Gorgeous day. It's hard to realize that people live like this, live in this city every day and can enjoy it. Of course, a lot of London is dirty and unsafe, but lots of it is parks and pubs and structures that date to the eighteenth century or farther. Even if you don't live in a luxury flat with a Thames view, you can leave your grimy bedsit and go off to any one of the free museums that look like palaces. We were in the Natural History Museum today, and it's gorgeous, ornate and yet restrained, multicolored stones and stolid skeletons, stuffed birds and wild sculptures.
I went up to Hampstead, my very first stomping grounds, looked in the window of the Worrell House (my first ever London address) while a ginger cat sat on the ledge and watched me watching some student practice guitar. I walked down over Primrose Hill (Sylvia Plath lived nearby at one point), then down through Regents Park. I went over the canal bridge that runs through the Park. I wanted to use the path along the canal but I was worried I wouldn't have enough time for the long way. I like the canal path because it backs up to the London Zoo, so as you trot along you have every chance of running across the odd wild horned animal peering at you through the fence.
I used one of the rentable bicycles and manuevered from Baker Street (the line of tourists outside of 221B Bake Street was comical, not least because they were all wearing yellow hats - a school group, I presume) all the way to Exhibition Road, which boasts the NHM as well as the V&A, which I wish I'd had time to wander through, if only desultorily.
After a truly amazing Salgado photography exhibit, I ended up picnicing by the round pond in Kensington Gardens, looking back on Kensington Palace, the place Victoria lived before she became queen.
It was beautiful, all of it. Did I mention it rained most of the day? Didn't matter. It was beautiful.
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