This has to be quick and dirty, and worse, no epic digital camera movies, either. We leave London for Amsterdam tomorrow and have spent a wonderful four days in this somewhat overwhelming city. Like Rome, New York, and Paris, London dwarfs you and makes you feel your mortality as you dance in its fumes, its jolliness, and its history. Although Anne and I have been in London before, we have regressed to pure tourism to show the city to boys for the first time. So: doubledecker tour buses, the London Eye (the slowest way in town to bleed 30 quid), the Tower of London, which was darkly fascinating, Hamley's, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square (over and over again: that's where the cinemas are!) and Trafalgar Square, where the pigeons of my childhood have been eaten by falcons the city introduced a while ago to clear them off. Sad, but it's cleaner. I know the boys would have loved to feed them, but they liked climbing on the lions enough.
Today we took them to the British Museum to see the Terracotta Army. There are about 15 of the 7000 or so terracotta soldiers, officials, acrobats, musicians, strongment, horses, and geese that the brilliant and megalomaniac first emperor of China had made for himself in order to rule China as well as the universe from beyond the grave. A really moving exhibition and a very early historical example of what Hitler might have done if he'd won the war: got the trains to run on time and gone slowly mad. Still, the remains of this madness are really stunning to see, and these two millenia gone by are enough for us to forget whatever atrocities this man must have committed in order to rule as absolutely as he did.
Anne and I have been spelling each other on and off these few days, and going to see movies or eating out or shopping on our own. It's so nice to see a couple of first-run flicks after all this time away from movie houses. I took the guys tonight as she did last night. We went to see Ratatouille (again) and then had an Italian meal at a nice little place near Russell Square, everyone sort of staring at us, wondering what this guy was doing with two little boys in a nice Italian place at 8:30 at night. But they were very nice to us, and apart from wearing the napkins as hats and trying to spear the icecubes in their waterglasses with their forks, the boys were very well behaved.
Like Paris, we take the big city as an opportunity to eat anything but French food. I believe the combined culinary accounting includes Indian (twice), sushi (twice), Italian, Mexican, and one or two others. We had a great Indian (adults only!) meal with our old friends Elizabeth and Anthony near their house in North London Saturday night ... so nice to have an adult conversation over curry.
That's the capsule report for now ... something more detailed before long.
Update ...
We're here in Amsterdam! One short hop flight and boom, new city. We lived on top of each other in London: cheek and jowl, beds pressed together, a tiny 10" television set bolted to the wall seven feet up a wall ... we got pretty tired of it quick, although London was magnificent. Now we're in a third-floor two-bedroom apartment with 10 foot ceilings, overlooking one of the many canals here and already in love (and GRATEFUL for some space!!) I walked two kilometres—through various, discrete clouds of pot-smoke—to get to a store that was still open in order to buy some supplies for the morning. I took a cab back and was dropped 200 metres from our building, which is about 50 metres from where the real window-market in prostitutes starts, and walked back past pink-lit windows with women sitting in chairs wearing almost nothing smiling very nicely as I walked past. I hope it wasn't the bananas in my shopping bag that gave the wrong impression.
So we're here safe and sound and exhausted: Anne is groaning with delight as she settles down into the nice bed about 20 feet from me.
