London (part 1)

Friday night we arrived in London. The ride with the Eurostar was a story of 30 minutes delay, no delay, maybe a delay, maybe not a delay and in the end 15 minutes delay. Oh well, we had proper seats, eventually we were served a light meal and we were in a pretty quiet wagon, so it could have been a whole lot worse. We had fun and we've also had a look at the things on offer during the conference that starts on Tuesday, so our conference schedule is set. 

Saturday we started pretty early, since we'd booked a Baja Biketour. With our guide Patrick, we've explored London by bike. I have to say that that's quite an adventure! I don't think I've ever broken this many rules while biking in one day, hahaha. The guide set a pretty easy pace and told us lots of interesting things, both historical facts and information about every day life in London nowadays. Like for instance how few people actually live in the area 'City of London' nowadays. The area is an independent area in London (also called The Square Mile). There are mostly businesses there now (banks, lawyers, insurance companies, stock brokers, etc) and fewer than 10,000 people actually live there. If you do live there, you have to be really rich, like in quite a few other areas. 

This street is in an area close to the city of London. Each house on this street costs at least 7 million pounds. From this angle you sadly can't really see the walled up windows. Those are from the period when there was a window tax (introduced by our very 'own' Dutch king William - who became king William III of England - in 1696). If your house had more than 10 windows, you had to pay taxes. So a lot of people walled up windows to avoid that. This tax law was abolished in 1851. Because the houses are listed nowadays, the owners are not allowed to open up those walled windows. One house was absolutely huge, but had over half of the windows walled up (and costs considerably more than 7  million). Kind of hard to believe anyone would pay that kind of money for a house and get so little daylight. 

One thing we saw during the bike ride (but was completely ignored by the guide, because he was only talking about Westminster - the houses of Parliament - across the Thames), was the COVID memorial wall. It really made an impression on me, both the wall and the fact it got ignored. It made it clear to me that even though a lot of people were affected one way or another, it's being completely ignored nowadays, almost as if it's something that didn't happen or that people just don't want to think about anymore. 

Sophie and I did have our 'touristy' photo taken hahaha.

During the tour we saw a pretty big part of the city. Most of them not all that off the beaten track, but one stop was an eyeopener for us. It was a system of tunnels where graffiti artists are allowed to show their work. It is ever changing, because the works get sprayed over all the time. Two works were protected (the bottom two). The tank is a work of Blek le Rat, the other by Ana Pallares. We also saw some young kids creating works on the wall. I did make photos of that as well and of other works, but I won't put too many up here. 

After the bike ride, we went to the National Gallery. I've been there before, but it is always a pleasure to visit. My daughter was a bit sad to hear there were so many more Monet paintings on show now (there weren't last time and she loves Monet). I've sent her photos of all of them to ease her pain a bit ;). In front of the Gallery (at Trafalgar Square) there was a lot going on. A lot of stands, a big podium and a lot of people. It kinds of seemed like some kind of event to protest things (a lot of people on the fringes calling attention to the war in Iran, etc), but afterwards we found out it was because there will be elections for a new mayor of London in a few weeks. Possible candidates could present themselves there. It may have been interesting to walk around there, but since we were already starting to flag a bit and we still had the Gallery and our evening program to go, I'm glad we didn't explore that. 

For dinner we went to a pub near the Victoria Palace Theatre (we had tickets for Hamilton). The place was really hopping with locals. We were happy to be off our feet for a bit and enjoyed a pint of cider and some British food. 

After dinner it was time to go to the theater. We had box seats in the royal circle. It was amazing to sit in one of those boxes. We missed out on some of the action (what happened at the side of the stage), but being so close to the actors, to see all the emotions and even have eye contact with them was absolutely amazing. A once in a lifetime experience. Sophie and I have both seen the musical on Disney+, but the live experience was amazing. If you've never seen the musical: please do (even if it's the Disney+ version). It tells you a lot about the history of the founding of the USA, from an interesting and different point of view.