Category: Miscellaneous

I Paid 70p To Pee

July 30, 2010

Lots of public toilets around England are pay toilets, ranging from 10p to a princely 50p. Today I paid a total of 70p to use the garderobe, and upon leaving one of them I found this cute sign:

Today was our last full day in London. A bit of sightseeing, a bit of shopping, a bit of eating. JBF went on another train safari today, so KLS and I headed out early to see Buckingham Palace.

As our travel books predicted… we were underwhelmed 🙂

Very close is a park (St James I believe it is called). This was an unexpected treat, since the lake in the park is full of a variety of different water bird species, most of which are unafraid of humans.

The park was also home to some of these little fellows:

Next was Westminster Abbey, which managed to impress us even though we’ve become somewhat jaded by ancient, immaculately detailed buildings. We didn’t pay the (exorbitant) entry fee though, and only admired from outside.

This morning I bought a lemonade beverage from Waitrose. Upon drinking, I had to glance at the bottle to make sure I hadn’t actually bought lemon juice for cooking or something, since it was so terribly bitter. KLS insisted on photographing me drinking it.

It is moments such as these I wonder why I let her take these ridiculous photos of me…

The apple pies are like the Australian/Japanese ones, incidentally 🙂

Here’s another pair of shots, this time taken in Trafalgar Square:

Here’s a story that I don’t remember telling. We went to a Games Workshop in Edinburgh, and I overheard a customer say (dead serious) to an employee “You’re pretty much the only Dark Emperor I know.”

Today we went to a Games Workshop in London. There were an abundance of amazingly well-painted miniatures on display, and I wasn’t surprised when I heard employees boasting to a customer how they were the premier store in Britain (this was on Oxford Street by the way). An example figure:

Toward the end of the day we visited (as I suppose we had to) Harrods, the world famous department store. It was maniacally busy and terribly ostentatious. For instance, in the fancy spirits shop in the basement they had a single bottle of cognac for £26,000.

They were also selling this, a full sized bath carved from a single piece of quartz crystal. It is the only one of it’s kind on Earth and also, so the sales board said, will be the person who buys it.

Anyway as I said this was our last full day, and it is unlikely I will do another blog entry this vacation. Hopefully you enjoyed reading it (even if some of the entries were a bit late!) as much as I enjoyed writing it 🙂

Strangeday

July 28, 2010

Our next destination after Blackpool was Keswick, in the popular Lake District in the northwest. However we decided on a detour to Barrow-in-Furness, the ancestral home of KLS’s grandma.

I was unprepared for how reminiscent of Australia much of England is. It is perhaps obvious given our heritage, but the similarities go far beyond languages into such things as street signs, shops and even the ‘flavour’ of the variety shows on television. Even though we only whirlwinded through, Barrow-In-Furness was the place that reminded me most of my home town Newcastle, and it was a bit surreal. Walking through an empty pedestrian shopping district on a Sunday almost gave me Hunter Street deja vu.

One of the most unexpected delights of our trip was to be found in Barrow – and that was Furness Abbey.

Once the seat of power in the region, the abbey was abandoned hundreds of years ago and now exists as a large and spectacular ruin.

As you can see we were free to wander (and climb up on) the ruins as much as we wanted. The site is managed by the national heritage organization and they have done a great job explaining the history of the abbey and the events that led up to todays ruin.

We couldn’t help but imagine how suitable the ruins would have been for a movie site. I also dubbed it the best live-action AD&D site in the world. Take a look at that shot above right – couldn’t that be a room of storopers just awaiting an unwary adventurer? 🙂

After Barrow, we drove a motion-sickeningly-and-yet-mesmerizingly-beautiful road to Keswick. Here I am making friends with the carved bear outside the B&B:

Yep, that’s the umbrella I bought in Blackpool. At this point, we haven’t quite worked out how to get it back to the USA…

Keswick is a picturesque little town on a lake surrounded by sheep fields. Take a look:

The water was crystal clear and mirror-still. Although it wasn’t raining, the sky was overcast and the clouds sat low on the surrounding mountains:

Late in the day we walked through a sheep field into the town…

…where dinner was Chinese followed by ice-creams each!

Seaside Rendezvous Too

July 28, 2010

Ok, where was I… ummm… oh yes: Scarborough!

Scarborough was a moderately low-brow seaside resort. Beautiful, but they did sell chocolate gentleman’s sausages so they can’t claim to be prideful. However the next day we cut across the country to one of the most famous seaside towns of Blackpool.

There it is: REAL ENGLISH WEATHER!

We had enjoyed glorious sunny days for the entire first week of our trip, and it wasn’t until Blackpool that the rain came. Even then it was little more than a heavy drizzle, but enough to make me go and buy an umbrella (see a future entry for details…)

The leftmost shot shows the Blackpool tower (admission, £17, we passed) and both the central and (in the distance) northern piers. These were like the Brighton pier; containing amusement parks, arcades and restaurants. The rightmost shot is looking back in the other direction (both shots were taken from the south pier, at different times) toward Pleasure Beach (the rollercoaster).

I went down to the waters edge and put my hand in. It was very, very cold and great amounts of sand were suspended in the water. I imagine it would have been an uncomfortable swim.

Pleasure Beach is a very good looking amusement park and is apparently Britains top tourist destination. We walked past just after it opened (our hotel was right next door) and the lines to buy tickets were mind-bendingly long. We didn’t go in, which was a shame since that giant coaster is one of the worlds tallest and looked like a lot of fun.

Here’s two pieces of airbrush art from rides on one pier:

Yep, Blackpool isn’t about high class 🙂

The streets were alive with Britoners of all ages and all classes. Many of these were gangs of roaming females all dressed alike: hen parties (aka. bachelorette parties). Drunkenness was on full public display. Everyone was having fun.

I ate the best fish’n’chips of the trip here:

< Yum!

And JBF and I shot some Terminators:

And here are the horsey rides, protecting themselves from the rain:

Blackpool had 1.5 surprises for me. The first requires some backstory. For many years Britains only official Doctor Who museum/exhibit was in Blackpool, right on the promenade. It closed late last year, but I was surprised and elated to find that the gift shop is still there. I was amazed by some of the stuff they had for sale, and even made a few purchases. Alas most of the stuff was either way too expensive or impossible to bring home. Such as the finest item of them all:

< Yum!

The other surprise relates to the Blackpool Illuminations. Every year in September the city turns on a large amount of lights all along the seafront. This is a big spectacle, and is always done by someone famous (such as David Tennant or the Top Gear guys). Even though the lights are not on yet, they are there, and you can guess my reaction when we discovered the particular sets of lights outside our hotel were themed around Doctor Who!

Blackpool was kitschy and quaint, saucy and quite a bit special. I wish we’d had more than one day there.

Robot Claw