I've been busy, and I've fallen into a sort of routine. Mike wakes up in the morning and goes to work, I have a muffin and tea and read email and putz on the internet. And by putz I mostly mean "order things that we need for the apartment" because as much as this is a beautiful example of modern streamlined Euro-style living, it's also missing a lot of things. Like anywhere to put things in the shower. Mixing bowls. Washcloths (face-cloths). Any number of other small, piddling-but-really-irritating things that I already have back in California but that I now need to buy again.
After breakfast, I shower, and go wander the Town. There's a lot to wander.
It's strange because being an Anglophile for so long, so much of London has lived as a pile of unsorted mosaic tiles of places and things strewn helter skelter in my mind. I had the realization that we live nearish to Buckingham Palace, which is next to St. James's Park, which means St. James's Court, which is the place that Mr. Hurst in Pride and Prejudice very patronizingly offers to introduce the superior Darcy sisters into. Or that the perfumery I visited today - the one that I'd been ordering samples from back when I was graduating-from-being-into Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs all those years ago - is in Covent Garden, which is where the brothels mentioned in Fanny Hill and City of Vice were located, and which is practically on Bow Street of Bow Street Runners fame, and I in fact did pass the Magistrate's Hall on the way in.
The little tiles fall into place like colored shapes on a child's sorting toy. Except for me, they sometimes fall six or eight deep, as I recall different things that happened in one place or another over all the recorded history I've studied.
I am a huge nerd.
On day 3 I walked down to Chelsea Bridge and flummoxed by the utter lack of navigable stairs along the Thames, followed the course of the river to Vauxhall, and swept along by the foot traffic over the bridge. At which point I discovered that I was standing right in front of the MI6 building. You know, the one that gets blown up in Skyfall? There's a little walk that runs along in front of it (bristling with CCTVs, naturally) and then it crosses a little boat ramp where - get this - those same amphibious duck boat/busses that give tours in San Francisco push their way out into the Thames. And then there's a snippet of beach, pebbles and mud and ducks and not great-smelling, with plastic bottles and bits of modern flotsam. However, mixed with the anti-erosion rubble are bits of pottery and hundred year old glass, marbles and metal bits and tons and tons of pipestems. I am totally going to do that again and again and again!
We went to the British Museum, and saw an excellent exhibit on forensic analysis of mummies. I was absolutely blown away to discover that fully half the mummies I was familiar with from my childhood obsessions were... right there. There's the possibly-a-transvestite padded-and-painted mummy. There's the "all natural" sand mummy. There's the weird folded Roman child in gilded cartonnage.
And then you turn around and there's the fucking Rosetta Stone.
You walk through the gift shop, and discover that the facepalming ivory queen carving from one of your favorite material culture books is also in their collection. So is a copy of The Great Wave.
It was a little surreal. It's still a little surreal. I'm loving it.
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