Doing the Tourist thing in London

It is hard to get more than a superficial sense of a place from spending a few days there, and especially as a tourist.  When I went to London, for example, I saw the inevitable sights such as the palaces, the museums, the landmarks, the statues, etc.  I walked the streets, I took pictures.

  I ate, I slept, I looked around.  The museums were first rate. London seems well adapted to the demands of the modern city with its fast food, little shops, inevitable souvenirs and postcard stands, tee shirts.  Piccadilly circus seems to be an enormous tourist trap and I was there trapped along with all the other tourists with their cameras looking at stuff, with a multi-storey Ripley's Believe it or Not museum  right on the circus itself, and flanked by LED advertising of mainly Korean products (Hyundai, LG, Samsung), and a theatre in which Hitchcock's famous old film "The 39 Steps" had been converted into a play, and a "Cool Brittania" store, which was a very large gift emporium.  The place was kind of cool, but then I'm easily amused. 

And I suppose if Hell became a tourist attraction, there would be tee shirts for sale saying "My parents went to Hell and all I got was this crummy tee shirt". 

Dante:  Kinda Reminds me of my trip to Yellowstone

There would be Inferno refrigerator magnets, a Dante's Believe it or Not museum, a casino (if you lose you have to stay), and demon bobble heads.   And of course the money changers would overcharge you and everything would be absurdly expensive.   Indeed Dante was the first infernal tourist.  He was suffering a midlife crisis and had to take a vacation.  Unfortunately his pictures were lost at the processing lab (but no one really wanted to look at them anyway). 


That's Gary Sinese over there posing

  I stopped in and had a look at Cool Brittania.  It consists of two floors of tourist knick knacks like buttons and even wall clocks that say "Keep Calm and Carry On", and tee shirts with rude or humorous sentiments printed on them, toy double decker buses, union jack underwear

, flags, pennants, pictures of the Beatles, cardboard cutouts of the royal family,  mugs with big breasted women with the words "London", wall posters of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, postcards with the royal family and/or their dogs on them,  toy red British telecom phone booths and so on. 

I ended up buying a little blue backpack with the word "London" on it to carry my little collection of stuff back to America.   All this kitsch is rather predictable and God knows, I've seen the same thing in Chicago, except in Chicago it has "Chicago" printed on it and instead of Big Ben you have little plastic skyscrapers for sale with "Willis Tower" printed on them.    

Museums can take up a lot of your time, of course, but I wonder sometimes if I could have used my time more profitably avoiding the museums.  Sure it was a feast for the eyes, but after a while you are surfeited with looking and seeing.  The quiet and massive halls at length tempt me to sleep, if only there were a place to lie down and to think:  I need another brownie, and where is the toilet?  The British Museum for example, to do it justice, might accommodate a dozen visits for an hour or two each time, but then I can easily enough read and think about antiquities at home.  It was interesting to reflect that I had seen a replica of one of the better Elgin Marbles that was used to decorate the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Lapith and Centaur do battle on the South Side

  Maybe if I had brought with me a mind more steeped in the details of the ancient world, I would have enjoyed it more, but as it was I wasn't sure what the difference was between the Assyrians and the Babylonians, or between the Egypt of the Pharaohs,

Ozymandias and or the various Ptolemies.  After you have seen one mummy you've kind of seen them all, or so it seemed to me. 

I strolled down from the Green Park station to view Buckingham Palace and the massive monument to Queen Victoria complete with fountains and bronze sculptures on a heroic scale.   And elsewhere there are stone and bronze monarchs. 

William IV I found at Greenwich, Queen Victoria was also featured in front of Kensington Palace, and  George V  on the south side of Westminster Abbey.  As a stamp collector, I should know what these guys look like, since just about every British stamp features a picture of them.  And then there are all those Royal Consorts, and it was a shame I guess I never found time to have a look at the Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall. 

There is even one of Oliver Cromwell over by the Houses of Parliament, which seems odd since during the restoration, almost the first act of the new regime was to dig up his body, behead him and throw the rest of him into the Thames.   I guess Cromwell was kind of a local, i.e. parliamentary hero and has since been "rehabilitated" in the eyes of the British people.