Category: 2004-05: LHR & CDG

The weather was on the chilly side today, but it looks like it will get warmer for the rest of the week. 19 degrees! As opposed to 14 today. Oh well.
Today was a continuation of the “History Tour”. I went down to the Cabinet War Rooms near the Halls of Parliament. These were the rooms that Churchill and his Cabinet ran the British part of WWII until three weeks after VE-Day. Non stop from the beginning of the Blitz through the buzz bombs and then the end of the European war.
Then the last people who were on duty there simply turned off the lights and locked up. Parts of the complex were stripped out and used for storage and the like, but the truly historic parts such as the map room where convoys were tracked and battle statistics were kept were left as they were in 1945 when that afforementioned fellow turned out the lights and locked the door.
One sad testament if you’re British; the maps still showed the extent of Empire, which no longer exists except in the mind of those who miss it.

So after getting my dose of wars from the past century, I thought that doing some sightseeing with live people around would be a good thing.
The weather has been socked in all day, but at least it’s not raining.
First visit was to Trafalgar Square. There’s a statue of Lord Nelson on top of a tower surrounded by four lions. The National Galleries are there as is the St. Martins in the Fields Church. If you’re a classical music fan, that name means something to you. I’m contemplating catching a concert there before I leave.
I was getting hungry and needed to get something to eat. That wouldn’t cost an arm or a leg. Things are more expensive there than in Tokyo.
Anyway, I alighted at Picadilly Circus and puttered around a bit. It’s their big touristy shopping area with lots of international chains and some neon. It’s not Shibuya or Shinjuku, not by any means.
I walked over to Chinatown through the theatre district. They’ve got a LOT of theatres for stage plays and musicals. Then I got close to Chinatown. I could tell because the signs were in Chinese, I heard Cantonese and that other mainlander dialect being spoken and it smelled bad. What IS it with Chinatowns and bad smells???
I found a small restaurant that didn’t have white tablecloths and ordered my comfort food, wontonmein. That plus a Coke = �5 = $9.00!!
I mean, the wontonmein was okay and all, but definitely not worth THAT much. And that’s cheap!!
You should see how much McDonald’s costs for breakfast…I stopped off at the Supermarket and picked up some yoghurt for breakfast. Definitely cheaper!

So what IS it with the London Underground?
On paper it looks very comprehensive. It goes to a lot of places. That’s good. However…it’s not air conditioned (since I guess it doesn’t get that hot here) and the cars are cramped (I’ll take a pic before I leave to show just how) and it seems to always have things happening to it.
Let’s see, just in the past 24 hours, there has been the following incidents:
Person under tracks (last night)
Line shut down because of signal failure (today)
and the most disturbing…
Train derailed on Central line.
And don’t even get me started on how bloody expensive the Tube is!

There’s a lot of recent history here in London.
After a fun-filled day of transportation yesterday getting back to London from Paris, I’m now going into tourist mode here in earnest.
I spent much of the day at the Imperial War Museum. All the events that affect our world today get traced back to the last two World Wars that the museum showcases.
There are also exhibits on the Cold War and Britain’s various engagements in its ex-colonies and about the Troubles.
Before I went inside (for five hours!) there was a photo op happening in front of the Museum. Seems it’s Black History Week here and the mayor of Sussex (?) was at the Museum along with some Black UK WWII vets.
I was chatting with one of the people who work there while the photo op was happening. He was formerly of the British Army from India many years back.
We both spoke of rememberance and how a lot of people view WWII as something unimportant or something that they see in the movies. Because many of these people think appeasement will work.
Learn from history! It didn’t work in 1937 and it won’t work now! Remember, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance…
Pretty deep for this travelogue, eh? =)

I got in this evening and had a “London Underground” adventure.
The Underground was shut down for 9 stops going into London from Heathrow. Seems someone jumped and got caught under the tracks. So they shut down service.
After some back and forth between the Underground people and the Heathrow Express people, the Underground arranged free taxis to get us all to Northfields so we could catch the last train into London (there were five of us stranded that chose this option).
The problem was that I needed to get to either Paddington or Lancaster Gate tube stops and that meant transferring to different lines that have already shut down for the night.
That meant an adventure with a Greek Masters student (who knew which buses to take) and the London Bus System (late night).
Long story short, it took 2 hours to leave LHR to get back. An hour longer then it would have by Tube. Grimley says that I’ve experienced the worst of London Transit. I hope so.
Oh yah, updates coming later in the week about my week in Paris. It was surprising, doing laundry is expensive and the weather sucked big time.

Goin’ to LHR via Heathrow Express.
Why would I do that since it costs �13 one way?
Cuz Yumi-chan is here! Yay!
This is her last day in London, helping out some friends. And she’s staying out at Heathrow.
So I’m goin’!
The trains look familiar. That’s because they’re versions of the HK Airport Express trains except they’re about 10 years older…

So unlike my trip outbound where I had a nice empty seat next to me, this train had more passengers on it going to London Waterloo. And naturally I got seated next to some guy with really really really bad B.O. I mean it was the kind of BO that works its way up your nose like the pain you get when your nosehairs get pulled out. THAT bad.
Because of that, I spent much of the trip hanging out in the dining car with 8 Koreans who proceeded to drink all the beer that was for sale.
So I guess it was half an UA nightmare #2, cuz you don’t get a place to hang out on a UA flight!

Some things here are surprisingly cheap. You ask for water, non bubbly and you get Evian. Except over here, since it�s made here, it�s just simply �water� as opposed to some fancy imported French water that spelled backwards is “naive”.
Pain Chocolat is just an Euro, great way to have a fast breakfast. Coffee is good and reasonably priced as long as it’s not Starchuck’s.
The Metro has a tourist pass that�s not a bad deal too.
Some things here are surprisingly expensive, such as doing two loads of laundry. You see, I had this plan to get up early (which I did at 0700), go to the laverie nearby my hotel (I did) and do my laundry (I did not, at least right away).
The laveria had a machine that dispensed detergent. I wrote that in the past tense because the machine was not working. The coin thingy was bolted up and there were no other vending machines in any of the three laverias nearby.
I had to wait until 0900 to go to the Marche to get detergent. Then I did laundry.
A medium sized box of detergent cost about 2 Euro.
It cost 4 Euro to run the washing machine. Since I did two loads, that�s 8 Euro.
Then it took 20 minutes for one load and 30 minutes for the other to dry. That�s 1 Euro for every 10 minutes. Total for dry clothes: 5 Euro.
Add that all up and it cost 15 Euro for two loads of laundry. That�s close to US$20!
Chi Sin!

This Paris trip was fun! Here’s how it really began:
I was chatting with Andrew about a month back or so and just casually mentioned that I was heading out here. He said, “wow, Ellen and I are going to be in Paris in May too on (dates here)”.
So I just did the Paris leg at the beginning of my trip instead of at the end. Which makes sence since I’m flying back to CA from LHR instead of CDG, get it?
Now by an incredible coincidence, Meghan is also here in Paris for a couple of weeks, staying with friends. We exchanged emails and phone calls and voila, she’s at the Orsay with me!
But since you can overdo appreciation of art, we ducked out and visited the Eiffel Tower. The weather didn’t get any better so we passed on going up. That goes on my list of “things to do next time I’m in Paris”. However, we walked around a lot and caught up.
We wound up in the Latin Quarter, having coffee at a famous Cafe (Meghan, if you’re reading this, what was that cafe’s name again?) and dinner at a reasonable French chain restaurant. The mussels were good and the main plates were pretty filling.
Then it was time to go home…tired again!

Ellen and Andrew flew back to LAX this AM via SFO from CDG so I slept in! I didn’t realize how much running around we did here because I slept hard until 1000. And then realized that it wasn’t raining.
I finally visited the Arc d’Triomphe. It’s in the middle of a traffic circle but you can access it via a tunnel that runs underneath it. They wanted 7 Euro to go up to the top and since it wasn’t wet BUT it was windy and cold, I put that on my “do it next time I’m in Paris” list right below “visit the Dupont store” because they were closed for remodeling all this past week.
Since yesterday was the 59th Anniversary of VE-Day, there have been observances all over the city. On many of the buildings, there are plaques that remember those from the Maquis or the Underground who fought the Nazis throughout the Occupation.
There was a humongous tricolour hanging the height of the Arc and their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was immediately below. There were a lot of visitors.
After a brief snack (which is one of the things you do a lot in Paris because the food is good and good priced), I headed up to the Musee d’Orsay which houses art from the 1800s to the present.
The Orsay is located in an old train station that was built for the 1900 Paris Exposition but fell into disuse and disrepair over the years. When they created the Musee, they took all the “modern” art from the Louvre (they didn’t want it anyway) and began a gallery that is more accessible (not as much fire and brimstone religious art) and for many people, more enjoyable.
After about an hour there, I met Meghan, a former SMWMer/co-worker there and we puttered in the Musee for a few more hours.
Art!