The first 24 hours in London have been fabulous--all four of us love being here already, and we haven't even begun to see much of the city. Our itinerary began this morning with a Tube ride to King's College. Guiding 22 people through an unfamiliar labrynth that is a big-city public transportation system is never easy, especially when your seven year old realizes that he desperately needs to go to the bathroom just as you arrive at the station. But we did make it (due mostly to our good fortune of being on the correct Tube line when we started, so avoiding any transfers). The students met Peter Adamson, a professor at Kings (and a good friend of ours from graduate school at Notre Dame) for a lecture, while the kids and I wandered around the West End. I surprised them by stopping at the Lyceum Theater and buying tickets for The Lion King for later in the week, then
we had a snack at one of the hundreds of Cafe Neros that line the Strand. We walked through Victoria Gardens, where someone stopped me to ask if we were Latvian, as apparently John was wearing a pair of pants that looked somewhat like the Latvian flag (the guy must not have noticed the huge "California" on John's shirt, I guess.) Emma loved the flowers in the garden, and just watching all the people, but John was angry that we couldn't be at the lecture with the students. Apparently, he was keen to discuss neoplatonism and the theology of Aristotle with the rest of the group, and I was crimping his style by making him walk along the river instead. Eventually, he snapped out of it, and we stood along the river with our map looking for London landmarks. We stopped at Cleopatra's needle for some photos, then walked back to the Strand in search of yet another bathroom for John. They were quite impressed with the freestanding automatic bathroom on the street, and we got every pence-worth of our 50p admission charge by trying
out every feature of the sink that dispenses soap and water, then dries your hands all out of the same faucet! We met Peter and David for lunch at an Indian restaurant, then Emma really wanted to ride a double decker bus, so we took the Tube to London Tower and boarded a bust that would return us right back to where we started. We got the front seat at the top, and saw St. Paul's Cathedral, the Millenium Bridge, Trafalgar Square, and Picadilly Circus all along the way. The bus is a popular one for tourists who, like us, have realized that you can ride that for almost nothing with an Oyster card and get pretty much the same experience as the open-topped double decker tourist buses that probably cost 30 pounds for a family of four. Of course, the city must know that, so the line conveniently stops right in front of Hamley's Toy Shop, meaning that a steady stream of families pushing prams is disgorged on the sidewalk in front of the six-story monument to childhood consumerism every 15 minutes! We did go in and thoroughly enjoyed watching several
demonstrations and magic tricks, and looking at the different wands of every Harry Potter character, but fortunately even the kids realized that everything was frightfully expensive, so we left empty-handed. We got back on the Tube to Kensington Gardens, then bought some gelato for the kids and went to the Princess Diana Memorial playground in the park, which was wonderful. It was a bit crowded, but the playground is so large that we didn't really notice. The centerpiece is a big Peter-Pan style pirate ship, but there's also a very large treehouse-type structure that winds through a series of trees, and lots of bamboo-lined paths with musical instruments and moving toys hidden in little niches along the way. We stayed until it closed, then met the students at an Italian restaurant, Rossopomodoro, near Covent Garden. The food was fabulous, and since a large group of our students were leaving in the morning for Italy, we all took the opportunity to work on our Italian pronunciation. The kids loved their margherita pizzas, though they were exhausted by the time we returned to our hotel by Tube.
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