S/V Tavarua

A bit of a suprise, ol’ chap. Walking into ‘EDIN-burra’ and finding that we are in the midst of the opening weekend of the three-week long Fringe Festival. Actors are everywhere, plays are everywhere, handout pamphlets are everywhere. The paper reported 150,000 people were in town yesterday for the opening and, I must say, we believe it.

The Edinburgh Tattoo sold out at the castle arena on Friday night… and that is a darn big arena.

We attended four different plays on Saturday, all definitely small theater amateur hour. The first was a single person drama about a poet who lost his muse. The second was a Monty Python-esque revue that was the best thing we saw presented by a very enthusiastic set of university actors. (Something about people dancing across the stage singing about undertaking is, well, kinda funny. God knows why.) Our third choice was an hour long two person play pitting IKEA (furniture store) against the German world of knik-knack stores. (It was almost good.) And finally, we ended up in a weird venue (the upper deck of a double decker bus with ambient blue lighting) for a stand up comedy routine that for all but the first-third of the hour, sort of was flat like a blown tire.

Yes, we tried the Haggis (seems rather like a relative of corn beef hash) with some Guiness to wash it down. And we tucked into a atmospheric meal at The Witchery for a unique lunch by candlelight in a 400 year old building…Salt Cod anyone?

It has been a pleasant stop, rather sunny and all. Good drumming and bagpiping on the streets by Scottish men in kilts. Lots of smiling people. Ah, but this morning… the weather is back “Heavy Thundery Showers this afternoon” has been declared by those horrid BBC local forcasters. The skies are turning gray and starting to drip, so they probably have prediction correct, even though they used the word ‘Thundery’ on public television. Must be a sign to move on…

It stayed gray during our visit to Londinium. You probably are not surprised by that, eh? January in London. But it was warmer than Amsterdam by a good five to ten degrees.

We stayed in one of the smaller rooms on our travels at Cherry Court Hotel. The room was clean, cute and took much conversation to coordinate moving even one foot towards the door.

We’ve had a partial London breakfast (skipping the baked beans), a fine Southern Indian restaurant feast at Malibar back near the British Museum and a descent pasta/pizza meal close to the inn. And of course, we checked out a requisite local smoky pub. The latter having a very drunken office party with one girl squealing ‘Let’s get Pissed!!’ in a very historic setting. The Samuel Smith Extra Stout was pretty good, but we are definitely out of California. These people smoke like a nuclear chain reaction.

Theater is in vogue here, although I question the critic’s tastes in musicals. We’ve walked by huge musical productions including: Tonights the Night, the Rod Stewart Musical; We Will (We Will) Rock You, the Queen Musical; The Jerry Springer Opera, and Mamma Mia, featuring songs by Abba. Seriously, these were big popular shows. Yikes!

Anyhow, off into the morning for another gray day to explore more of London and then an overnight flight to Cape Town. We have a new color to add to our vocabulary from this week: Londinium Gray.

Happy New Year of the Monkey! It’s the Lunar New Year!

As we shake the water off our coats, we are contemplating the true dampness of London weather.

We are being true tourists and saw the Crown Jewels at the White Tower yesterday. The whole kaboodle a touristy place with not much of interest beyond the jewels and the Beefeaters giving Shakespearian loud tours. One item of note was a 540 carat diamond embedded in a mace used during coronations. I would have thought the mace should be referred to as a sceptor, but maybe during a long ceremony you might need it to bludgeon the page that is falling asleep at your feet? The Beefeaters are in dress and are on their follow-up government service after serving 20-years in the military and reaching a certain officer ranking with necessary ribbons for good conduct also being required. It seems a rather ignoble end, giving guided tours in costume, after an illustrious career in the army but they seem to be enjoying it.

From that over the top tourist spot, we headed over towards Big Ben and the Parliment buildings. The clock is sparkling with newly applied gold and the Big Ben bong-bong-bong has a fine echo to it. In the distance you can see the Millenium ferris wheel that is under renovation during January. And close up you can see some more scaffolding for a bit more renovations. As we determined from this summer, Europe is the ‘land of reconstruction’.

Westminster Abbey was an interesting church. We were able to see where those Crown Jewels were actually used. Now just how long do you think Queen Elizabeth is going to last past her 100th birthday? There should be a ceremony there in the near future, but I suppose Prince Charles thought that over 15 to 20 years ago. The Abbey is packed with shrines and tombs to poets, scientists, including Issac Newton, explorers, nobles and royalty. They did remember to tuck a few religious images in the corners, but they were much harder to spot.

From the church we headed back out into the rain and towards Trafalgar square, the theater district, SOHO and the gay neighborhood, Chinatown and finally landed our damp butts in a pub for a righteous pint of Guinness.

Not a bad intro for London, although we can saw that traditional pub food is still rather awful. Consider a sausage sliced up on margarine buttered brown bread with raw red onion sliced on it and a smidgeon of mustard, all served up with fries of course. And then consider a BLT, also with gobs of mayonaise, and the bread smeared thickly with margarine. We vowed to head towards the Indian, sushi and Belgian restaurants after that tastebud numbing exploration.

Our day today was spent at the British Museum which contains an astounding amount of booty collected during the colonial escapades of many famous conquering Brits. It has a fantastic ambience in the attrium. This is a big open space the size of 2 acres with large columns around the egdes reaching up to a huge expanse of a opaque white glassed ceiling. Then that ambience is superceded by the library that is contained in the center. When you glance around in the hushed silence the books collected for reading in the 1800’s (with a readers pass) encompass huge walls. And then for even the final over the top ambience experience, we wandered the special exhibit in the newly renovated ‘library hall’ that would stymie even the most renowned antique collector. The hall displays in true 1800’s period library a collection of artifacts, books, natural history items that exist in museum presentation elsewhere in the building but here look as if you walked into a collector’s personal library.

Museum highlights: The Rossetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles, and a most tasteful bronze of Siva’s consort, Parvati. Derrell awarded it the prestigious, ‘Best Goddess Buns in the World’ award and nearly had to be removed by force.

After a leg-stiffening 5 hours wander the halls of the museum we are back out on the streets looking for every excuse to sit down. London is easy to navigate, the subway (”Tube”) system works seamlessly, and we can read the menus. No one is going ‘bbb-blah-bbb-BLAH!-bbb-BLAH!’ in the streets at each other which makes it seem such a quiet city.

Our next major goal is to actually stand up (argh), get back out in the drizzle (argh) and continue to avoid British pub food. Repeat after me, no mushy peas, no mushy peas, no mushy peas…