Being touristy (London)

Two weeks ago our student group went to London for the day.  I enjoyed the sightseeing for the most part. But I'd decided not to blog or Facebook about it because all my friends were, and because I do not usually get excited about cities or about being a tourist.

But, I've changed my mind and decided that being touristy for a day in London was worth it.  We went to many places that I don't remember anymore, but these are the ones I do:

National Gallery of Art:  Art galleries are one of the things I do genuinely appreciate about big cities.

Tower of London:  Here are two young girls being all smiley at a place where many sad and gruesome things happened for centuries.  Ironic.

Buckingham Palace:  Claustrophobically crowded, but I liked hearing the band.

Tower Bridge:  I don't know why I liked this, but I did.  It looked like a fairy tale.

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St. Paul's Cathedral:  Yes, I really like big churches and their Evensong services.  We even managed to get seats up by the choir for the service and were specially welcomed in the announcements.  St. Paul's made the beautiful Christ Church in Oxford seem puny (!)

Picture-taking was strictly forbidden on the inside, and it didn't occur to me to break the rules.  But the interior was glorious, as far as man-made things go.

The whole day was chilly and damp.  By the end, the phone booths started to look more and more inviting:

Eventually we rode home in one of these:

I had forgotten that these are exciting until my sister asked me, "Do you get to ride in one of those cool double-decker buses?"  Yes -- and she was even more impressed when I informed her that they have Wi-Fi and restrooms!

Just being in London gave me a sense of the city that I value more than visiting its specific sites.  This week I read The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, set in nineteenth-century London.  It kept mentioning the weather -  "grey, dreary, damp, foggy, misty, gloomy, wet, soggy, etc."  Each time Conrad moaned about the weather, I remembered trekking through London streets and laughed and thought, "Yes!  That is what it's really like."  Here's an excerpt:

"The panes streamed with rain, and the short street he looked down into lay wet and empty...It was a very trying day, choked in raw fog to begin with, and now drowned in cold rain.  The flickering, blurred flames of gas-lamps seemed to be dissolving in a watery atmosphere.  And the lofty pretensions of a mankind oppressed by the miserable indignities of the weather appeared as a colossal and hopeless vanity.  'Horrible, horrible!' thought the Assistant Commissioner to himself, with his face near the window-pane.  'We have been having this sort of thing now for ten days; no, a fortnight - a fortnight.'"

Cheery, isn't it?

Really, though, London is better than that.  The parts I saw were beautiful, clean, historic, and impressive.  I wouldn't want to live there, but I enjoyed it for a day.

So -- that is London, through Nebraskan eyes.