Trip Report: London, October 2022
Jan 3rd, 2023 | 04:09 PM
#1
Original Poster
Joined: Mar 2003
Posts: 23,446
Likes: 0
Trip Report: London, October 2022
This is the first of three reports on our travels to London, Tunisia and Marseille.
We started with a stay in London to recover from our overnight flight and the attendant time changes. We did not want to go to Paris, as we had been there in the Spring and did not want to impose on our friends. Besides it had been a long time since we were in London that a stay there would not be time lost.
We made reservations for an Airbnb in the Shoreditch area. Its location was fine: a short bus connection to the Old Street U-station, serviced by two or three different bus lines. The apartment was a basement apartment, spotless, with advertised WiFi connection. The only natural light was from the main door with a frosted glass window and two small rectangular windows pushed out and up in the bathroom and bedroom. Both of these windows were broken and could not be closed and it was rainy and cold when we were there. The WiFi was located in the apartment next door, also an Airbnb, but even when in that apartment, my flip phone could not recognize its existence. That meant that I did not have convenient (time-wise) connection with friends in and near London.
One day we went to the south side of the Thames. It started with a stroll through the Borough Market, which appears more oriented to tourism than when we first saw it in 2007. We also visited the Southwark Cathedral and eventually ended at the Tate Modern for a Cιzanne exhibit. That evening we saw a performance at the National Theater of Blues for an Alabama Sky which takes place in Harlem in 1930. The characters tend toward the stereotype, but it worked as a kitchen sink realism play, which may be why the London reviewer liked it while the NYTimes critic did not.
We had reservations for a dinner at NOPI which was excellent but I cant recreate the menu. I was under the impression that this Ottolenghi establishment catered to the theater goer, with a prix fixe from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. I guess that is not the case on Monday nights where one orders ΰ la carte; I would have preferred a set menu to see what they create as an ensemble.
Most of our other meals were forgettable. I did insist on a pub lunch hoping to get steak & kidney pie. That is rarely offered on the pub menus nowadays, at least the ones I perused, and my impression is that the menus are exactly the same in those old-fashioned pubs with the elaborate reconstructed signs such as this one:
https://flic.kr/p/2o52wTs
The food was fine but I wonder if the dishes are cooked from scratch at the tavern itself. The beer was good. The upstairs room was cozy and quiet. We had tried another more up-to-date locale; it was crowded and the noise was deafening; we decided to look elsewhere.
Aside from the specific reservations we wandered around different sections of London, using the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide for London as our reference. The pictures in this still unedited album represent what we have seen in our wanderings about town: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAgAHA
Eventually I will combine them with the previous pictures of visits to London and hope to be able to organize that amalgam into some rational geographical sequence.
We left London in a downpour to catch the Eurostar to Paris and a plane out of CDG to Tunis.
We started with a stay in London to recover from our overnight flight and the attendant time changes. We did not want to go to Paris, as we had been there in the Spring and did not want to impose on our friends. Besides it had been a long time since we were in London that a stay there would not be time lost.
We made reservations for an Airbnb in the Shoreditch area. Its location was fine: a short bus connection to the Old Street U-station, serviced by two or three different bus lines. The apartment was a basement apartment, spotless, with advertised WiFi connection. The only natural light was from the main door with a frosted glass window and two small rectangular windows pushed out and up in the bathroom and bedroom. Both of these windows were broken and could not be closed and it was rainy and cold when we were there. The WiFi was located in the apartment next door, also an Airbnb, but even when in that apartment, my flip phone could not recognize its existence. That meant that I did not have convenient (time-wise) connection with friends in and near London.
One day we went to the south side of the Thames. It started with a stroll through the Borough Market, which appears more oriented to tourism than when we first saw it in 2007. We also visited the Southwark Cathedral and eventually ended at the Tate Modern for a Cιzanne exhibit. That evening we saw a performance at the National Theater of Blues for an Alabama Sky which takes place in Harlem in 1930. The characters tend toward the stereotype, but it worked as a kitchen sink realism play, which may be why the London reviewer liked it while the NYTimes critic did not.
We had reservations for a dinner at NOPI which was excellent but I cant recreate the menu. I was under the impression that this Ottolenghi establishment catered to the theater goer, with a prix fixe from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. I guess that is not the case on Monday nights where one orders ΰ la carte; I would have preferred a set menu to see what they create as an ensemble.
Most of our other meals were forgettable. I did insist on a pub lunch hoping to get steak & kidney pie. That is rarely offered on the pub menus nowadays, at least the ones I perused, and my impression is that the menus are exactly the same in those old-fashioned pubs with the elaborate reconstructed signs such as this one:
https://flic.kr/p/2o52wTs
The food was fine but I wonder if the dishes are cooked from scratch at the tavern itself. The beer was good. The upstairs room was cozy and quiet. We had tried another more up-to-date locale; it was crowded and the noise was deafening; we decided to look elsewhere.
Aside from the specific reservations we wandered around different sections of London, using the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide for London as our reference. The pictures in this still unedited album represent what we have seen in our wanderings about town: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAgAHA
Eventually I will combine them with the previous pictures of visits to London and hope to be able to organize that amalgam into some rational geographical sequence.
We left London in a downpour to catch the Eurostar to Paris and a plane out of CDG to Tunis.
Jan 10th, 2023 | 04:35 PM
#3
Original Poster
Joined: Mar 2003
Posts: 23,446
Likes: 0
I have finally arranged my London photos in the best order I can figure. The sequence cant be absolutely seamless, so I punctuated it with train and Underground stations and generic street views, separating one section from another. Not perfect, but where does perfection exist?
Here is the London album. It probably will be subject to a few more deletions.
https://flic.kr/s/aHsjpP7jkW
Here is the London album. It probably will be subject to a few more deletions.
https://flic.kr/s/aHsjpP7jkW
