Day 3 • Sept. 1

Our day started off, as usual, at 8:30 a.m.  We headed straight to the breakfast provided by the Falcon an ate a typical English breakfast, consisting of one overcooked fried egg, sausage as on the English can make it, Canadian style bacon, and beans in tomato sauce.  After breakfast and showers, we took the tube to Liverpool Station, near the City of London.  We wandered around the nearly deserted streets of London’s banking district for about an hour.  Had this been a weed day, the streets would have been bustling with financial types.  To Sharon’s disappointment, and mine too, we didn’t chance upon the headquarters of Lloyds of London.

Next it was off to St. Paul’s Cathedral, which is not a hard place to find.  After circumnavigating the nave (I believe that’s what they call it) with its countless statues of admirals and generals, we began the obligatory hike up the 10,000 or so steps to the top of the cathedral.  The steps at the very top turn into something more like a suspect ladder than a stair case—one’s safety is a reasonable cause of concern.  But we made it from this magnificent perch gazed down at London. 

Following our tour of St. Paul’s, which besides being a full-fledged tourist shopping center, passes for a church, we headed down Fleet Street, which is the journalistic heart of London.  We ducked down a side street for a bite to eat and a couple of beers.  We dined outdoors, although “dined” is perhaps the wrong word.  The sandwiches were awful—too much butter and mayonnaise.  The beer, however, was superb, as was the weather.  (Note:  The sandwiches came form a sandwich shop, not the pub.)

Afterward lunch, we made our way to the British Museum.  One could spend weeks touring this museum; we had about one and a half to two hours to take it in—and on legs and feet wracked by yesterday’s long walk.  We leisurely toured the library, with its near ancient books and letters of famed writers, and then blew through 3000-plus years of Eastern artifacts in 25 minutes.  After brief respite, we inspected the relics of ancient Rome and Greece and Egypt.  Our Egyptian education was alas cut short by the fact that the museum was set to close.  The mummies were neat.

From the British Museum we headed toward Soho, stopping along the way at a bar called Munchen, where we drank a few pints of Lowenbrau beer.  Lowenbrau is as good as beer gets in my opinion.  Our next stop was Soho.  That entailed hordes of people, myriad strip joints, and in our particular case, a salted beef sandwich and coffee at a kosher Jewish restaurant.

Understandably, wending and winding through Soho was a bit more up my alley than Sharon’s.  At any rate, we wended and wound for a couple of hours, stopping only at a pub here and there.  Sojourning Soho left me with two questions:  What is a “bed show”?  And where have all the punk rockers with their Technicolor hair and pierced everything gone?  Ah yes, lest we forget, two pound sterling were played and squandered in one of those carnival gizmos where you drop in a coin and watch it fail to push any of the coins teetering on the edge over it.

Following Soho, we caught the tube at Leisetier Station, where for reasons unknown to me a vast horde of folks had congregated outside.  Our final explorations of the day were a stop at another pub near our hotel, where we had a pint apiece, and a return visit to the Mideast restaurant for a couple pita bread sandwiches to go.  I ordered “feta cheese.”  The guy serving us was perplexed by the order, but after I showed it to him on the menu posted outside and he had consulted with his partner, he set me up with a very tasty sandwich.  We ate the sandwiches back in our hotel room, where we drank another beer, watched a bit of the telly, fooled around, and then went to sleep about 1:00 a.m.

Notes: 

• What movie did we watch?

• Missed being with the Jammers.  This was their long weekend without Sandy stopping by to feed them.