great expectations

It all began this morning after a mad dash from the Royal Opera House box office to the Tower of London. My first official act of tourism - the sort of thing I've been trying to avoid since day one. A guided tour. Our guide successfully exceeded my expectations with his gelled hair, his fanny pack speaker attached to a ludicrous microphone headset, and his general inability to be discreet.


This is him pre-mic explaining that William the Conquer was actually known to the English as William the Bastard - said so emphatically that he could almost be likened to a fervent preacher, saliva projection included.


Next up was boat ride down the River Thames, also narrated, but far more interesting as it was an employee of the boat company. Apparently in the 1960s someone ran the lights on the bridge as it was being drawn up to allow a boat to pass through, and instead of hitting the brakes, slammed the gas and actually jumped the gap in a double-decker bus.


No one died, so the city awarded him £10 for his bravery. This tour guide mostly pointed out pubs: The Grape, The Mayflower, The Captain Kidd, etc., justified by his level of expertise having visited all of them. I really enjoyed seeing all of the old industrial wharfs, which are mostly apartments now, selling for about £1.5 million.


Oliver's Wharf was known as an execution site in the past. Apparently, they would take the criminals down in low tide and chain them up so that they would drown as the tide came in.


Back on land and in Greenwich, our lovely sermon continued against the backdrop of a chilly, gray, London day. The buildings pictured above were designed by Christopher Wren as a retirement home for sailors. Nowadays they are museums, but are also often used in movie sets.


And there it is. The reason for the day trip all the way out to Greenwich and the humiliation of a guided tour. At 12:55pm GMT everyday that red ball rises to the top of the pole only to drop at precisely 1:00:00 GMT in a New Years-everyday fashion allowing anyone within viewing distance to sync their watches with 'good London time.'


After the vigor of a ball drop, we needed refreshment whereby we discovered a market that sold all sorts of wonderful homemade goods. For a very reasonable price I took home a macaroon bigger than my fist and quite tasty, too.


Here I am at the center of the world, or at least that is what the British would have you think. Apparently when they decided that they get to have the Prime Meridian France wasn't so happy about the whole thing, but they got past it.


Why the empty plate? At the urging of our dandy preacher, and our hungry bellies, we decided to partake in some local cuisine. The Trafalgar is a pub where Charles Dickens used to live, and according to our tour guide it is famous for a dish called 'white bait.' The name should have been a clue, but in fact we were far too excited to go inside the haunt of a literary giant to think clearly.

'We'll take two.'

We got sixty... small, deep-fried, whole fish. A school of soft-boned beauties just waiting to be devoured. One very long hour, and six lemons later, we exited the pub triumphantly, somehow feeling as though we had been inducted into an important food ritual, and at the same time that we should return those little fishies to the river they came from before our bodies began to absorb them.


And to top off my very classy meal I headed back to the Opera House just in time for Sleeping Beauty, which lulled me into a dreamland of sparkles, tiaras, and Tchikovsky very unlike the cold, damp pub from which I came.