London, part 2

The Marble Arch

If you want to see a lot of London in a hurry and are not familiar with the city, tour busses are definitely the way to go. We took "The Original Tour" bus line - the Red Route, "The City Sightseeing Tour". There are other bus lines available which may or may not offer better value. We got on the tour at the Marble Arch, just outside of Hyde Park.

Haymarket, looking past Nelson's Column to Parliament

The open-top busses offer a great vantage point from which to take pictures. But we didn't count on how cold it would be in London in the second week of March, nor did we consider the effect of wind chill from riding in an open-top bus. Damn, it was cold. It actually snowed at one point.

Piccadilly Circus and the statue of Eros

We took the tour on Saturday, which helped us formulate a battle plan for Sunday and for our Saturday evening in the West End. Piccadilly Circus became our main point of contact with the big red double-decker busses that would get us back to our hotel.

St. Martin-In-The-Fields and a very strange-looking statue

The busses moved fast, a lot faster than I had expected. I believe this is in part due to recent traffic regulations that have cut down on the number of private cars in London and have opened up "BUS ONLY" lanes throughout the busiest parts of the city. As a consequence I was hard-pressed to get unblurred pictures as we zipped along, and I wasn't always able to leave the audio memos on my camera that I had counted on to make sense of my photos. Fortunately I have the DK Eyewitness Guide to London and my tour bus map to help me determine the identities of the things in my pictures.

Nelson's Column

I first heard of Nelson's Column in the book version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When Arthur Dent was trying to come to grips with the reality of Earth having been demolished by focusing on the loss of slightly smaller but significant things, Nelson's Column was one of the things on his list. I assumed at the time that it was a newspaper column.

Look, kids! Big Ben!
(The red double-decker bus in the foreground is advertising the movie "V For Vendetta", in which Parliament and Big Ben are blown to bits. The movie didn't open until a week after we were there, so we saw Big Ben just in time!)

We were very excited when we caught our first glimpse of the Parliament clock tower commonly known as Big Ben. For tourists, Big Ben more than anything else represents London; you haven't seen London until you've seen Big Ben. This was our first glimpse, but definitely not our last. But those photos will have to wait for the next installment!