Megz in America, England and Russia 2003

London, England

I arrived in London in the midst of a heatwave and on the hottest day ever recorded in England. After having had only one hours sleep on the plane and still being on Central time of 4am while it was 10am in London. At first I didn't realise how hot it was. I thought it was just me still not being used to the heat after coming from an NZ winter. Until I went to the London Eye for my 3pm booking to be told it wasn't running because of the heat and that it was 38 degrees Celsius!! It didn't even hit 30 degrees while I was in Chicago. So I was absolutely wilting. It was tempting to just sit in the underground and wait for that rush of wind that you get when a train is about to arrive. Except that when there is no train coming it is just unbearably hot. And it's even worse once you get on the train and it's packed with commuters. Luckily the weather has since cooled down to a normal 20ish degrees now.

I was in London for five and a half days from Sunday 10th to Friday 15th. During that time I went to: the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the National Maritime Museum, The Museum of London, the British Museum, the National Gallery (that's a heck of a lot of museums!), Hampton Court Palace, the Globe theatre, the BBC tv studio (for a studio tour), went shopping in Camden Town, rode the London Eye and fell asleep on the grass in Hyde Park.

I highly recommend doing a day trip out to Greenwich. It was good to get out of the city (even though it's not really out of the city, especially now that the Docklands rail goes directly out there), and both the Royal Observatory and Maritime Museum are very interesting. There are also other places to visit there but I ran out of time. And the best thing is everything is free to get into. That is one very good thing in London is that a lot of the museums at least are free.

Hampton Court palace is also very interesting, but quite expensive. You can easily spend a day there though. There are four different tours you can take round the palace or you can wander around by yourself. I probably spent a couple of hours just inside the palace. Then there's the grounds as well. I'd heard all about this famous hedge maze at Hampton Court but it was very disappointing. Very tiny, and therefore impossible to get lost. I wandered slowly from the outside to the middle in five minutes, and back out again in another five.

I have to admit that this time around London wasn't as fantastic as it had seemed the first time I came here. Possibly I could put that down to the heat. It's hard to enjoy something when you feel sweaty and dirty and everything around you is dirty and polluted. Because there was no wind at all to blow the pollution away or to cool you down.

I stayed at a very noisy inner city hostel, but at least it was cheap. After staying with people for the previous week it was hard to get used to being on my own again. And I'd just started getting used to the American way of doing things and had to adapt to the British way. Oh boy did I miss that American habit of putting ice in every drink. Especially on those very hot days. London water tastes foul.

posted by Megz @ 6:44 pm