12/6/09

I woke up around 9 and packed up some. This was much harder for me to do than last night, especially as I went through old papers and things like that. I went and printed out my boarding passes and bus tickets and then went across the street to get myself a Big Ben figure. I stopped for a Flake outside Madam Toussuds which wasn’t as good as I hoped because it was real ice cream and not the Cadbury soft serve stuff that makes them so good.

I packed some more, stopped in Marylebone Parish Church, and went out to get some Earl Grey and a strawberry chocolate gateux from a café along Marylebone High Street. I sat outside and read The London Paper, really enjoyable and helped to calm me down.

I went down to Oxford Street to look for any last minute buys. I went through Primark and then Topshop and didn’t find anything I could really justify spending the money one. Kim texted me and said she was meeting up with Lauren and Michael at Cha Cha Moon for lunch. I had some time to kill so I wandered around Carnaby Street and ended up at the Island Records store, where they had an exhibit on their 50^th anniversary downstairs. I walked through here until it was time to meet up.

I got the tofu aubergine dish thing. It’s so good (although really impossible to eat with chopsticks). But one of my favorite meals from here. Cha Cha Moon was sort of the place where our group ate at the most, I went three times myself (it’s cheap and good).

After Kim and I went to Trafalgar Square and threw some coins in one of the fountains because she had a ton of two pence coins left. We counted up enough and planned to go get some bread to feed the ducks but it was getting late and Kim wanted to go check-in and print out tickets for her flight at the Marylebone library, so we headed back there.

Next we took the Jubilee line down to The Mayflower Pub. Parts date from the 16^th century and from the dock is where the Mayflower departed to America. Christopher Jones, the captain (apparently) is buried at St. Mary’s Church behind it. It was a great old pub, and the best part was we went and ate out on the jetty over the spot where the Mayflower left from.


I had a cheese and broccoli quiche and an Earl Grey. We sat around there for a while looking at the water and talking.

We were a lot closer to everything than I thought we were, less than a mile from Tower Bridge, so we walked though the east side dockyard area along the water. In Dickens’ time this was the worst slum part of London, and is heavily featured in Oliver Twist. Today it’s nice, sort of like Brooklyn.

The views along the water looking toward the bridge were amazing. I wish I had known about this area earlier, there were a lot of restaurants right on the water there that looked pretty great.

The sun was setting as we walked back and the lights came on. The night was beautiful and it was actually warm out. It might have been my favorite walk in London.

We found a little alcove that I’d missed in the 40 or so times that I’ve walked the river and there were a number of shops and restaurants back there, pretty interesting. Kim got me a carbonated water because I was out of money, which was good.

We walked back past Westminster (Big Ben looks so impressive at night) to Trafalgar Square, Leciester, Piccadilly, Regent’s Street (my favorite at night) and up through my neighborhood, stopping at my old neighbor Paul McCartney’s place (I’ll never get over that).