LDN – going walkabout…
If it’s Wednesday, it must be London and a short walk was necessary to find the breakfast room at Imperial College…
Or should I say rooms, because breakfast is provided in one of the biggest student dining areas that I’ve ever been in, and because it was so busy, seats were at a premium, but the food was freshly cooked as the catering staff cooked more to cope with the demand. Given how busy it was, it was also a good idea to load up two cups of coffee before finding a table.
Once fed and coffee’d, it was time to pick up the bag from my room and head off in search of the sharing lunch items to have later in the day. Time to wander around the area surrounding South Kensington tube station.
Yes, there were loads of shops selling all sorts of things (including Lamborghini cars – I kid you not!), but it took a while to find a Waitrose to get a couple of packs of filled wraps and some pain au chocolate bars plus a couple of bottles of water. Once sorted it was time to head up to the RGS and the meeting point with the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree Forum contributors and the trio of moderators who were joining us for all or part of the day.
Once we met up and introductions were made, it was time to take a wander around the Travel Photographer Of The Year exhibition in one of the RGS galleries and the adjoining gardens. Impressive? Oh yes as a certain cartoon bulldog that’s used to sell car insurance might say…
After leaving the RGS behind, it was time for a different London experience for me – getting on a London bus for the first time in about thirty five years! The destination on this part of the day was the Wellcome Trust building and a visit to the Institute Of Sexology (no, I hadn’t heard of it before either!).
Although an hour or so had been allocated to wander around this site, I found myself taking a wander downstairs to the multi-faceted shop on the ground floor (10/10 for stocking the London Modern Babylon DVD guys!) and a double espresso. Once everyone assembled, it was time for another bus, this time down towards Central London and St. James’ Park ( the park itself, not the similarly named football ground in Newcastle-upon-Tyne – only been there once to see a certain band that still had Bill Wyman as their bass player at that time).
After a brief wander through the park, it was lunchtime and starting to drizzle, so lunch was a standing up job for me as I’d noticed that others outside of our party had plumped for sitting down in deck chairs – and were being charged for this privilege!
Once we were fed, we moved on to see the tail end of the Pelican Feeding Time elsewhere in the park and witnessed a couple of witless herons trying to have a free meal for themselves by taking on some of the fish that the pelicans had left behind.
As the herons were failing miserably in their attempts at successfully feeding themselves, we moved on to Horse Guards and caught the mid to end sections of the Changing Of The Guard routine. Fortunately for me, I’d seen quite a few armed police officers in Lisbon a month before my visit to London, so seeing a fully armed police officer in Horse Guards wasn’t that extraordinary to me…
So, where next? Well, I could tell you the location but then I’d – nah, only joking! But somewhere in London are the offices of Lonely Planet and that’s where the bus journey and walk ended up And up as we were given entry passes to get to the six floor of the office block that Lonely Planet hang out in.
And what can you say? A suitable entrance hall with a selection of classic Lonely Planet guides surrounding a seating area, long desks with plenty of occupied and unoccupied computers on them (PC’s not Macs) plus meeting rooms and a library of Lonely Planet guides in both English and the multitude of other languages that they’re published in. A Forum/Moderator shot was taken for posterity by Lonely Planet’s Tom Hall before handing our passes in and heading out for the next bus and our next stop.
And the next stop was? Familiar territory – Camden Town and more specifically Camden Market. Why familiar? Largely because I’ve been to Camden Town a few times to see one particular band (The Skiff Skats) back in the mid-1980’s and also to take a band into the legendary Dingwalls Dance Hall back in my days of managing and promoting bands.
Camden Market is still one of the ‘hip’ places to go in London and yes, there were a few bearded hipsters in attendance that day too. After a wander around the market it was time to get undercover when the rain started, so an all-out personal assault on KFC was called for to get a drink and a small bite to eat at the same time. Once done, it was time to join the rest of the happy wanderers in the local Wetherspoons near Camden Lock.
When the rain stopped, it was time for a stroll along Regent Canal in the general direction of Lord’s Cricket Ground and onward to our eating place for the night – The Cedars.
It’s not the first time that I’ve eaten in a Lebanese restaurant and it’s certainly not going to be the last! As ever, I made a complete hash of trying to pronounce my menu selection (in English it was lamb cutlets with rice), but when the meal arrived, it soon became apparent that whilst I may polish off the cutlets, polishing off the rice might be a different matter. Needless to say, I wasn’t the only member of our group that had the same problem.
Want to know more about The Cedars – take a look at http://www.thecedarrestaurant.co.uk for more details. I suspect that like Arnie S, I’ll be back!
As the night was wearing on, it was time to head back to Imperial College. Now the quicker way back to my bed for the night was out of the question as a Tube strike had started at 6.30pm and it was now around 9.30pm. So it was time to get a couple of buses towards The Royal Albert Hall before crossing the road, heading back to the hall and phoning Caroline before finding a nice pint of cold Guinness and then bed…
Little did I know what the following Tube strike embattled day was going to bring!
LDN
Time flies – either when you’re having fun or when you’ve just thrown the alarm clock across the room!
I honestly meant to post this a couple of weeks ago, but things got in the way a little and distracted me (honest!).
The trip to London was done at relatively short notice after receiving an invite from a fellow poster on Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree Forum to head to London and join in a grand day out on foot or bus around the capital. And to meet up with other posters plus a trio of Lonely Planet‘s Forum moderators.
Getting down to London was easy thanks to a couple of offers on Grand Central‘s rail services – just over £13 for the journey down to London from Yorkshire and around £34 for the journey back in First Class.
Getting around London was interesting, even though I’d invested in an Oyster Card. First up was getting out of Covent Garden tube station as work on the lifts meant that you could get off the tube at Covent Garden, but not get on it as there were two lifts working rather than the usual four.
First stop in Covent Garden was Stanford’s – one of the best places for maps, travel books and accessories that I know of. An Oyster Card holder was all I needed on this first visit of the trip, but other items were noted to pick up later in the week. After a wander around, it was time to hit the tube again and head towards Kensington to find my room for the night.
But not before a quick detour into the Victoria & Albert Museum. All I was wanting was a coffee and a piece of cake, but there was also the notion of seeing what was in there in anticipation of a return visit with Caroline in the coming months. The place was quite busy, even though the Alexander McQueen exhibition has finished a few days beforehand.
The coffee went down well, but the cake was left where it was considering it was £4.50 for one slice (Caroline’s comment during a phone conversation later on was that she could have made two cakes for that price!).
And so to the digs for my two night stay in London – the residence hall blocks of Imperial College. I’d found this on booking.com and booked it because it was remarkably near where the Lonely Planet meeting up point was going to be the next day – the Royal Geographic Society.
It was also just a short walk from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. At a smidgen under £140 for two night’s B&B it wasn’t that cheap, but as it was Summer in London, the price bullet just had to be bitten…
Mind you, the room was a cut above the residence hall rooms I had as a student twenty years ago – ensuite, tea, coffee and toiletries provided and an outlook over the park in Princess Gardens. There was also a mini-market in one of the adjacent blocks and a student bar/eating place that proved to be one of the cheapest places to eat and drink whilst I was in London that didn’t have a set of golden arches on the signposts outside.
After eating early, it was time to head to The National Theatre to see a performance of Everyman. Now I was in the back row to see this play, but given that it was London, a packed house and a good cast, I wasn’t going to begrudge the cost of the ticket to witness the performance – £15.
One thing I didn’t expect was the way in which the rest of the audience descended on the auditorium just before the lights went down – most people are usually in their seats in the theatres near home about 15 minutes before the play or show starts.
Now I like wandering around London and have been known to go to a function, spend the day there, hit the ceremony at the end of the day and then go clubbing afterwards before heading back to a hostel to get some sleep at around 3.30am. Not now though as I’m twenty years older and a bit wiser!
So it was back to Imperial College and a just-before-the-bar-closed pint of Guinness, a call to Caroline and then it was time for bed, but not before doing some clothes washing and hanging up to dry in readiness for wearing again two days later…
To say that the following day was full-on would be an understatement, but you’ll have to wait until Wednesday for the next instalment!
Social media…
I’ve had a couple of requests recently asking whether there’s any kind of social media aspects to wisepacking…
The clear and final answer on this one is no!
I’ve personally been on social media sites twice over the last five years and have left them after three months or so on both occasions.
I’m aware that there’s been comments left on wisepacking by those using social media, but on several occasions, I’ve not been able to read them anyway as they’ve been in the person’s native language rather than English.
Why don’t I use social media?
Largely because of the various posts received during my time on those sites that were of little or no interest to me.
Other reasons? The time being spent on social media that could be better spent on other things elsewhere coupled with the fact that I don’t lug that much tech stuff around when I’m heading off anywhere.
Most of the places I go to in the UK don’t have mobile phone coverage, never mind wi-fi and as I don’t have a smartphone, tablet or laptop, it’s a bit of a non-starter anyway. I got rid of the smartphone back in April, I still can’t see the need for a tablet and whilst I could be tempted to go back to having a laptop, I don’t actually see that happening soon somehow.
As a fiftysomething, I take things in on my travels and make notes in a paper notebook. These can then be used to formulate pieces on wisepacking or form the basis for pieces for print media (which is where I started and still believe in).
It may be an age thing, but it works for me!
Smartphones? Or dumb-ass phones?
It’s twenty years since I got my first mobile phone.
It was a reaction to the fact that the publications I was writing for at the time needed to speak to me and to the fact that the student flat I was living in at the time didn’t have a phone, even though I was one of those helping to look after a residence hall and had a couple of on-call shifts every week.
So I got a half-brick size mobile phone and became the first student in either the Media or Business School to have such a gizmo (I was probably the only Media & Business Studies student in the UK who had a couple of national magazine columns at the time as well, but that’s another story…).
There were several smaller phones that followed in the wake of the half-brick between 1995 and 2010 of course, but then I made the decision to not have a phone and guess what? I didn’t miss it at all.
That changed with getting a new day job of course and then I noticed that most of my work colleagues (and Caroline’s sons and her daughter) were all using smartphones. So I ditched my pay as you go talk and text phone and upgraded to a smartphone…
Which I got rid of back in April 2015 and went back to a talk and text phone.
Well almost. There is internet and email capability on the new phone, but it’s not an Android phone and I don’t actually use the internet and email capability on it.
I’m not looking at it and swiping or stabbing it on a regular basis. I’m making calls on it or sending texts when I need to or using it as a watch and that’s about it.
Do I miss the smartphone? No, I’d rather have the dumb-ass phone as it works and only needs charging once a week or so.
Do I take the mickey out of smartphone users?
Sometimes, usually when there’s a group of people huddled around a table in a hostel, bar, cafe or restaurant and they’re all on their phones rather than communicating with others by talking to each other.
And then there’s those who text or do social media updates as they’re walking around a shop or wandering around a village, town or city. They’re so intent on what’s onscreen that they’re oblivious to the fact that there are other around them and that they’re either holding others up on the pavement or that they’re about to walk into a lamp post, sign post or another person.
The one that really took the biscuit was the lady in London who was so intent on her phone that she couldn’t even control the wheelie case that she was pulling along with her at the time.
Not only was she oblivious to everything else, she didn’t even hear words including ones that rhymed with clucking bell which were coming from a certain bloke behind her who was trying to get back to his hotel before the heavens opened once more!
There’s been a few conversations on forums recently about people taking smartphones with them on their travels to use for social media purposes, getting information from websites or to take photos with the phone (with or without the use of a selfie/selfish stick). One guy even wanted to use a selfie stick to take photos out of train windows whilst train was moving – as if!
There’s also been a few comments about whether such phones are covered by travel insurance if they’re stolen or damaged. My annual travel policy has a limit to such cover, another reason why I got rid of the smartphone, don’t travel with a phone wherever possible and why I use a reasonably priced digital compact camera on my travels rather than a DSLR.
Think it won’t happen? We got into conversation with a lady at Lisbon airport a couple of weeks ago whilst waiting for our plane back to Liverpool. She’s been on Tram 28 around Lisbon and had had her smartphone stolen, even though she’s heard about all of the alleged problems with pickpockets on that tram and elsewhere in Lisbon. Didn’t ask what type of phone it was, but after seeing the prices of certain Apple and Android phones a few months ago, I suspect that it won’t have been a cheap one.
Which brings me back to a point I’ve made on forums a few times now.
I don’t take a phone with me unless it’s unavoidable (i.e. I’ve driven to the UK airport and don’t want to leave the phone in the car for a week or more whilst the car is parked up). If I need to know something about a town or city then I’ll either ask or use a paper guidebook (an item that is still relatively cheap and doesn’t need to be charged up in order to use).
And I’ll talk to people in a hotel, hostel or cafe rather than being someone who hides in a corner staring at a screen for hours on end…
Thanks…
To those who took the time to leave some comments on here!
Glitch on my part is why they’re not visible on here, but thanks anyway.
One person commented on the words v pictures nature of the site.
That’s probably down to the fact that I have a print rather than an email/internet based background.
It’s about 30 years since I first started doing music reviews for The Northern Echo up in Darlington and 26 or so since I started writing for magazines such as Climber on a regular basis. I’ve also done editing on magazines here in the UK and spent a little bit of time doing editing on an award winning student newspaper too.
In terms of internet writing, I’ve posted on various websites for around 10 years and started planning wisepacking just over a year ago.
In terms of using the internet, I’ve been doing so since 1994 and have always preferred wordy sites to those that use picture after picture after picture to break up the copy.
A number of sites that I used to visit on a regular basis have switched to picture based breaking up of the copy and that’s when I’ve either stopped visiting the sites or reduced the number of visits to said sites.
As it stands at the moment, I’ll still be going for the wordy approach. There are a few items in the pipeline that will have more pics in them (travel accounts, practical pieces and others), but these will be the exception rather than the rule…
I guess it’s the joys of being a fiftysomething writer!
Nepal…
Isn’t a place that I’d like to be at the moment in the wake of what happened at the weekend.
The news footage shown on the BBC here in the UK has shown some of the after effects in cities and at Everest Base Camp and it’s good to see that countries, governments, non-government organisations and companies have reacted quickly as the effects have become known.
It’s a shame then that some people have been posting messages on forums about how their travel plans have been messed up because of the earthquake instead of thinking about what’s happened and how it affects the people, the families of those who have lost family members, relatives, friends, work colleagues plus the state of play in places, the infrastructure and the economy of the country.
One suspects that the posters should be thinking about others rather than themselves and pondering what it’s like in the places which have been affected by the quake and aftershocks that haven’t been accessed by rescue & medical teams or by camera crews…
Food for thought?
I’m in the middle of reading ‘My Trade‘ by Andrew Marr (Macmillan 2004/Pan Books 2005).
It’s about the media world and how it’s developed over the years, but the section on foreign correspondents has an interesting sentence that’s set me thinking.
‘Jet travel has rather limited the scope for genuinely adventurous travel writing; the bookshelves are crammed with guides giving worldly wise advice for holidaying consumers rather than offering discovery and fresh exploration.’
Are we travellers? Explorers? Or holidaying consumers?
The link to the Kindle book is…
wisepacking 