10/12/2015
We woke up at 3am to catch our 6:15am flight from Madrid to
London flying RyanAir. Since we’re staying in an apartment with a reception
desk that closes at nighttime, there was no hotel alarm clock available to
us—Angel brought her own. We came prepared because we didn’t want a repeat of
last time in Edinburgh. Angel and I took turns sleeping that night because we
didn’t have an alarm clock and our flight was early in the morning too.
I was super paranoid about luggage weight because RyanAir
charges you an arm and a leg for every little thing. 1 kilo over? 50 pounds.
Don’t have your boarding pass? 15 pounds. Crazy! (It used to be 70 pounds to
print your boarding pass, but after much customer complaint, the CEO finally
ceded and decreased the fee. Although he did say, “If people can’t be arsed to
print their own boarding passes, they deserve to be hit with a fee.” Never mind
that a whole lotta people are traveling and don’t have access to a printer!)
At the time I reserved the airline tickets, I’d prepurchased
checked-in luggage because it’s more expensive to pay for it at the gate. There
was an option of 15kg for one price, then 20kg for another. Being us, we
purchased the 15kg option for each one of us, thinking we weren’t going to buy
anything in Portugal or Spain. The motherload is in London. But somehow we
ended up buying more chocolates and nibbles than we anticipated, so every one
of our luggage was 15kg right on the dot. RyanAir’s luggage scale counts in
0.5kg increments, which is so ghetto of them.
We got in line at the check-in counter, but when it finally
came to our turn, the lady wouldn’t let us check in because—turns out—if you’re
not a EU resident, you have to go to RyanAir’s office first to get a stamp on
your boarding pass. Then you go and check-in. Grrr. So we had to get out of
line, roll our luggage to the office, get the stamp, then get back in line to
check in. They should really have signs telling you this before you get in line!
The flight was supposed to be about 2 hours, but our pilot
sped so we got there ½ hour early. Yay! The pilot flew smooth, but the seats
were uncomfortable because they don’t recline whatsoever. There’s no buttons on
the armrest.
When we arrived at London Stansted, we went up to the
Stansted Express booth to buy the train tickets into the city center. There’s
competing businesses offering this service; National Express is a bus system
that’s slightly cheaper but doubles the time it takes to get to London. Had I
bought the Stansted Express tickets online like my gut was telling me to do,
the tickets would’ve been 8 pounds each. But since I didn’t, they turned out to
be a little less than 12 pounds each. And the booth wouldn’t take credit cards.
Argh! Should’ve just bought online!
We were ½ hour late getting to our Airbnb apartment because
of tube transfers (Stansted Express drops you off at Liverpool Street station).
When we finally arrived, the guy who was supposed to let us in wasn’t waiting in
front of the building. Uh oh. None of us had a phone, so I asked around and
found a payphone around the corner. But the payphone just kept eating our coins
and wouldn’t go through. Angel and I went into a coffee shop where a very nice
cashier let us use the phone, but there was no response on the other end. This
was seriously starting to feel like a Seinfeld episode. Time to panic? Starts
NOW. What if we can’t get a hold of him? What if we’re stuck outside the whole
day? What if he never shows? Or he’d already showed and left because we were
late?
Our schedule for the day was already pretty packed and this
was delaying everything. Angel and I went back to the apartment building, where
someone had let our parents go into the building foyer and out from the cold
(it’s COLD here!). I was getting desperate, so I asked the next guy who walked
into the building if I could use his cell phone to call someone. I’d began to
explain the situation when he introduced himself as the guy we were supposed to
meet! There was a misunderstanding, and he thought we’d call him when we
arrived. He’d been waiting in a café around the corner. When I told him we
didn’t have cell phones (and that the ones we did have didn’t have texting
capabilities), he was completely baffled by us and said he didn’t know how he
could live without his smartphone haha.
After getting settled in, we went to Churchill’s War Rooms.
Our Stansted Express train tickets allowed us 2-for-1 entry in a bunch of
different attractions in London, and it’s valid for a 24-hour period. Churchill’s
War Rooms has a steep admission fee of 18 pounds, so we saved 36 pounds here
alone! It’s a popular attraction because, c’mon, it’s Winston Churchill. And
because it’s housed in the original location, it’s underground, very cold and
damp, very tight and narrow, so they only allow a certain number of people in
at a time. Sometimes the queue extends all the way down the block!
On the way there, we saw Trafalgar Square, which strangely enough, has always eluded us until now:
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| Trafalgar Square |
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| Admiral Horatio Nelson - Dad's favorite English hero...besides Churchill, of course |
Just a little ways down from Trafalgar is the Horse Cavalry Museum:
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| Horse Cavalry -- the horse poop stinks! Don't know how the guard stands it all day! |
And we arrive at the Churchill War Rooms. You can see the queue in the reflection:
The war rooms are one big flight of stairs underground
because they were afraid of being bombed during WWII. I'll let this explain it more succinctly:
Since they all worked underground, there would be markers telling the workers what the weather was like above ground that day:
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| Transatlantic Telephone Room |
Another one of the weather markers is "Fine":
Typical dry Brit humor, one of the workers, Rance, famously changed the weather indicator to "Windy" when air raids were in progress above ground.
Gas masks for typists so they could work through a gas attack without
stopping:
The typists had to undergo regular sunlight treatment for vitamin D deficiency as they would
work down there for several weeks at a time without ever seeing sunlight.
Churchill made be a hard taskmaster, but he was very harsh on himself too. His typical workday was 8am to 3am. Wowza!
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| One of Churchill's famous jumpsuits |
He lived to 90, which is very impressive considering he’d
have champagne for breakfast, wine for lunch, port for dinner, in addition to
smoking his famous cigars and ate a very rich diet. Because he was so demanding and
exacting, his chef was known to say that this post was her contribution to the
war effort. He had very expensive taste, but because of rationing, she had to
be inventive while satisfying the great man. He slept very little during the
war, working 8am-3am every day. He was harsh and expected the best from
everyone, and he was no exception to the rule. He pushed himself to breaking
point, and had a stroke.
Churchill's take on his very refined taste: “I’m very easy to
please. I just eat the best.” One of the menus for his dinner was with truffle
butter!
The love of his life was his wife, Clementine, who he called Clemmie. Below is a letter she wrote him, expressing her dismay of his rather short attitude toward his colleagues:
She never took an active role in politics, but he always listened to her advice (much like a good husband should).
D-Day victory – King Edward wrote a letter to Churchill
saying that contrary to their previous plans, he thinks they shouldn’t be there
on the D-Day victory because the risks were too great should they get bombed
during the celebrations. England might lose a monarch and they definitely couldn’t
afford to lose Churchill.
Below are some of Churchill's famous (or funny) remarks:
On wooing Roosevelt into WWII:
There is a painting on display in the museum that he painted during the years he was forced out of politics after WWII. It's a gorgeous piece very reminiscent of Impressionist painters. Indeed, Churchill submitted it to an art contest under a pseudonym and they deemed it worthy to be shown in their gallery.
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| Churchill's bestselling books |
Churchill had a hearing aid, which he used to his advantage:
On his opinion of King Edward marrying Wallis Simpson:
The door to 10 Downing Street:
If you can't make out the words, Churchill says: "I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial...I was sure I should not fail." This was his reaction to getting back into power on the eve of WWII.
Clemmie's bedroom:
One of Churchill's staff members commented that his wife seemed to make it her life task to disagree with everyone.
One of the workers drew Hitler on the map:
The maps on the wall are the original maps Churchill and his
generals used to plot out the enemy and the Allies’ movements each day. In
fact, the whole area has been arranged like a time capsule, taking us back to
1940 England.
Churchill's bedroom:
He only slept in this room a total of three times. He didn't like the cold, damp bunker and often insisted on going back to his proper bedroom in 10 Downing.
Propaganda posters:
It was wartime and so the rationing was pretty severe. One
of the generals squirreled away 3 sugar cubes, but he left the War Rooms rather
abruptly. Researchers unearthed his precious labeled sugar cubes in the 1990s.
I love these quotes by Churchill:
...and the real 10 Downing Street, which is just a block away from the Churchill War Rooms:
Based on movies, I always thought you could just waltz up to the front door of 10 Downing. I did not realize there were guards and a huge iron fence in the way.
After the War Rooms (which I could spend at least half a day in here, though was forced to go because we had a schedule to keep), we went to the National Portrait Museum. They had a Audrey Hepburn photograph exhibit that was also 2-for-1. If it hadn't been, I would’ve been just a tad pissed because the entrance fee was pretty steep and it was, for the most part, just photographs of her on display. For some reason, I thought there'd be more artifacts or costumes on display. I can google her pictures any time I want to!
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| Audrey's ballet slippers |
We split from Mom & Dad at this point because we had a musical to watch tonight. They went home and we shopped near Covent Garden, which is a very busy tube stop but we walked there from Leicaster Square. There’s a Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer’s Simply Food, Tesco Express all very close to Adelphi Theater.
For dinner, we scored a king prawn and avocado sandwich half off at Marks & Spencer:
We're watching Kinky Boots tonight, winner of 6 Tony awards:
Cyndi Lauper wrote the songs and it's based on a true story of a man who's struggling to save his family's shoe business from closing. He decides to change the business model and product line, producing fetish footwear for men instead of the staid shoes his family has been producing for generations.
Kinky Boots was hilarious. The music was upbeat, the dancing
fun, the costumes out of this world. It was very moving. I almost cried when
Lola sang about her dad. It has a very positive attitude about accepting people
the way they are.
I’d wondered aloud if the dancers were men or women. I guessed men because of the cleft chins, but Angel thought they were women. When we came out of the theatre, turns out, they're men! But super cut, super fine men. J
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