London and New Years Eve — Saturday 31 December 2011 (and also a little bit of Friday 30 December)

Conor came to Bedford on the 30th and was about as excited as I had been to see Josie and James and be with fun people again (he was with family that he likes but has a hard time spending too much time wit and his teenage cousin doesn't seem to like him, which didn't help). We sat around, talked, and went to see the new Sherlock Holmes, which was pretty much amazing. I kept seeing bits and pieces from the books, and had to keep myself from expostulating on them during the movie.

On Saturday, we went to Wokingham, where one of James' school friends was having people over to his house, via London. 

!!!

I've been on the underground! They don't actually say "mind the gap" on it, though. They do on the overground trains, but not all the time.

We didn't have to be at Ben's house until "sometime after 4", so I took a bus tour (really expensive, but worth it) while everyone else, who had already taken at least one bus tour, went and watched arthur christmas. 

I would have taken nicer pictures if the bus would have stopped, and I would have taken more if I hadn't run out of battery. 

This is next to Buckingham Palace. The gold thing next to the biggest tree is what I was aiming for, but the bus was moving.

Westminster Abbey, I believe.

St. Stephen's Tower and Big Ben with the House of Commons, and everyone else on the bus taking pictures in the foreground.

No fellow photographers in this one.
Actually, this was just the first of many Bens that I met on New Years Eve.

I think that's more of Westminster.

The House of Lords, I think. And what appear to be portable arena speakers, probably for new years eve.

I have no idea what this is; I just like the red and white on the building.

Looking down the Thames at the London Bridge (I think; you can't really see it and I couldn't really hear the guide) and the London Eye (the ferris wheel on the right), with old London on the left and new London on the right.

I think this is the War Museum, located in Bethlehem Hospital (aka Bedlam, the insane asylum).

If the picture above didn't show Bedlam, then this one does. This might be related to some gardens, though.

Big lion on the riverbank

I think this is westminster again.

House of Commons and House of Lords, left to right.

I don't know who the statue in the front is, but the one in the background is Abraham Lincoln. This is across from parliament, and a lot of prime ministers, generals, and world leader-ish people are in it, like Nelson Mandela (senior quoter; I forget the quote, though) and Winston Churchill.

The buses were everywhere. I wasn't walking enough to be in danger of getting hit by one, though.

A war memorial. I forget which one.

Lord Horatio Nelson, atop his massive pillar in Trafalgar Square. As I was told at least twice, he's actually looking towards where his ship is still docked in Portsmouth. 

Nelson's ship, just smaller and in a bottle. I didn't know what it was when I took the picture; it was explained on one of the many times we passed it later.

Trafalgar Square. As alluded above, we went by it at least four times. The screens are for the fireworks, and the national gallery is in the background.

I was amused to see something calling itself a "Texas Embassy", even if it was just a restaurant.  

Incidentally, the Oceanic House, current home of the Texas Embassy, is the former home of the White Star Line. This is where you bought tickets for the Titanic.

I don't know what the spire is, but that's the national gallery and the back end of trafalgar square. Again.

Trafalgar Square's very clean fountain. I think you can normally go right up to it, even.

I mainly took this picture for the serious statue with the fairly serious bird on his head. If you look at the base of the statue, Terry Pratchett readers will see a familiar name. Who knew that anyone actually had the name Havelock?

A church smack in the middle of London, possibly St. Martin's  (M-something, I think), definitely the parish church for a branch of the military. The pitting is from the Blitz. 

The statue in the middle of the street is a dragon and marks the entrance to the City of London. The queen actually can't go in without being accompanied by the Mayor of London, and she can't wear her jewels. She also has to defer to the Mayor and walk behind him instead of beside or in front of him, as she would normally do as a head of state.

Not a church, but the most ornate civil court building ever. The guy who designed it wanted to build cathedrals, but this was as close as he got.

St. Paul's Cathedral. Burned down three or four times, didn't fall down during the Blitz in spite of Hitler's express command to destroy it. The people's church of London.

Tower Bridge. We actually drove over it, but the batteries in my camera kept giving out, the horrible things.

HMS Belfast, I think. Also the Tower Bridge.

What I wanted very much to see, but either didn't drive past or didn't hear in time to take a picture or had already run out of battery, follows:

Original Twinings store (saw it, still had battery, bus was moving too fast)

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (saw off in distance as we crossed a bridge; no battery)

Tower Bridge (I was ON it!)

Plague/Great Fire monuments (bus went too fast, and no battery)

Women of (one of the World Wars) monument (short notice, fast bus) 

Sherlock Holmes museum (bus didn't drive past it. And okay, I did pick up this little obsession after watching the first Robert Downey Jr. movie, but it's been fuelled by the books! Wanting to see the museum has nothing to do with the fact that I just saw the second movie and loved it; I saw the second movie almost equally because I loved the first one and because I love the books. If it's full of deerstalker hats, I will be sorely disappointed and will actually go to the effort of writing nasty reviews. I might even demand my money back. Nowhere in the first collection, last collection, and the first three novels does Conan Doyle even mention a deerstalker.)

Once it got dark, I got kind of bored and nervous about missing my stop. I hate asking for directions in big cities because I'm afraid the fairly friendly-looking person on the street will actually be a nefarious criminal and will peg me as a helpless tourist, which in fact I am, so I always go into shops and ask salespeople discreetly. 

I found my stop without difficulty, however, and knocked around Victoria station (although NOT Victoria Coach station, as I discovered the next afternoon, trying to find it in the dark and the rain) until I got a text from my movie-going friends that I should meet them at the tube stop where our train connected to Wokingham. That was an adventure, although riding the underground by myself felt pretty cool. It was just that the station was consumed by holiday chaos, and it took us some time to figure out which exit had an overground train station. 

After a very long wait and a longer train ride, we got to Wokingham (pronounced, by the way, as WOKE-ing'm, with no relation to ham or stir-fry skillets), where James' friend Ben Ireland met us at the station. He's one of many Bens (alluded to under the picture of St. Stephen's Tower without all the photographers), all of whom go by their last names. We met Ben Watkins, his best friend since early childhood (the farthest apart they've ever lived was on opposite sides of a fairly small town when they went to university) later, and we never met Ben Taylor. 

It was a pretty casual new years eve. We hung out with mostly guys, since I guess all the girls were unavailable and had all fallen out with each other shortly before anyway (bullet dodged!), and ate garlic bread and chilli (for everyone but me) and what had been thought to be a margarita pizza (plain cheese, but if you ask for cheese pizza here, you get weird looks. I picked up on the margarita thing pretty quickly) but was in fact a holiday chestnut pizza. It was pretty good. We stayed up late, cheered when someone's watch phone said 00:00, and eventually straggled to our respective sleeping places. 

Year complete. 

It's weird, writing this up four days into the new year.