I worked Wednesday through Friday so Somchai was on his own during the day. Wednesday, he started at St. Paul's Cathedral, probably the most beautiful building in London. He then went to the Royal Court and Inns of Court, which are the ancient training ground for England's lawyers, and a really beautiful part of the city that for some reason is overlooked by tourists. According to Somchai he then continued walking and walking until he got to Hyde Park. (I'm not doubting him, but walking from St. Paul's to Hyde Park would be quite an accomplishment, and he looks at me like I'm insane if I suggest walking ten minutes to a nearby store rather than driving.) We then had dinner at Vong's, accross from Hyde Park. Vong's is another London outpost of a New York restaurant, although this is much better than Nobu. It's dark and intimate, with a crazy and tiny bar area and great Asian fusion food imaginatively presented.

Unfortunately Somchai didn't have his camera with him that day so a)he has no proof of his supposed trek across the city, and b) I have no photos to share. I've got a couple of photos from later in the trip with St. Paul's in them, so I'll post them here and we can all pretend Somchai took them when he "visited".

On Tuesday we returned to Westiminster to see the Abbey, which was closed during our previous visit. It's a beautiful cathedral, as most European cathedrals are, but every inch of wall and floor space is also covered with memorials, tombs, and curiosities so it's a fun place to explore. Had lunch at Criterion, a gorgeous restaurant housed in the old Turkish baths, let down by mediocre service and food. Then spent the afternoon shopping in the rain around touristy Covent Garden and the nearby (and vastly better) Neals Yard, had a gutbusting high tea and then saw the Lion King at the Lyceum Theatre. It was a visually beautiful performance, although I'm one of the few people on earth who never saw the movie, and I knew none of the songs. As far as I can tell, there's virtually no plot, which when combined with unknown songs, made it a bit of a struggle.

The next couple of days were pretty much a constant downpour, so we had to scramble the schedule a bit. Monday was an uninterrupted procession of museums, starting at the British Museum. We went a week before they opened the enormous new section in the museum's courtyard, which looked pretty cool. We spent a couple of hours there, mostly on the Asian collection and of course the very famous mummies. We then took a taxi to Oxo for lunch, which is a very good restaurant with great views from the South Bank over the city. Another reason we chose this restaurant is we have a friend in Bangkok who liked the restaurant so much, he stole the name and logo for use at his (now closed) Bangkok restaurant.

Some more photos of Mayfair, although the text, about dinner, isn't related, but we haven't stooped to such a tourist level that we take photos at dinner so there will always have to be this text-photo disconnect at dinner time. We had dinner at Nobu's, which I believe originated in New York but now seems to have sprouted in a dozen or so cities around the world. The London version is housed at the trendy Metropolitan Hotel, although this Nobu is much less trendy than the New York version. It looks more like a diner, a sprawling blandly designed place absolutely crammed with customers paying very high prices for pretty good Japanese food. It was packed even on a Sunday night, and the crowd looked like the crowd at McDonald's, big families, lots of kids all noisily enjoying dinner. Not complaining at all about that, but you rarely see a trip to the local sushi restaurant as a kids' favorite in the US.

There are a few parks surrounding Buckingham Palace that used to be part of the palace's grounds but are now open to the serfs. St. James' Park is the prettiest, and provides the best vantage point for photos as well. We didn't tour Buckingham Palace because it's only open during the summer, but I've done it previously. I would definitely recommend it but mainly because you'll feel like you missed something on your tourist checklist if you didn't. But it's not really that interesting. It's grand but not over the top enough to be memorable, and it's scrubbed of any sense of someone actually living there. There was a tv show about the real life at the palace, and people working there would talk about the queen eating cereal out of tupperware containers and stuff like that. Now that's a tour I'd like to take.

Because it was Sunday, we had the questionable pleasure of seeing the changing of the guards. It's nice because the main roads become pedestrian only, and the horse guards are interesting. The actual ceremony behind the gates of Buckingham Palace is a bit boring for me, but judging by the enormous crowds that come to see it, I'm very much in the minority.

The most famous landmark on Trafalgar Square is the National Gallery, which is a small-ish art gallery but a great collection and very nicely displayed. There's also the almost totally ignored National Portrait Gallery behind it. It's ignored because portraits tend to occupy the boring spectrum of painting, so the prospect of seeing thousands of portraits is understandably offputting, but it's a cute little museum and a great place to get up to speed on the who's who of britain before you tackle the historical sights these people used to occupy. The church photo is of St. Martin's, which is famous in the US because it's the prototype for the Congregational churches that occupy the prime real estate in every New England town.

One clarification-the weather in London is changeable, but not that changeable. We walked through this area almost every day so the various pics were taken on different days with different weather conditions, but I thought it would be easier to present if I grouped them geographically rather than sticking strictly to chronology.

Trafalgar Square is clearly ground zero for tourist London, and rightfully so. It's one of the few open plazas in the city, and the architecture is for once uniform. London has some beautiful architecture, but it's often sandwiched between 1960's office buildings and shops. The centerpiece is Nelson's column and the pigeon infested open plaza, but the surrounding buildings are stars as well.

Another reason not to write a lot about this trip is that London is the only overseas place we went as a family, and since my family is the big bulk of my fanbase, they're up to speed on all the history stuff. (Actually, I seem to recall Madame Tussaud's being a highlight of the family trip, so maybe the history is a bit rusty.) Well, here's the very unhistorical Millennium wheel, which is new(ish) so there's nothing much to write, except that I heard they're taking it down. That's fine by me, although I thought it was a pretty stylish ferris wheel. Obnoxiously large and clashing bigtime with the surroundings, but stylish nonetheless.

On Sunday, we walked around Westminster, the heart of tourist London and probably very familiar to anyone with a passport. You would think that would dissuade me from babbling on about these overly familiar landmarks, and you'd be right. For example, this is Parliament and Big Ben, which as you all know sits atop Parliament. There are many centuries of history on this site, which started out as part of the main royal palace but was rebuilt several times after fires, with this majestic faux-old building housing Parliament for the last couple of centuries. Lots of weird and wonderful things happen all over London's ancient sights, but talking about them at length would take the focus of us, which would be a shame. So you'll have to google up the history stuff, because the spotlight will stay relentlessly on Bromchai (like Brangelina, get it?). But since Sunday was also the only sunny day on the whole trip, there will be lots of photos about this area coming up.

Wow, I'm tired just reading my journal entry on our first day in London, but apparently this neverending day continued to a quick stop at Harrod's, which is a quick walk from the Albert memorials. I was never a big fan of the store's merchandise, or the look of the place on any of the floors other than the main floor. But the main floor is amazing, each room a different theme and all over the top. Of course the food halls are the most famous and well worth a visit. But if you haven't slept in a couple of days, and you're at the world's most crowded store a few days before Christmas, you don't stay for long. So we fled back to Notting Hill for an early dinner at the supposedly trendy Bali Sugar Club. We were early so the trendiness wasn't apparent, but the unfriendly staff hinted that it would be trendy later in the evening. Food was just average, and overall our most disappointing dining experience of the trip.

On the south edge of the park, Queen Victoria sponsored two memorials to her beloved husband Albert. There's an overly ornate memorial to him in the park proper, which you're supposed to think is grotesquely gaudy, but most people, including me, just think it's got lots of shiny bits and intricate carvings, what's not to like? Having said that, Victoria does seem to have overdone the grieving widow thing. Her whole purpose in life seems to have been to squelch sexuality and romance out of the nation, so it's quite a disconnect that when her unassuming husband died, she totally flipped, went into mourning for the rest of her life and never really recovered. Anyway, what energy she did have left in her was devoted to building Albert memorials. The more practical one was the Royal Albert Hall across the street, a huge oval concert hall still in use today.

We then wandered about the park in the cold, damp weather for the rest of the day, which was very enjoyable, really. The park serves the same purpose as New York's Central Park, but it's more consistently manicured. Central Park has big sections that are essentially natural woods with some paths through them, whereas in London's equivalent each tree was carefully planted to achieve a certain effect. There are also lots more ducks in Hyde Park, as well as their byproduct, so watch your step!

We then headed to nearby Kensington Gardens, which becomes Hyde Park further east and together are a massive stretch of greenery in the middle of the city, and almost everyone in London spends part of their weekend here in decent weather. Kensington Palace, Princess Diana's former home, lies on the far west end of the park, so we toured that first. It's a very depressing palace, built of dark brick in the 17th century, with dark paneling and small windows throughout to ensure the place is as depressing as possible. Of course only the historical, somewhat pokey rooms are open, so I assume the bulk of the palace that is still in use is more lively.

We then walked over to Kensington, and went to my old house in Campden Hill Gardens. Kensington is older than its neighbors and has a more varied housing stock, with a big section consisting of plain Georgian townhouses in a surprising variety of pastel colors, as well as the more typical blocks with Victorian flourishes. I managed to find a street where houses adopted a depressing grey brick aesthetic, but inside it was quintessentially English, tall ceilings, creaky floors, drafty and with terrible plumbing, all decorated in high chintz.

We then had lunch at Kensington Place, one of my favorite London restaurants, quite modern and buzzy with the best scallops in the world.

Holland Park proper was one of my favorite places to hang out in London when I lived there, chiefly because it was a ten minute walk from my house. It was an enormous estate owned by the Earl of Holland, who used the house as his city residence and a center for entertainment until it was reduced to rubble by air raids in World War II. The estate (and the rubble) was then gifted to the city, who turned it into a pretty park, and wisely kept the ruins of the house as is.

One thing London doesn't do well is big streets. There are loads of them cutting across the ancient villages and generally leading to the City of London, the square mile that was the heart of medieval London but now is just home for a bunch of banks. These streets are invariably lined with unimaginative shops and takeout restaurants, lots of 1960's architecture and really ugly street furniture, primarily big gates and fences ensuring pedestrians have as difficult a time as possible crossing the street. If you see London mostly from a taxi or tourist bus, you'll mostly see this ugliness, so it's very important to walk as much as possible, as the small roads are infinitely nicer and more typical of the charm of the city. That was a long lead in to the fact that we crossed ugly Notting Hill Gate to get to Holland Park. This is another residential neighborhood surrounding a park of the same name. In Holland Park you can either live in a flat in one of the grand apartments built more than a century ago as individual houses by an ambitious real estate developer, or in the cute alleyways behind these houses where the servants and horses lived.

We then walked around the posh residential areas of West London, Notting Hill, Holland Park and Kensington. While London has great historical and cultural sites that are world famous, so do many cities in Europe. But I think what makes London special are the many neighborhoods that make up the city. These villages used to be completely independent, but are now loosely bound up into modern-day London. But they still have their own governments and, more importantly, their own look and feel, and they are well worth exploring. Since Portobello Market is in Notting Hill, we started our exploring there. Somehow this neighborhood even today (2007) has the reputation of being bohemian and slightly dangerous but it was well and truly gentrified even when I lived there, so the reputation is pretty hard to justify.

After we unpacked, by which I mean opened our suitcases, looked around and decided there was no room for us to unpack, then left the suitcases on the bed to be dealt with later, we went downstairs for a surprisingly good breakfast. I say surprisingly because meals at these kinds of hotels always have an edge, which is generally not a good thing for breakfast, but Ian recognizes this and his hotels always have an easygoing breakfast, good music and a pretty traditional menu. We then headed out into the rainy London weather, targeting my old neighborhood of Kensington. First stop was the Saturday Portobello Road market, just north of Kensington in Notting Hill. As usual it was swamped with tourists, but it's a fun place to kill a couple of hours, browsing through the antiques and collectibles stands lining the street for about a mile. While most visitors are antique hunting, Somchai brushed all that aside and ventured to the far end of the market, where they sell vegetables, which he found inexplicably fascinating. Almost everywhere we travel, we end up spending an inordinate amount of time looking at vegetables thanks to Somchai.

We stayed at the St. Martin's Lane Hotel, a very hip (at the time) hotel owned by Ian Schraeger, the inventor and key booster of the hip hotel, for better or worse. I was quite into this type of hotel for a while, but, like most of the market (and Ian himself) have pretty much moved on. The lobby is fun, like in all these places, lots of odd pieces like a giant fishbowl, big gold teeth and a huge chess set, for no particular reason. Disco music everywhere, including the lifts where you're also followed by a big pair of eyes on a tv screen. It also has the Asia de Cuba restaurant usually found in Schraeger's hotels, and a trendy bar. And the staff is very easy on the eyes. As an aside, I like the format and menu of the Asia de Cuba chain, particularly the New York one, but I know a lot of people find it tired and pointlessly fusion-y, so I suspect I'm in the minority here. Anyway, of course you know where this is leading, and that is that the rooms are tiny, nicely decorated, but tiny. It was quite a challenge for two adults with excess amounts of luggage to stay here for a week, but we survived. St. Martin's Lane Hotel-(7), Room-4, Facilities-8, Service-4, Wow-3 (because I'm a sucker for the overdesigned lobby). We didn't take many photos of the lobby because we were pretending to be too cool so we'd fit in, but the photo with Somchai in it was taken in our room, and I think you can see about half the room in the photo.