The past three days

What has happened in the past three days? I’m gonna say a lot. But that’d not really cover it sufficiently.

Saturday was, up to that point, the best weather we had had in London. Clear skies, mild wind, enough heat for me to whine (so probably around 20 C). The best day to go see the changing of the guards in front of Buckingham. We thought this was a splendid idea.

So did about 10,000 other people.

We all shared the boulevard in front of Buckingham together and admired the red guards in enormous bear-skin hats march and trot on horses to the lawn within Buckingham, play a little happy concert, wave batons and guns around, and march out. The whole process took about an hour. We got there at 11 to watch the hullabaloo commence at 11:15. Stuff was still going on until about a little after twelve. We then sat in St. James park, people watched, fed pigeons, and oriented ourselves towards St. Paul.

St. Paul Cathedral is a dome attached to another building. The dome dominates the building and the landscape. Your eye is drawn to it because of the aesthetics that the architect used. It was rebuilt after the Fire of 1666 made an ashtray out of most of London, including the very wooden and very flammable cathedral that had been there beforehand. It was built entirely to Classical ideals, so the dome is perfectly proportional on the outside but actually comprised of two concentric domes. That way, the dome on the inside is a size for maximum ooh and ahh-ing from worshippers inside. Any bigger and it would seem vacuous.

St. Paul is the second biggest cathedral in the world; only St. Peter’s is bigger. I visited St. Peter in 2009 when I was with my parents on a great Mediterranean tour de Carnival boat. I remember not liking St. Peter at all. It was crowded and everyone was taking pictures next to the signs that said “NO PHOTOGRAPHY” in at least ten different languages. Aside from that, though, I couldn’t reconcile its excessive décor. Really. I’ve been raised that a house of God is a house of God. God doesn’t give a crap about gold leafing on an altar or your mother-of-pearl nativity scene. St. Peter was all that. I went to cathedrals all over Spain that were just seeping with this almost bawdy ornate-ness. It made me feel uncomfortable. It was like the church was trying to win people over with shiny things or flaunting its wealth in an indirect way to show its power. It left me with a quite negative impression, really. All I could think about in Toledo, Madrid, Sevilla, Cordoba, all those cathedrals, was how many Jews, Protestants, and Muslims the Inquisition would have had to kill, loot, and otherwise impoverish to finance something like that.

I did not get that sense at St. Paul. It was richly decorated, but it never lost sight of some sort of austerity. There was gilding, yes, but there was just simple carving in granite. There was wrought iron next to mosaics. There was splendor but it was never bountiful and it never had an ulterior motive.

Of course we had to get to the dome. The first part is called the “Whispering Gallery,” so called because you can whisper on one side of the dome and hear someone directly across from you, about 100 feet away. It was 250-some steps, but getting up there was cool because you got a great view of the top of the inside of the dome and got a nice view of the nave below.

119 steps above that was a portion of the dome that was outside. I was all pumped up from the guard-changing, people-watching, pigeon-feeding festivities of earlier that morning, so I was going to go to the top, so help me God. My mom is not fond of stairs, and the view from the first portion was good enough for her. I dragged my dad along to the top part of the dome.

THESE 152 steps were iron and small. I’m fairly dexterous and can move around in little spaces, but a lot of people aren’t. I could see why many people elected to stay on the first landing.

Getting to the top, I could see why many people elected not to.

St. Paul is the highest point for a ways around. I could see our hotel, the London Eye, Parliament, Westminster, and the Tower of London. I took a bunch of pictures and the guard at the top had to peel me off the railings and throw me down the stairs. It was worth it though.

Upon reaching the bottom, we were all hungry. As the drunken porter so wisely said in Macbeth: “Steps are a provoker of three things.” “And what three things doth steps provoke?” “Quick breath, rueful knees, and dinner.”

Okay, he didn’t actually say that. He did that with drink. But I felt like waving my artistic license around. Or something.

We were so hungry that we basically saw an Italian restaurant and all yelled “THENCE” and descended upon it like lions on a gazelle.

I had pizza. It was good. And it was not $36 like the one in Norway.

After that we went over to Tate Modern. I have an inconclusive relationship with modern art. Some of my favorite pieces are modern art that have been so painstakingly constructed or deconstructed, or have used utmost brevity and simplicity to convey infinite emotion.

Most of it though is a black line on red paint.

And then we walked back to our hotel. We walked a lot that day. And we all felt it.

Sunday our day started later, but as usual, with some tea (TEA TALLY: 20).

Since going over to Westminster, I had been dying to get back, and I thought going to a service would be the best time: free, nice context, fewer crowds. And it was. I’m not the most religious person on the planet, not in either way. I’m not Christian, nor am I really staunchly against any religion. I haven’t been to a church service at all in the recent or even more remote past. Yet I had to make an exception for the Abbey, especially for Howells Mass in the Dorian Mode.

I mean, who can say no to THAT?

After the mass I was in a very peppy mood and exasperated it by having a chai from Caffe Nero, a local coffee chain that had some very nice brews (TEA TALLY:21).

From there we made our way to the British Museum, a place you could literally live in for weeks and never get bored of. The fun part about London is that the museums are free. Tate was free; so was this. People waltzed in and out like it were St. James Park, seeing artifacts predating civilization in England itself with a very appealing casualness.

It was originally a collection of buildings with a central courtyard, but in 2000 they put a huge lid over all of the buildings. They’re all thus encased in glass but still their own buildings. We started out with the typical fare of Egypt, Assyria, and Greece, but I’m not too fond of that part of history. I’ve always found the Indus Valley and China to be more interesting, so I dragged my parents up to the India and China exhibits, which we found much more interesting.

In between there I had an Americano and proceeded through the exhibits with increased… vigor.

We finished off our trip to the British Museum with Japan and a tiny bit of Korea. I’ve always been interested in Japan and Japanese history, but most museums ignore it or minimize it because it was not really a world power until the mid 1800’s. It was fun to see an actual exhibit that followed them from the beginning until present day.

And then we were hungry again. Because that’s how people get after walking around.

We ate at a Thai restaurant part of a chain called Beathathai. I had pad thai and a mango lassi with rosewater. It was perfect.

After dinner we walked around London some more, made it over to Soho, Piccadilly Circus, and Trafalgar Square. We went into a used bookstore where I found some Joseph Conrad from the later 1800’s. I love old books. They have that smell.


Monday we left London and headed to the English countryside. It was like going back to Wales, only not as far and all in English. There we stayed with an acquaintance of my dad and grandpa, Tim Newell, an amateur historian and one of the English historians for my grandpa’s bomb group from the war. He lives in a tiny village called Conington, situated near where the base was. A lot of his interest in the war stems from the proximity he was to the base that my grandpa was stationed at. I slept through most of the ride going there, despite having some English Breakfast before we left (TEA TALLY: 22). Before heading out to the base, we stopped by Cambridge where we took a gander at the campus and admired the town, stopping to have tea in a crepe shop called Benet (TEA TALLY: 23). Cambridge does have a beautiful campus. It was built in 1209, making it way older than anything we have in the US. It was weird visiting a university campus like a tourist, but I was a tourist once to Dartmouth. Maybe I’m visiting a future alma mater? We’ll see.

Despite my second cup of tea, I still fell asleep on our way to Madingley Cemetery, right by Cambridge, where many soldiers on the base were buried. There’s a huge wall of names that stretches all across a pond, and at first I thought they were the casualties sustained from the war. But it was not even that. It was merely the names of those MISSING and presumed dead. The wall was staggering; there were more than 5000 names on it, and Madingley is one of the smaller American cemeteries in Europe. There are 14 others too. 3000 soldiers are buried in Madingley today, but that’s only the people whose bodies have remained in England. Most of the others have been since transported back to the United States. The cemetery also only covered certain sections of the Air Corps and Navy; it didn’t even regard the infantry.

I had never visited a military cemetery like that, and the most I could make out of it was that war is just consuming. B-17’s get shredded by the slightest bit of shrapnel, armies go through bodies like lawnmowers clipping grass, and entire ships explode and instantly condemn millions of dollars and hundreds of lives to sunken eternities in frigid waters. I could have never fought in the war. I couldn’t imagine myself as a ball turret gunner like my grandpa, or in a foxhole, or running around in the boiler room of a huge navy ship. I would have probably blasted my own brains out before pointing a gun at someone else.

The cemetery was quiet and peaceful, but we needed to keep moving. Tim took us back to his place in Conington to meet his wife, Angie, who was preparing us lunch. I fell asleep on the way there too. When I awoke, we were at their house, which Tim has been disjointedly remodeling. The house itself was built in 1820. It is a beautiful house.

Angie made us an array of small sandwiches, some egg and some ham. She also prepared for us a homemade lemon cake. It was heaven. With tea (TEA TALLY:24).

After our meals, we went over to what remained of my grandpa’s base, which was basically just the runways and a water tower. The runways have been integrated into a small airport today, and so we visited that airport and imagined enormous B-17’s filling out the tar mat with their size and noise. Tim owns a small plot of land near a highway on which he has placed memorials to the bomb groups and has designated the water tower as a final memorial as the last significant structure left from the base.

From there we went to All Saints Church, a semi-abandoned church by their house. There is the original memorial to the bomb group, but the church is considered “redundant” and only used twice a year. It is unlocked, so we went inside. It’s a beautiful church in spite of the mouse poop and years of neglect. I think it’s at least from the 1600’s since I found graves on the floor from the 1600’s. Tim bitterly explained that this church would be much better cared for had the crazy final owner of Conington Castle, which stood just a few feet away until 1954, hadn’t decided that his family’s 500-year old estate was “tacky” and demolished it. And I think he’s right. Tourists love castles. That castle would have been protected by now and made into a world heritage site, and this beautiful church would not be covered in feces and cobwebs.

We made our way back to Tim’s home and were fitted again with an amazing meal of lasagna and a British take on tiramisu. I like food. I also had my first cup of herbal tea since being at school (TEA TALLY: 24).

This morning, while drinking some Earl Grey (TEA TALLY: 25), it hit me that we were leaving, and I had realized that I hadn’t tried marmite yet. Luckily, both Angie and Tim are marmite fanatics and gave me some to try. It tasted like miso paste, and therefore I liked it.

What happened on the plane? I had English Breakfast (TEA TALLY: 26) and got an entire row alone.

Where am I now? I’m home. I would add some sort of conclusion, but I’m gonna write the rest of my Norway trip before I do that.

Besides, this is the longest entry to date.