Architect Abroad

Mike, Laura, and I absolutely loved our time hanging out in London. With the London Go City pass we managed to do over 30 attractions ranging from the London Eye, The Crown Jewels, Afternoon Tea, the soaring heights of the Shard, the karaoke fever craze that was the ‘Fun Bus Tour’ (Legend), all for the price of about $40/person/day. The pass included several Meals, Wicked Theatre tickets, Walking & Tours, Museums & Galleries, Adventure Parks, Royal Apartments, Booze Tastings, and pretty much everything you could imagine for a raucous 10 days in London. All the attractions were great, the most unexpected joy was the washrooms of the Shard Building having floor to ceilings windows so you can have a very exposed pee at 60 stories up with an excellent view of the city.

We also loved going to the play Cyrano (not included in the pass) but it was so moving that I was bawling, much to my teenager’s shock. Another unexpected awesome bit of London was taking a canal tour from ‘Little Venice’ to home of punk rock – Camden Town. The canals were made across England for industrial shipping uses across the island and are now places were Londoner’s recreate, tourists gather, and some call home on houseboats. You see a very different perspective of the city via boat and you can see the layers of history that London has lived through as the canals are among the oldest parts of the city. In a very strange and watery version of ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’, the canals connect heavily industrial areas such as coal electricity plants to the most expensive real estate in the city (including secret gardens of a certain Sultan of Oman). You can see marks of the industrial revolution with the bridges crossing it being riveted steel works, you can see the remnants of ‘horse power’ where the horses would pull at ropes to tug the boats along the canal, those rope marks are etched deep into the steel corners of bridges they wore at over the years.

The only trouble with doing a London city pass is not the ‘value’ part, its not even that the attractions are not entertaining, it is the ‘not living like a local part of things’. It is the feeling that being a tourist starts to feel like full time employment as you try to cram all the things while racing around the city. The hard lesson of London is to try to slow down more and enjoy, that lesson was accentuated by the fact I picked up a creeping and painful case of the ‘Disney Rash’ that I can’t quite shake. Travel always brings odd ailments that apparently only time, walking less than 20,000 steps a day, and diaper rash cream can solve.

Part of me was tempted to never leave London, but living here would be a totally different experience from touring it…I am not sure that my liver could actually take living here with a pub culture this strong. Besides, the world beckons, and the adventure has only just begun.