Thursday 19 January 2011 -- The Day the Laptop Vanished

This is also the day that I went to Westminster Abbey (and met up with the Whitworth pre-med friends), Buckingham Palace, Regent's Park, and the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221 Baker Street.
Pictures! I'll do my best on the captions, because it was about two weeks ago.

I walked down Oxford street (down which you cannot go 90, although the demon Crowley did) and may have also passed SoHo (home of funky little bookshops and interesting inhabitants) on my rather circuitous way to Westminster. Most of my interests in London were of a literary, and often Pratchett-inspired, nature. Speaking of which, I saw either Sir Terry Pratchett himself or a remarkable doppelganger hurrying past me when I left King's Cross station on Wednesday, but he was moving too fast for me to stop, balance my luggage, and ask him for a picture and an autograph.

Edward (possibly "VII" and definitely Victoria's son) built that for Victoria, as people who can read latin would know from the sign. It's basically a huge gate-y thing outside trafalgar square.

I really like this monument. It has all the uniforms and/or trappings of the jobs that women took over in the absence of the men.

There were no pictures allowed inside the Abbey itself, but this is in the chapel outside the abbey and is fairly representative of the architecture inside.

This unremarkable old door is actually THE old door. See below.

See? I love the "most likely" and the comment of a Whitworthian that they could just go around slapping "oldest" signs on most old things in London and no one would know any better.

St Stephen's Tower, home of Big Ben the bell. Taken in much better light than on the bus tour.

The houses of Parliament. Just like in Sherlock Holmes! The movie, that is. I'm always impressed by how spiky everything is.

Pelicans and also a heron in the background in St James' Park. There were so many birds.

Shiny statue outside of Buckingham Palace. I think I caught this on the bus tour, but from a different angle through some trees.

There it is. The sometimes home of possibly the most famous people in the whole world, or at least in the western world.

Cool gate, bro.

Bearskin hat! I fail to see the point of those.

This is from the tube station at Baker Street. The little dots that this is made up of are that same silhouette in  miniature.

ZOMG 221B Baker Street OMG OMG.
I don't care if Sherlock Holmes was made up and never lived here, it's a real place that featured prominently in some of my favourite stories.

It was less cool than I had hoped.

Still, we had fun with it. Megan's on the left and Gina took the pictures.

The hat looks lopsided because it is. My hair is not hat-friendly.

I rather suspect that they put that in after the movie, but the attendant indicated that he did that in the books. Of course, she kept referring to everything as if it was real, which irked me.

A pipe collection. I was pleased that not all of them were those funny curved-stem affairs.

I like it that they included all the stuff that would have probably been in the rooms of Sherlock Holmes, had he been real.

This was intriguing. I think it was originally written for east asians, as the first set of descriptions were in asian characters. I don't know enough about them to distinguish language, just cuisine.
Anyway, the brochure thing has some hallmarks of the Holmes craze as well as some lesser-known but more book-common features. It debunks the deerstalker hat myth while pointing out that, yes, Sherlock Holmes did hard drugs.

 More stuff. I didn't photograph the preserved ears. It's anybody's guess as to whether they were real.

THESE. Why are these plants blooming with tropical scents in the middle of January?!

Regent's Park, which features in one of the hallmarks of my childhood, 101 Dalmatians. 

Water feature in Regent's Park. They were everywhere, and very pretty.

I'm not used to the regimented neatness of London parks. I'm more used to the "here's some grass and some trees. Don't hit the trees when you play games, okay?" style of parks.

It was big and had big avenues running through the whole thing.

Griffins? Or just winged lions?

The fact that my laptop was stolen when I got home rather ruined the peace and tranquility of the day, but it's coming back to me now.