night, or rather afternoon since it was still only about 4:00 in England (tea time).  We walked over to the Kitchen and saw a small, local place with wooden tables and booths against the wall.  On the tables were silver canisters that held forks and knives.  Inside were two servers, a tall, gangly blond young man who sounded like he was from Australia or New Zealand and and a curly headed Irish girl with freckles on her face.  They were very nice and welcoming and became the first official people we met in London, although still now local.  We had yet to meet anyone other than the cabbie with a British accent.  We proceeded to have some of the best burgers ever along with the best sweet potato fries and of course we had to try out the beer.

One of the things TC noticed as we ate were all the luxury, expensive, sporty cars.  No Hondas here.  It was Mercedes and Porsches and all other expensive car names you could think of. (I am not a car person so this fact would have passed by me completely if TC did not remark on it.)

Once we were fed, drank our beer, and satisfied with the new sights the waves of fatigue were starting to take over again.  The hotel offered a free glass of wine in the evenings and we ended our evening that way but barely made it through that simple glass before shuffling back up to our room.  I needed to take a shower and one of the things I noticed as I explored the desk upon arrival was that the blow dryer was not in the bathroom but in the desk where you could not remove it.  I showered quickly and when I exited the bathroom TC was already sleeping hard.  He was so tired that when I had to blow dry my hair in the sleeping area, still a strange concept to me, he barely moved a muscle.  I managed to dry my hair and then crawled into bed myself and that is about all I remembered for the next six hours.

We slept hard for a long time but ended up waking up about two in the morning and decided to explore the neighborhood around us before we went back to sleep. Along our walk I felt like I had stepped back in time and entered a Victorian novel.  All the buildings were cute and even in the dark I could see the allure and simplicity and yet elegance of my surroundings.  There was a small alley way that led back to our hotel and on the corner was a blue door.  The rest of the homes surrounding it were standard black but this had a blue door. Along with edges of the doorway there was ivy climbing up the walls.  It truly was like stepping back in time minus the uncomfortable corsets.

We were starting to get tired again and ready to go back to sleep.  Our first official full day of exploration of London would begin tomorrow and we needed our rest.  I knew though that I had already fallen in love with London.  The clean, crisp summer air, the small black cabs, the Victorian buildings, the parks.  I grew up hearing all about London most of my childhood from my father.  Walking back to the hotel that evening I felt a sense of familiarity and I could almost here my Dad's voice, "Welcome to London. One of the loveliest places on Earth."

To be continued...First full day in London - Shakespeare, Cleopatra, and a little thing called Big Ben.