London Trip -- Day Two

So, we arrived in London a day late -- and after 2 hours going through customs, 30 mins on the train from Gatwick to Victoria Station, and our first navigation of the Underground, we came up out of Embankment station and walked the streets of London for the first time. As we hiked with our backpacks down the Strand towards our hotel, the street reminded me, rather oddly, of Canal Street in New Orleans (and I'm not sure exactly why, perhaps something in the breadth of it and the color of the buildings and a faint uneasy feeling walking in a new city for the first time), but it passed and twas never to return. After checking in, we began wandering around London, going from Trafalgar square, to Picadilly Circus to pick up a pass that we would greatly whore out -- going to museums and places we otherwise wouldn't have visited but were glad to have seen.








After dodging some traffic and jumping over a couple of walls, we got our first glimpse of the Thames, which despite (or maybe a little bit because of) its shadowy lineage of rubbish, became one of our favorite rivers.









The skies that afternoon were dramatic, cloudy with bursts of sunshine and always promising rain. That pretty much typified the weather for the entire trip.










We crossed the Millineum Bridge to visit the Tate Modern. Some quality stuff and some rather horrendous miscarriages of art. We also took a nap on the grass out front.








That night we visited Shakespeare's Globe.





And we saw a brilliant performance of Merchant of Venice, replete with its homoerotic not-so-sub-text and its great complication of "value".





After the play it was around 10:30 and the sky had finally darkened. We saw London at night for the first time. The city takes on this amazing, mysterious, and almost magical air.



Walking around late in the evening became one of our favorite parts of the trip.