I’m a lucky guy – I’m spending two weeks working in three of my favorite cities.
In Paris – my all time fave place to eat is Mediterrano at the Odeon, (http://www.la-mediterranee.com/)
in Rome, it’d be Carbonara in Campo di fiori,
and in London – yes you CAN get great food especially if you go to Sheekeys!
@JSheekeyrest @RistoranteLaCarbonaraRoma
What are your fave places in these cities? I love to try new places!
Nowadays though I tend to see it more as a tourist and probably enjoy a lot more of the sights than I ever would if I lived there. Usually when I fly transatlantic to London, the flight pattern follows the western parts of the city and picks up the Thames just around the airport area close to Windsor, Eton, and Runnymede where the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Sometimes, if you sit in a holding pattern low enough, you get a wonderful tour of the city center before making final landing.
But the other day the flight pattern coming from another European city was decidedly different.
It was a sight to behold. We passed over the mouth of the Thames where Dover sole fish farms ply their trade and eels are caught for the English delicacy of…horror upon horrors, jellied eels.
Literally we seemed to trace the old docklands which had been replaced by brand new developments around Canary Wharf, past The O2, and over the Emirates gondola before we started to get into the new city development – the skyscrapers with funky names like the Gherkin, the Shard, and the Walkie Talkie. This was the new London and we were flying above it at around 20,000 feet. The pilot seemed to be enjoying the view as much as we did and he made a couple of announcements pointing to the developments on the river below.
It was strange to see old London squeezed in between the skyscrapers and the ancient river below. There was the tiny-looking Tower of London and the omnipresent Tower Bridge, London’s iconic and still used drawbridge. Everybody in the plane, whatever side you were looking at, had a treat to behold. St. Paul’s Cathedral was on the right, the Tate Modern on the left, and the London Eye straight ahead…did I miss 12th century Southwark Cathedral in the middle of it all? We passed Westminster, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and Lambeth Palace, just a stone’s throw from where I grew up, and still we kept on following the Thames.
As we started to run out of sights, the plane banked slightly and we caught a glimpse of Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace.
You can work through the day on the plane, arrive looking roughly the same as when you left, and get to enjoy a great meal in London before you begin your journey. Or better still, grab a hotel night at the incredibly convenient Sofitel that is situated at Terminal 5 at Heathrow. This hotel is a dream especially if your onward connection the following day is on British Airways and therefore in Terminal 5.
The flight time from Boston is 5 hours and 50 minutes and while it is not recommendable for people who are trying to save a hotel night by sleeping on an airplane seat, the difference in a healthy travel experience and a somewhat acceptable looking human being emerging from the plane is well worth it. The great news is that during the summer months you can connect all the way through to Paris (if you are a BA fan) or to more exotic places like Palma in Mallorca (I’m a big fan).
At that point it is still only 7pm in the evening on Boston time. True confession: I am a secret addict of the day flight.
When I was growing up, the Thames and the embankment areas were barely used. There was one boat that would take you from Westminster to Kew Gardens and Henry VIII’s palace of Hampton Court and another boat that would travel as far as the tower and Tower Bridge. It was as if the river ought to be ignored and certainly to all intents and purposes stopped at the Tower. The French have long made fabulous use of the Seine. It was inevitable that the Brits would someday catch up and would start to develop a world-class waterfront to showcase London.
And so it goes that pretty much everything starts around Westminster and heads east towards the new developments down at Canary Wharf. The east of London, once a wasteland full of warehouses and disused wharfs, is now a principal point of traffic with its own airport, super high-speed trains, and new buildings that pop up it seems every six months or so.
These are essentially boat rides that encompasse the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, the London Eye, Shakespeare’s recreated Globe Theatre, the Tate Modern at the old Bankside Power Station, and the fabulous new London City Hall, the Shard, the Walkie Talkie, the Gherkin, and the Millennium Bridge, otherwise known as the wonky bridge. Not to mention the fabulous Tower Bridge and its neighbor, the ancient Tower of London.
So a bunch of us decided to do this journey using the Thames RIB Experience boats. Essentially, it’s a high-speed boat ride eastward down the river with different possibilities for location – Tower Bridge, Canary Wharf, or the Thames Barrier. It is a great ride. You embark at Embankment Pier and the journey can take anywhere from 30 to 75 minutes depending upon how far you want to go.
The boat twists and turns in spectacular fashion as you get into open water after Tower Bridge. It’s powered by 740 horse power, in other words it moves very fast. It rained a bit but nobody got wet because the boat was moving at jet speed! It was one of the fun ways to see the river and count the changes that have graced this skyline.
One shout out to London in the midst of the Brexit catastrophe – Congratulations! You have a Muslim mayor, the son of a Pakistani postal worker, in this most cosmopolitan city. So proud to be a Londoner!
That changed. The United Kingdom has just experienced a political nightmare. What most thought would be a very passable referendum to remain inside of the European Union sparked such fierce political divisions that the vote went into the night and became a cataclysmic defeat for those that wished to remain in the EU.
The political fallout from this is still happening. The Labor Party, Britain’s main opposition party, has been splintered and almost certainly sidelined for many years to come. The Conservative Party has lost its leader and the Prime Minister. As two populist conservatives, Boris Johnson, the disheveled and outspoken ex-Mayor of London, and Nigel Farange, a leader of the generously named but highly racist Independent Party, became the outspoken leaders for the “leave” camp. Neither of these two villains will see power but they did enough damage to offset the gains made by being a member of the European Union for the last 45 years.
It was a campaign fueled by fears of immigration laced with racist terms. Bringing “England back to England” banded around with frightening repetition. At the end of the day, England is out. The ramifications of this will be most obvious in the years to come. In a global society, in a global economy, England has chosen to be isolationists fueling the immigrant polemic and walking confidently backwards into a “we once were great” illusion. If that is not enough, English hooligans were on display everywhere during the European Championships of soccer. To let you know what you really will be getting if you cut off the supply of bright, young Europeans who come to England to study our language, our culture, and more importantly, to work.
On a positive note, it means that your dollar will go further because the pound is tumbling and the euro has taken a hit as well. It will probably mean more border checks and as England is not in the EU, the lines will be a little longer on the Eurostar and at the airports. The fact that the United Kingdom is not in the Schengen Agreement which entitles free mobility between 19 countries will make it less of a problem. For the United Kingdom passport holder traveling to Europe, it will mean longer lines and no freedom of movement. It will mean that people will not be able to work freely with a British passport in any of the 27 member states and of course vice versa. It means that in five to six years’ time, London will probably seem a little bit more English and that is not a good thing! I love hearing the sound of foreign languages on the streets of London. It makes me feel that I am in a cosmopolitan city, it encourages languages to be studied, and cultures to be learned.
Europe just lost one of its stars. The United Kingdom is also the second largest economic country in the 28 countries with Germany still as number one. But critically, Europe will still be a trading block of over 450 million people and therefore the second largest trading block in the world behind China and ahead of the USA. The United Kingdom, in addition, may also become somewhat disunited within itself. Scotland, who fiercely voted to remain in Europe, will probably elect to have a referendum and leave the UK. Northern Ireland may do the same. That would leave a very strange United Kingdom. But for us tourists it would mean that we would have to go through border control to get to Edinburgh and the drive from Dublin to Belfast would also have a new border constructed. Maybe we will have a united Ireland!
Of course none of this will take place right away. Article 50 of the EU is the thing that has to be invoked. That will set a two-year timetable for the unprecedented departure of one of the member states. Thank goodness my grandmother is Irish! I am applying for my Irish passport now!
On June 23, the UK will hold a historic referendum that will determine whether they stay inside of the European Union or exit.
Britain was a relative second choice to the initial family of six countries that formed the early version of the European Union in 1957. The French, under President Charles de Gaulle at the time, had little time for the English, and the English had little time for the French. But England joined in 1973 and became a big player in the EU which now has 28 member states. They also enjoy a semi-unique status inside of this massive economic trading block. The Brits retain their currency and want nothing to do with the open border policy that is known as Schengen. With the exception of the UK and Ireland, the rest of the EU is obliged to adopt.
For most European member states point of view, the Brits are already getting a sweet deal – Trade collaboration, protection, and stimulus of a huge economic block but they still retain sovereignty over their borders and currency. Especially in light of the recent immigration crisis that has resulted from the Middle East conflict.
So which way is this going to go?
It’s too close to call but David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, has staked his reputation on the “stay-in” stance. However, the flamboyant Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who is considered to be a potential heir apparent for the Prime Ministership, is on team Brexit. The right-wing UK Independence Party and some would say openly racist party, UKIP, is solidly for Brexit.
For me, I like the European Union. I enjoy the international flavor of London with the open flow of European workers in hotels, bars, and restaurants. I love hearing the languages. On any given day in any given restaurant or hotel, you can speak with a Pole, Slovenian, Italian, or Spanish citizen. It creates a better community and in many ways it teaches us through trickle down to love thy neighbor. Yep, even the French! I like moving through the open borders of Schengen on my Euro passport. I can remember when I was growing up in London traveling “abroad” on our holidays to strange foreign places with sunshine and warm seas called Spain and Portugal. They were third world countries recovering from decades of Fascist dictatorships. Now they are integrated into a powerful block of healthy economies that make them better.
Consolidation is the way of the future; just like airlines and hotels. It is economically impossible to survive and prosper as a tiny island state.
Yep, I know the Brits struggle with the French and the French struggle with the Brits but this is the future and that is the past. They gave us garlic, baguettes, fabulous cheeses, champagne, and wine. The Brits have the beer, the aristocracy, theatre, and tradition that still lives. Not to mention the culinary delights and natural wonders of the other 26 European countries. This is not just a powerful economic trading block, it’s a new way of life and I am grateful to be a European. I don’t want to lose the touch of Europe that we would lose if we took the narrow view and leave. We would have to rename the song “Rule Britannia” into “Fool Britannia.” The UK would be marginalized. It would become a niche business! That would be a drag for all of us.
As I get to travel, I am probably spoiled for choice.
One of my favorite shops is Paul Smith in London. I started going to Paul Smith in the late 1970’s. I loved the shirts and shoes from the very beginning. It was a sort of cool, edgy, and a very “Londony” look. As I was living in the States, it was a way to keep myself in tune with England!
So, all those years ago and still, I go to Paul Smith when I am in London. I love the tiny street in Covent Garden called Floral Street where the store is located. Everyone is helpful, trendy, and more or less my sons age! Actually my son who lives in Washington DC, always asks me to buy him a shirt whenever I am passing through. He even pays me back!
This past Christmas, I bought him a couple of shirts as a gift. However, one of them, as he later discovered, still had the magnet attached and had escaped the alarms in the shop. So the present wasn’t a present but rather a pain! With no Paul Smith shops in DC or Boston, I knew I would be in London soon so I popped in armed with photos of the unusable shirt. I chatted with a nice sales guy who had the deputy manager, Alex Sivyer, come down. He assessed the situation, said, “Here’s what we will do. Buy a shirt today. It’s on us. Bring the other one in whenever and well take the magnet off. 2 for 1!”
And that’s why I shop in Paul Smith. I wish every store could be like that. Great ethos, great people, and everyone obviously likes the guy who owns the place. Hats off to Paul Smith. It’s not just about the clothes. It is about the attitude and the culture towards the customer!
I even know how to shuck them pretty fast – something that I picked up from a mate of mine that works at Legal Seafood in Boston. When I travel to London, I love the rock oysters. They are not farmed, they are briny, super delicious, and quite deep.
Oysters are most famous in towns like Colchester and Whitstable so it is no surprise given the English obsession with oysters that they chose to name their metro card the “Oyster Card.” Believe me, when you are travelling in London, your life depends upon this card. It is your ticket to ride on the underground and the double decker buses. Think of it like this – London is a huge city with over 8 million people and geographically it covers an area of 1,580 square kilometers. The subway system in England is the oldest one in the world and reaches out way beyond the center of London and into the rural hinterland. Nowadays, every bus accepts the Oyster Card which means that you can jump between the superfast subway network and a super cool Routemaster bus. If the traffic is getting crazy, abandon ship and head down to the subway. If the subway stop is too far or inconvenient, grab one of the many buses that fly by you on the street. The stops are well marked and very civilized. As for getting in from the airport, the subway system delivers you right into the center of town from Heathrow.
Essentially, the city becomes yours!
But here is the deal with the Oyster Card – you must put a deposit down of £5, but when you leave, you return the card and receive that money back. Whatever you have left on your card is shown clearly whenever you put your card down on the yellow entry/exit pad. They are easy to top off using cash or credit. Given the high cost of the subway in London, if you are there for one day I would probably invest £25 in an Oyster Card and use it up the kazoo. It is not cheap but it beats the alternative. Happy travelling!
As blue as the sky is at any moment in time, there always is at least a 50% chance that the weather will turn for the worse. Furthermore, it will almost certainly end up as rain! Then it stops and starts and rains some more.
In England it rains – so much so that English people have a national obsession about the weather. “How’s the weather love? Bit hot today. It hasn’t stopped raining. We will need an arc if it carries on like this.” They even have words for varying degrees of rain. Spitting (yes, spitting!), drizzle and rainy spells (as if it’s some magic trick)! Cloudy with a chance of…some rain. Not rain but some rain!
I was thinking of this the other day while I was walking through Covent Garden and had to stop at the store Muji, a place where I always buy great pens, to grab a reasonably dependable short umbrella. Fact is that you simply cannot be without an umbrella in London. The whole city is geared towards terrible weather (there even are signs inside of the Underground stations telling us to shake our umbrellas Outside of the station in order to avoid slippery surfaces) and in stores people leave their umbrellas at the umbrella parking space by the door. Truthfully, if you are armed with a short umbrella which you can stick in your pocket, you can kind of go anywhere. It is a liberating feeling!
What is the story with umbrellas? Where did they come from and how did they evolve into what they are today? Funny enough, the basic umbrella was invented around 4,000 years ago and even appears in ancient wall drawings. The umbrella was made with paper and used as a shade from the sun. Hence, the name umbrella which comes from the Latin word umbra meaning shade. Leave it to the Chinese to figure out a way to wax the paper umbrella and lacquer them so that they can be used for both sun and rain. Then we fast forward a few thousand years to the 19th century when James Smith and Sons Umbrella Shop opened in London in 1830 to serve middle- to upper-class people a parasol for the rain. Working classes used their cloth caps or just got wet! The shop on 53 New Oxford Street is still there selling high end umbrellas to tourists and wealthier clients alike. England even invented a word that is used everywhere today – brolly.
So where was my tiny umbrella from Muji made? Muji is a Japanese store and my pens most certainly are made in Japan – but you guessed it, my umbrella has gone back to its roots and is made in China. This likely is also where every single short version umbrella in any city sold by any number of people comes from. When you dash into a store or buy an umbrella from a guy that just happens to show up because it is raining (and let’s face it, you need it), remember that he is simply following a 4,000 year old custom practiced over the years and built to perfection for an English climate. But if you fancy a high end experience, go to James Smith and treat yourself to the real deal – a brolly for the ages.
Every time that I go to London, I try to see a play. Last time I was there, I went to The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the indoor Globe theatre. I saw Shakespeare’s Cymbeline . It is still playing actually. At the Wanamaker, there is no electrical lighting inside of the theatre and only candles and candelabras on pulleys. It is classic London Theatere: good old Elizabethan fare served up on bare sets with traditional music in the background. Catch any performance there if you can. It is like no experience I have experienced.
This time, I was invited by a friend of mine, Lee Curran, to go see a play at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. Lee is the lighting director; a “creative artistic type” that lights up much of London and Stratford with his art. The play was Linda, a play by Penelope Skinner and starring Noma Dumezweni. She plays an award-winning business woman promoting beauty products while facing the hypocrisy of how beauty is marketed to women. This was a play originally starring Kim Cattrall of Sex in the City fame but she pulled out with just a week to go before preview. Noma stepped in out of the blue, out of nowhere really, and pulled off one of the greatest tour de forces in acting. Talk about a crash course in learning lines. She was amazing, as was the play.
For me the real buzz was that I got to sit in the tech box with Lee high above the performance and watch the play through his critical eye. That was a first. It felt a bit like being in the cockpit of an airplane next to the pilot. We saw the next to last performance of the play. I got to meet the star and even got to grab an Indian meal afterwards. A truly perfect night in London.
The funny thing about the holidays in the USA is that everything seems to begin around Veteran’s Day. The Christmas music starts to rear its ugly head and while decorations do not go full-in until the week around Thanksgiving, there is that sense of a relentless march towards the big day. It is the holiday season after all– Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas – it just requires a couple of months to sell its various brands. But what it does not need is global warming which seems to have happened while we were all sleeping, driving our diesel and gas cars, ignoring calls for solar and wind power and maxing on our air conditioning use. Now, as I sit in Boston, watching somebody skateboarding by in a t-shirt, I wonder if I will ever see snow again!
On the other hand, London seems to embrace Christmas like no other place. It has the people (lots of them), every street in the center is full-on lit up with beautiful or funky lights, there is the huge Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square, and big bonus, no sun and it gets dark so fabulously early that the entire city is in nighttime glow most of the time. It’s cozy! While there is absolutely no snow ever to be seen and lots of rain, it somehow feels Christmassy. It is probably because London has so many shops and every shop has a Christmas window and everybody walking around London seems to be holding bags that indicate they have been shopping. There are pubs on every other corner jammed with revelers and the occasional jolly drunk and all of the restaurants have Christmas menus in addition to the usual a la carte stuff. This place full-on celebrates!
So grab a Christmas cracker, put your paper crown on, grab a piece of Christmas pudding or mince pie, or even go to Pret-A-Mange (the popular take-out place) for a Christmas lunch sandwich – yes, Christmas lunch complete with stuffing can be contained within two pieces of sliced white bread! While you are at it, grab a bag of Christmas crisps and then take the kids to see Father Christmas and a Pantomime. It’s the most popular entertainment over the holiday period. I grew up on them. Based in history on 17th century Commedia dell’arte characters, panto means to imitate all in Greek. Everyone has fun, kids laugh, men dress up as woman and woman as men. Shakespearean really! Although it’s mainly for kids, it’s huge! It involves music, topical and saucy jokes, and slapstick comedy and is usually based on a fairy tale or nursery story. Plus everyone gets to go to the theatre!! Good for the soul!
Image Credit: londonconnection.com
Image Credit: VisitLondon.com & Featured Image: LondonTown.com
Held every year in London’s east metropolis full of new buildings that dot themselves around the river, the World Travel Market is like a huge bazaar, a maze-like walk across the world. I love the fact that you get to start your day in London Town and end your day in the far reaches of Bhutan. In between, you have every single country in the world – even Saudi Arabia that does not want you to come! They are all here.
More than 20,000 people visit the World Travel Market. There are seminars and exhibitions, but for me, the biggest thrill of all is to walk across the world and listen to thousands of languages being spoken from stand to stand. There are roughly 6,500 languages spoken in the world today although 2,000 have less than 1,000 speakers. However, at the World Travel Market everybody seemed well equipped with English. It was absolutely brilliant to walk through Italy, then Greece, to Turkey, and then France, and onto the Arab countries. Entrance into the World Travel Market for trade is free which means that you can travel around the world for nothing. As it turns out, the good old London Underground was on strike and so Emirates airlines was transporting everybody across the eastern London sky in their Emirates cable cars.
Rooftop Dining – New Soho House
London’s Soho House recently opened its new house on Dean Street and, even though it has an early closing limitation because of the neighbors – yes people actually do live in Soho – it’s a little bit of a jewel in the ever-so-crowded craziness of a Soho evening. It has a small rooftop bar, along with its Greek Street counterpart and the notoriously fun Shoreditch house. It seems like Soho House is heading for rooftop views all over London. Despite the weather it’s kind of cool to look above the chimney tops of London and get a Mary Poppins view of both Old London and the scintillating New London popping up towards the East. Soho House is a private members’ only club and a genuine respite from the madding crowds in post-theater West End. If you happen to know somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who can take you in there, it’s a great place to hang out. If you don’t know anyone, oh well…
Looking for a special roof outside of London? Other memorable rooftop bars I’ve visited:
