» London, first day - Umamiblog, by John Lewis

London, first day

Having slept for an insanely long time I eventually woke up in the wee hours of Monday morning. The first thing I noticed is how light it is here so early in the morning. It starts to get light come about 2:30am and is fully bright by about 4am. It’s disturbingly early for light.

Trey and I were subsequently up quite early and by 6am we were waiting to take a tube into the city. We stopped off at Islington and found a place open for breakfast. Islington appears to have been gentrified somewhat but is gorgeous. We then went walking past these canals Trey had spotted the day before. It was quite neat and picturesque and the temperature was slowly starting to rise as the morning went on.

From Islington we followed the canal quite far until we reached another tube station that took us to St Paul’s, it was stunning from the outside and even better from the inside. Yoko Ono had a couple of things at the cathedral. This was a peace tree that people had attached little messages to – there was another similar installation on the inside of the cathedral too.

We started in the crypt and slowly moved our way to the main floor. Sitting in the centre of the cathedral and looking up is just awe inspiringly beautiful and the decoration is amazing. Of course you can’t take any photos inside and that’s probably a good thing just for the fact there would be no way you could fit in all the color and other subtleties in a photo.

Once inside you can climb up to three different vantage points. The first is the whispering gallery which true to its name you can whisper to someone on the other side of the gallery and hear them fine – the acoustics are rather unique.

If you climb even further up you get to the outside at the lower part of the dome – the views are great and as you walk around you get a 365 degree view of the city and most famous landmarks. Climb even higher and you get to a little gallery on the outside through some very narrow staircases that is above the dome. There isn’t much space at the top and there are plenty of people.

One of the landmarks you can see directly from the top of St Paul’s is the Millennium Bridge leading to the Tate Modern. We found our way down from the top and across the river Thames to the Tate. The art and architecture in the Tate was really good and there were throngs of people there. One of the coolest installations was where they’ve hooked something up to the Millennium Bridge that listens to the vibrations made from people walking over it and then using and amplifying these vibrations to create music (or just noise) inside the museum. Cool.

We then went on a riverside walk towards the Tower of London and across the Tower Bridge – taking in all the riverside sights and attractions. From there we caught a tube up to Hyde Park and walked through the park while citysiders enjoyed the long sun and hot temperatures. Its funny how less harmful the sun is when you have an ozone layer above you – it’s great.

\we then slowly made our way towards Buckingham Palace where we strolled past a live television production that I had no idea of. When we did make it to the Palace we saw a little march of the guards on duty who then promptly stopped moving at all.

From there we decided it was probably time to start heading home and walked towards the tube station at Picadilly Circus. We stopped off at Islington again to go to the supermarket which was pretty much empty (of produce rather than people). Then finally we made it back to the hostel where after a quick shower I had to collapse. We’d been out for close to 16 hours by the time we’d made it home.

Photos

Shots of the canal near Islington.