London Town: Day One

Shortly before we left Vienna for home leave back in September, we started making plans for Granny and Elizabeth's trip overseas.  We knew they were coming to visit us in Vienna, but we also wanted to take advantage of having family around to travel somewhere new together.  This was a big discussion while we were visiting Washington State, but eventually we settled on visiting London together.  We had debated about going somewhere with a warmer climate, but Elizabeth has several food restrictions we figured would be easier to traverse in a country where English is the official language...and it also conveniently happened to be a place we really wanted to visit.  Once we were back in Vienna, excitement for our upcoming trip fueled a lot of research on my part.  I realized I had almost always taken London simply at face value; add in the random smattering of information I had stumbled upon over the course of my life and you have someone who is interested in the city, but really knows little about it.  I'm not a fan of being a tourist, but, knowing I wouldn't be able to avoid that moniker while we were in London, I decided, instead, to become a well-informed tourist. I spent the following months reading about British history and became truly fascinated by England and, particularly, it's capital city's role in that story. 

 For our visit, we chose to rent a flat between Regent's Park and Euston Station, which conveniently (for this Sherlock fanatic) also happened to be quite close to Baker Street. Our first day in London felt a bit disjointed; we had a very big surprise planned for Bailey's birthday the next day that required picking up train tickets and birthday cake beforehand.  It was understandably strange, having errands to run on our first day in a new city, but I knew getting the ticky-tacky things out of the way in advance would make Bailey's special day more enjoyable.  I think we were all a little disoriented that first day.  I'm finding that traversing unfamiliar public transportation systems can be baffling at first and this led to us just choosing to hitch a ride on a random bus line going in the direction of Victoria Station.  The logic being, that we would be able to see some of the city without having to over-exert ourselves.  It was just coincidence that this bus ride allowed a nice solid chunk of time for both girls to fit in a nap, which they were clearly in great need of.  At Victoria Station, we woke everyone up and bribed some smiles onto their faces with Haribo gummies while John and I grabbed some city maps and decided where we'd be off to next.  

We ended up walking down Victoria Street to Westminster Abbey and Parliament, which were the first really big sights we spied in the city.  We wandered around Parliament Square, admiring the statues for Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill (which I knew, thanks to my reading, is host to a small electric current to keep pigeons from defecating on his bald head).  We then made our way over to the Thames, which was another great source of excitement for me, since this waterway was the entryway used by the Romans when they first settled and created Londinum. This particular spot, though, was where the Anglo-Saxons arrived, forming a settlement called Lundenwic in the 7th Century.  That's a huge concept to let sink into your head while standing at a simple vantage point on the river. Forget the bustling city all around me, this waterway itself has an incredible depth of history to it.

I literally could've stood there for days, trying to wrap my brain around it all, but duty called!  We had to make it to a bakery on the other side of the city before closing to pick up Bailey's cake.  So, we reluctantly left the waterfront and hopped on the underground station at Westminster...where I proceeded to direct our group to a train going in the wrong direction.  Oh, The Tube!  I'll give it all due respect by acknowledging it was the first underground system in THE WORLD, that there were several different companies developing separate lines at the same time without consulting with each other, and that the compartments are literally as large as they can possibly be given the size of the tunnels, but as a newbie in the city, I had no idea whether I was supposed to be headed East or West while on something called the CIRCLE Line or whether the random stations announced as a train being "in the direction of" were somewhere on the path I wanted.  After a few days, this all became old hat, but at the onset it was maddening.  Eventually, we made it to Kings Cross (and DID NOT go to platform 9 3/4, because...well...we'd see much better tomorrow) where we picked up B's cake and some bonus pastries just because they were there.  

Dessert before dinner is my favorite, so it worked out well that we had time to eat our pastries before deciding on a snazzy Mexican restaurant just down the street from our flat for dinner.  Liz and Granny ended up splitting a crazy, monstrous meal that came with twelve ramekins full of fajita fillings, while John and I played it safe.  Full disclaimer: It might seem strange to seek out food that isn't indigenous when visiting a place for the first time, but I have to say that the resounding consensus about food in London is that the best is something 'foreign'--people who came from lands that actually appreciate flavor. In all seriousness, British food, recently, seems to be making something of a comeback, but it can't be denied that the incredible number of immigrants living there have been rocking the food scene for quite some time.  I know how hard it is to find authentic Mexican food in Austria (more than impossible), so stumbling upon a place that hit it out of the park in our little neighborhood in London was a miracle in our book.