This trip's mostly to Scandinavia. But I came to London first so I could arrive in Denmark tuned up, rested, poorer, and fashionably rumpled and stubbly.
London's a good place to adapt to jet lag, because I more or less speak the language and not much is expected of tourists here. When it gets confused, my body just wakes up at 5am every day. I'm not sure why it does this; if it knows when 5am is, it must know when 9am is, too. But there's no way to explain these things to yourself. You have to envy the self-programmable cyborg humans of the future, who will look back on us with the same pity we feel for people of Medieval or Bronze Age Europe.
I got in late, took an express train from Heathrow, and then had to move on by tube and by foot. Unless you're staying near Paddington, the express train saves you about fifteen minutes of time on the tube, at well over £1 per minute. On a Friday night, this isn't bad value, because everyone else is drunk and 22. You just sit there trying to keep your suitcase out of the way and silently disagreeing with all the people loudly explaining to their friends that they need another drink.
I walked through UCL, along the canal in Camden town, and saw the Wallace Collection -- one of the world's finest collections of armour, Old Masters, dog portraits, and 18th century French paintings of women with one nipple showing for no obvious reason. Groups of tiny uniformed schoolchildren are sketching all over the place. They're all terrible ("God, that's awful").
I bought a ticket online from the bandits who control the British rail system and went down to Winchester, the ancient capital of Wessex. The countryside is green and rolling, and Winchester turned out to be a handsome medieval town thronged with tourists and buskers. One sat on the market cross and sang singer-songwriter songs, one played the Beach Boys and kept moving about -- I'd hear someone strumming a Beach Boys song around the corner and think, "how did he get ahead of me again?" Both were using amps, which I still think is wrong. If you have a guitar, you're a busker. If your guitar is plugged in, you're putting on a concert no one wants. Also, playing a handful of Beach Boys songs over and over for seven hours isn't fair to passers-by, to yourself, to the Beach Boys, or to the town's medieval ambience.
Winchester has a vast, gray, lichen-blotched cathedral that's quite expensive to get into (out of consideration for overseas tourists who will never return, it sells only annual passes). Unless, it turns out, you show up on a Sunday. But you can't completely outfox them that way, because on Sundays they also close off the display of the Winchester Bible, which is quite a Big Deal as medieval bibles go.
The cathedral also includes the tomb of Jane Austen, the tombs of a lot of people more interesting than Jane Austen, a stunning medieval quire, some hilariously ugly modern altar coverings, and memorials to Englishmen killed in wars -- ranging from large memorials to a simple table enumerating the numbers of local sergeants, privates, and drummers who died in the Crimean War (in battle; of wounds; of cholera). The cathedral was originally dedicated to St. Swithun, an underwhelming Anglo-Saxon saint whose most famous miracle was restoring some broken eggs. He's since been replaced, and is known to be available for any cathedrals that might now be seeking dedicatees.
There were idyllic English scenes outside: Park lawns like bowling greens, red-brick buildings, happy children running about. The cathedral grounds were also the finish line of Race to the King, which is apparently a 56 mile ultramarathon, and so there were any number of shattered-looking people in Camelbaks standing around.
The town also has credible but disputed-on-Wikipedia claims to the oldest pub and the oldest continuously-operating school in England. The pub business is tricky, because every pub you pass in Winchester or Bloomsbury (where I stayed in London) looks legitimately ancient and has some claim or other to historical significance -- Christopher Marlowe broke one of its chairs on Thomas Kyd, or Queen Anne played a perfect game of darts there.
I was half-awake for Winchester. I remember it being full of things it would have been nice to fall asleep on, if not for our society's stupid prejudice against passing out in public. Grassy areas, park benches, pews, cathedral altars, Jane Austen's tomb, parked cars. Had to concentrate quite hard to make sure I got the train back, and not a train going in the wrong direction, or something I thought was a train but was really a grazing cow or a log floating slowly down the river.
London's a good place to adapt to jet lag, because I more or less speak the language and not much is expected of tourists here. When it gets confused, my body just wakes up at 5am every day. I'm not sure why it does this; if it knows when 5am is, it must know when 9am is, too. But there's no way to explain these things to yourself. You have to envy the self-programmable cyborg humans of the future, who will look back on us with the same pity we feel for people of Medieval or Bronze Age Europe.
I got in late, took an express train from Heathrow, and then had to move on by tube and by foot. Unless you're staying near Paddington, the express train saves you about fifteen minutes of time on the tube, at well over £1 per minute. On a Friday night, this isn't bad value, because everyone else is drunk and 22. You just sit there trying to keep your suitcase out of the way and silently disagreeing with all the people loudly explaining to their friends that they need another drink.
I walked through UCL, along the canal in Camden town, and saw the Wallace Collection -- one of the world's finest collections of armour, Old Masters, dog portraits, and 18th century French paintings of women with one nipple showing for no obvious reason. Groups of tiny uniformed schoolchildren are sketching all over the place. They're all terrible ("God, that's awful").
I bought a ticket online from the bandits who control the British rail system and went down to Winchester, the ancient capital of Wessex. The countryside is green and rolling, and Winchester turned out to be a handsome medieval town thronged with tourists and buskers. One sat on the market cross and sang singer-songwriter songs, one played the Beach Boys and kept moving about -- I'd hear someone strumming a Beach Boys song around the corner and think, "how did he get ahead of me again?" Both were using amps, which I still think is wrong. If you have a guitar, you're a busker. If your guitar is plugged in, you're putting on a concert no one wants. Also, playing a handful of Beach Boys songs over and over for seven hours isn't fair to passers-by, to yourself, to the Beach Boys, or to the town's medieval ambience.
Winchester has a vast, gray, lichen-blotched cathedral that's quite expensive to get into (out of consideration for overseas tourists who will never return, it sells only annual passes). Unless, it turns out, you show up on a Sunday. But you can't completely outfox them that way, because on Sundays they also close off the display of the Winchester Bible, which is quite a Big Deal as medieval bibles go.
The cathedral also includes the tomb of Jane Austen, the tombs of a lot of people more interesting than Jane Austen, a stunning medieval quire, some hilariously ugly modern altar coverings, and memorials to Englishmen killed in wars -- ranging from large memorials to a simple table enumerating the numbers of local sergeants, privates, and drummers who died in the Crimean War (in battle; of wounds; of cholera). The cathedral was originally dedicated to St. Swithun, an underwhelming Anglo-Saxon saint whose most famous miracle was restoring some broken eggs. He's since been replaced, and is known to be available for any cathedrals that might now be seeking dedicatees.
There were idyllic English scenes outside: Park lawns like bowling greens, red-brick buildings, happy children running about. The cathedral grounds were also the finish line of Race to the King, which is apparently a 56 mile ultramarathon, and so there were any number of shattered-looking people in Camelbaks standing around.
The town also has credible but disputed-on-Wikipedia claims to the oldest pub and the oldest continuously-operating school in England. The pub business is tricky, because every pub you pass in Winchester or Bloomsbury (where I stayed in London) looks legitimately ancient and has some claim or other to historical significance -- Christopher Marlowe broke one of its chairs on Thomas Kyd, or Queen Anne played a perfect game of darts there.
I was half-awake for Winchester. I remember it being full of things it would have been nice to fall asleep on, if not for our society's stupid prejudice against passing out in public. Grassy areas, park benches, pews, cathedral altars, Jane Austen's tomb, parked cars. Had to concentrate quite hard to make sure I got the train back, and not a train going in the wrong direction, or something I thought was a train but was really a grazing cow or a log floating slowly down the river.
