I arrive at Heathrow 1:30 in the afternoon. Try to get Heathrow Express into Paddington, but line is closed due to fatal wreck the previous week. Instead take the tube (London Underground), a one-hour trip with lots of stops, but direct to Holburn.

Find hotel easily, very convenient. New hotel (The Holburn) with good (not cheap, but sensible) rate of 110 pounds, Internet special. The lobby is clean and well-lit, anonymous in an efficient, business-hotel sort of way (I could be anywhere in the world -- a suburb of Atlanta or the center of Yokohama -- these newish hotel lobbies all look the same).

My room looks out over a busy street filled with taxi cabs, double- deck buses, motorcycles and cars. I'm on the 4th floor. The phone works, the plumbing makes sense, the tilework in the bath is first- rate and there are fresh flowers on the small desk by the window. It occurs to me that I should have reserved two nights here and only one at the more expensive (and as yet unknown) Howard Hotel, where I have a business meeting in two days.

I get unpacked for the night, then go out for a quick bite to eat at an italian restaurant near Covent Garden. The food is not cheap, coming to $29 for a plate of unfortunate pasta and a glass of red wine. But the restaurant sits on a busy pedestrian corner -- the view outside is interesting -- and I have a good book. I can't really complain.

Walking through and around Covent Garden and nearby Soho, I quicky see that this is the hedonist center of the city. The streets are packed with mostly young, mostly drunk (or becoming drunk) Londoners all in search of fun. Covent Garden is reasonably tame, with chain stores (Gap et al) lining the tiled plazas, while Soho offers more seedy entertainments such as strip clubs, porn theatres and shops selling rubber and vinyl "accessories". I find a travel bookstore were I buy a copy of Donald Richie's "Tokyo" and a good London map. The Richie book is a good pick -- he invokes examples of London frequently in describing Tokyo's unique urban structure. (In just a two days here I can see that that there are many similarities. London and Tokyo are both cities with many points of focus, but no definable center.)

Back to the hotel to make a phone call home. After hanging up I consider getting out to see London's Saturday nightlife but I fall asleep on the bed instead, fully clothed and looking out the window at the darkened building across the way.

Sunday, October 18

Breakfast in the hotel (included in price and quite good). Spend too long trying to locate Howard Hotel. Sometimes (typically) I can be an idiot about these things. Rather than look it up or ask someone I set out walking, thinking I know where I'll find it. End up taking an hour (including a ridiculously short taxi ride) to make what should have been an easy ten minute walk.

The Howard is a letdown, especially considering the price (more than double the cost of the Holburn). The hotel clearly is a London institution (ah, but so is Margaret Thatcher). It sits on the bank of the Thames midway between the Tower of London and the Parliament.

The busboys are old men in slightly faded tailcoats with absurdly affected manners. All the guests visible in the lobby are in suits and ties. I stumble in with my rolling bag and bright red knapsack, feeling a bit surly from the long walk and wishing again that I had stayed an extra night at the Holburn. Two steps into the Howard I can see it for what it is: a tarted up old lady of a hotel where the aging upper crust of London society meet to perform rites of self-congratulation while the kowtowing staff drag their knuckles on the floor in pained subservience. (And Howard, whoever he was, must have been a drag queen; the theme is overwhelmingly pink with over-the-top accoutrements worthy of a Las Vegas wedding chapel).

Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but spending nearly $400 per night for a worn out room with a sagging bed... who wouldn't be?

After dropping off my rolling bag (too early to check in) I take a walk down the Thames path, which extends along the banks of the river to the Tower Bridge. It is Sunday morning, and the path is uncrowded, but chilly when the wind gusts down the river.

The restored Globe Theatre looks intriguing, so I stop to take the tour. The guide (for a group of twenty or so tourists) is an entertaining woman on the downhill side of 60 who wears black leather pants, a silk blouse and an eclectic assortment of rings and bracelets. Her commentary becomes a performance of sort as she hams up the story of the theatre's painstakingly accurate reconstruction from hand-hewn and pegged timbers, hand-turned ballisters and thatch roof.

Coming in the year 2000: The Globe Theatre "Experience". (The western world seems to be experiencing an experience binge: in London there is the Tower Bridge "Experience" and the Millenium Dome "Experience". In the states we have Experience Music in Seattle, Experience Star Trek in Las Vegas and at a hospital near you, Birth and Near Death Experiences...)

Midway through her lecture a large door to the outside opens and a group of revelers (in bizzare costumes) pours in for a brief solstice festival in which the theatre's artistic director is presented with a symbolic tree sapling and a pot of compost in which to plant it. A wad of herbs is lit, filling the open-air theatre with its smoldering aroma. There are a few minutes of oddly-rendered midieval music, then they are gone and the tour continues, ending (quite naturally) in the Globe Theatre Souvenir Experience.

After the tour I continue down the path, beyond the Tower Bridge, and stop in at a small pub for a bowl of cheese soup and a pint of ale. Delicious.

Crossing the Tower Bridge, I have a nice view back up the Thames toward the Parliament. The new British Airways Ferris Wheel is now fully vertical -- a pity since it effectively blocks one of the best views of Big Ben from the river.

I had noticed earlier that St. Paul's would present an organ recital in the evening, so I walk west, a few blocks up from the Thames to the cathedral.

At 5:30 the organist begins; the music is good, but not awe-inspiring. The inside of the cathedral, however, is quite an amazing space. It is easy to imagine the spell-binding power that such a structure would exert over the lower-class Catholic faithful. (And lower-class they would have been, as the Church of England, at home in Westminster Abbey, was the institution catering to the moneyed elite of England's royalty and upper classes.)

On Monday I take a tour of the Tower of London in the morning, then catch a tour boat down to Greenwich in the afternoon. In Greenwich I spend an hour and a half drinking wine and eating lunch at a small pub. An attractive barmaid with carribean skin and a nice smile roams around the room, stopping to wipe already-clean table tops and glasses, or to takes puffs of a cigarette while flipping quickly through a magazine. She suggests I walk through the park to the observatory and offers me another glass of wine (no charge) before I leave. Her lilting voice -- native Londoner spiced with the slightest hint of Jamaican brogue -- makes me linger over the wine. In any event it's cold outside.

There is only one other customer, an older man with fleshy eyelids and heavy jowls who is dressed in a green suit and matching fedora and carries a wooden cane. He talkes in a mumbling dialect of high English and is a perfect parody of Mr. Magoo. "Hmmm, well yes, then, harumph, this IS rather good, isn't it, hmmm..." he says while sipping his drink and myopically blinking behind his thick glasses.

I walk through the park as suggested. It is pretty, but rather chilly as the wind has again picked up. At the top of a small hill sits the Greenwich Obvervatory, where a small group of Chinese tourists is taking turns snapping pictures of each other setting their watches to the time displayed on the large clock that hangs on the wall outside. I decide there is no point in taking the tour, snap a few pictures of my own and head back to the waterfront.

I've arrived in Greenwich using one of the many large tour barges that run passengers between the various sites on the Thames. On the Greenwich waterfront, near the barge landing, the Cutty Sark sits in permanent drydock, an impressive monument to Britain's past imperial and commercial power. Nearby is a more recent (and much smaller) craft, Gypsy Moth II, which was sailed single-handed around the world by Sir Francis Chichester in the 1960s. The boat is much smaller than I expected (I read Chichester's fine account of the trip some years ago); it is a ketch with plenty of overall length but is quite narrow in beam. It's hard to imagine how Chichester (who was over 70 years old when he started the trip) could have handled the boat himself in the bruising conditions of the southern oceans. Today's solo round-the-world racers are equipped with advanced navigation systems, power winches and electronic autopilots. Chichester had little or none of that, just a poor-handling (but fast) boat with rickety self-steering hardware (a large wind vane on the stern coupled to the rudder), a compass, sextant and limited radio aids.

I cruise back up the Thames and depart at Embankment Station, hoping to get to Westminster Abbey for a tour before it closes for the day. I'm not successful, however -- it closes at 4:00 -- and instead plod my way further west toward Buckingham Palace.

In the fading light I have few opportunities to take pictures (and not a lot of interest anyway) so I content myself with a walk through the nearby park and back into the Soho and Covent Garden areas via Leicester Squate. At the Horse Guard Parade grounds (outside the old War Department) it appears that a reviewing stand is being set up. There are British and Chinese flags, and I remember that President Jiang is arriving in a few days. (I'm sorry I'll miss the fun; the London news coverage predicts masses of demonstrators, and I do enjoy a good party...)

After our press meetings, on Tuesday afternoon we take Eurostar from London to Paris (slow trip -- the thing sat on the track without moving for nearly an hour).

At Paris Nord (train station) we have trouble getting help. A woman in one ticket window looks at the hotel address we offer, passes it back and says "I can't help you." Similar story at another window, where the ticket seller seems to be having an argument with a boyfriend over the phone while rolling her eyes over some unknown slight. Finally we find a third booth where the ticket seller is kind enough to look up the address for us on a map. But we can sense her rolling her eyes in that particularly French way, for the benefit of the other people still in line, when we turn out backs to her and leave.

Our hotel near Paris is forgettable, although the service is quite good and the buffet breakfast excellent. In the morning we meet our contact in the hotel lobby. She is a wiry, birdlike woman of about 45 years and named Agnes who smokes often and talks quickly. Good sense of humor but poor driving habits. She drives a small Renault Clio and narrowly avoids numerous accidents as she misses turns and talks ("Oooh, excuse me... now I will swear in English...") while looking contantly, it seems, in the rear-view mirror.

We never see Paris proper; after our meetings with two editors we call for a cab and are driven (at impressive speeds) through the suburban traffic to Charles DeGaulle airport, where we spend an amazing time in a slow-moving line while the Lufthansa agent performs strange rituals with each prospective passenger, including an average of two trips to an unmarked door nearby for each. Somehow we make it to the gate and board the plane to Munich on time.