One light rail, two underground lines, one national rail, one plane, a monorail, and then a 35-mile drive in my Element, and I am home, safe and sound, from London. It hasn’t been a great day, but I probably don’t feel as bad as the executives at Merck do.
It wasn’t a good trip, to put it mildly. The conference was fruitful enough, but the convention center, ExCeL, was located in a pretty empty section of town so far from what we think of as London that I was stuck in my hotel room every night. I guess I could’ve gone out to the city for some fun/sightseeing in the evenings, but it would’ve involved the aforementioned two underground lines and that light rail, and I was a bit worried about how safe that would be after dark.
So I got to England for my first time since I was 5, and I spent 4 hours sightseeing on Monday. Oh, well.
Here are a bunch of pix from that little sightseeing meander:
A monument outside Buckingham Palace. Another view of it. A gate, and another at the same. The front gate.
The monument at a distance.
A WWI artillery memorial near the corner of Hyde Park.
The Princess Di memorial fountain in Hyde Park. This was REALLY disappointing. I was hoping for something more visually stimulating than a circular fountain with granite tiles that somehow represented the ups-and-downs of her life.
Reformer’s Tree, or where it used to stand, in Hyde’s Park. From what I gather, this was a big place of assembly, back in The Day, but got burned down in 1882.
The Marble Arch, which has its share of history. Everything there does, in a way that I simply don’t feel here in America. As I read that Stephenson book during the trip (only 200 pages so far), I marveled over the idea of being somewhere so steeped in history. I guess part of it is that I’m used to New York, where so much of the city is geared around skyscrapers. It doesn’t breathe quite the same way as the foreign cities I’ve visited these past few years (Budapest, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Auckland, Paris).
The Dwight Eisenhower memorial in Grosvenor Square.
The FDR memorial in the square. Looks like “Count FDRula” or something, but that’s how they want to remember him.
I went to the square to see the FDR memorial, since it was on my city map, and I thought it’d be nice to check out. When I saw it, I noticed a weird monument off on the east side of the square, so I went to take a look at it. The inscription read, “GRIEF IS THE PRICE WE PAY FOR LOVE”. I was still puzzled at what it was there for. Then I looked down. It’s the Sept. 11 memorial garden. Evidently, part of one of the girders from the WTC is buried under the stone. The inscription is a poem I’d never read before, by Henry Jackson Van Dyke: “Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is not.”
I’m home now.