Sunday:

On this day, I journeyed alone to the Tower of London, which I had glimpsed in passing on our way to dinner my first night in town.

Once again, the sheer weight of history landed on my head. Anything built to resemble this structure in the U.S. would be turned into a cheesy monstrosity (can you name any megahotel in Las Vegas?), so I had to repeatedly remind myself that this fortress...

• Really does house The Crown Jewels
• Really had been used in defense of a king against an enemy siege
• Really had housed countless criminals for many hundreds of years, including Rudolf Hess during the 1940’s
• Really had been used for executions
• Really had been the home/jail of Sir Walter Raleigh and his family, before he too was executed there.

I mean, the arrow slits were actually used to fire arrows through, and the moat was a very real line of defense before it was drained. This was the real thing, and that was not an easy concept for an American like me to grasp.

The tour groups were too large. Too packed, even on this chilly winter afternoon. So I chose to go solo with an audio tour. It was less personal in some ways, but much more so in others. It helped me tune out the noise of the massed rabble all around me and focus on the minute details as I leisurely strolled around the grounds.

Various Views from Inside the Tower Grounds
Click on any image for a closer view.

I think what struck me the most was not the narrow castle stairways or the stone walls or the massive turrets. It was the homes. People live there, inside the compound. The yeoman warders who kept watch over the place and their families, slightly over 40 families in total, spent their daily lives in this fortress, their home. I asked one of them what it was like, and he very nonchalantly said it was a very normal existence. Nothing strange about it at all.

I don’t care what he said, that’s bullshit. Most people do not have a park that’s a paper-airplane toss away from a gallows site. Their windows do not look out at walls twenty-feet thick, at cells that housed the damned of the day. I can’t see it as a place for a gala affair, a summer barbecue with the neighbors. Some history is too thick to ignore.

FYI - this is one of those must-see sites if you’re only in London for a day. Plan on spending several hours there, there’s a hell of a lot to see. I also walked to the London Dungeon afterwards. Avoid this at all costs, it's a cheesy wax museum wannabe. That's all I want to say on the subject.

Monday:

A day of rest. An evening of partying with friends. Once again, ‘nuff said.

Tuesday:

Another day of solo journeying. This time I tubed it over to Central London with a vague plan to walk around and see what happened. Sites of interest that I stumbled across included:

Trafalgar Square, the Theater District, the National Portrait Gallery, a giant park in front of Buckingham Palace, then the Palace itself (all I saw was the outside). Then I walked back through the park until I cut across a side street and found myself in Westminster, where I stopped for a lunch that included my first-ever pint of bitter.

Various Streetscenes, Big Ben in the Distance, and the Gates to Buckingham Palace.

But let me back up a moment here -- back to Trafalgar square where by pure chance there were some people feeding the pigeons as I walked by.

Have I mentioned the pigeons yet? No? There were more pigeons in this area than I have ever seen congregated together before in my life. These photographs do not do it justice. We’re talking a Hitchcock-sized group of flying rodents. Imagine a large mass of pigeons. Then double it. Now add a few more. Nope, still not enough freakin’ pigeons!

And these people with their feed bags... they couldn’t just drop the food and run, that’d be too dangerous for them! So they walked with their bags, walked in a giant loop all around the square, dropping handfuls of food as they strolled.

And the pigeons, they followed. Around the perimeter of the square, following their food trail. So while the pigeons started off far away from me, I barely had time to snap a picture or two before I realized....

Pigeons. Pigeons! PIGEONS! Want to see more of the sky rats? Just click on the pics.

...THEY WERE COMING RIGHT FUCKING AT ME!

(Insert your own personal traumatic experience here. Now take a deep breath. Hold it. Hooooolllld it. And... release. Ahhhhhhh.)

So anyway, a few hours later I finished my lunch, downed my bitter, followed it up with a Guiness... and had a revelation. I was in Westminster. The tour guide I had thumbed through said one of the must-see sites was the Westminster Abbey. The odds that the Abbey was closeby? Very, very high.

CONTINUED IN PART 4

© 2002, Michael Yanovich. www.mentalsnot.com