European vacations

As London”s most famous and most widely-visited store is Harrod”s, this opinions majors on that store. I have also tried to mention some other, similar stores for comparison purposes, and the whole thing is designed to be read by visitors as opposed to residents. If you live here, you know this stuff already.

In truth, the large department stores are not really the greatest places to go. If you want to do some real shopping, you want specialist arcades like Piccadilly & Knightsbridge, or more out of the way stores like Patrick Cox or Ghost. But, most visitors don”t want to spend all day getting to one shop for one pair of socks, so I”ll concentrate on the larger stores, and start with London”s most famous store - Harrod”s.

To talk about everything that is excellent in the city of Oxford, England would take a lifetime, but I will try to touch on the best things that I encountered on my trip there during the summer.

I was on a school trip to England over the summer, with a 10 day stay in London and a 17 day stay right outside of Oxford in Oxfordshire.

A typical guide book on London might start like this: “Few other cities in the world have perhaps been written about - or as well known as - London. For literally centuries, London has been the economic and political center of the western world, and today while cities like New York and Washington might be the seats of the new power, London continues to attract … ”

“Hello this is XXX speaking, I am the captain of your train, and we will be departing shortly. We will be cruising at an altitude of approximately zero feet, and our scheduled arrival time in Morden is 3:15pm. The temperature in Morden is approximately 15 degrees Celsius, and Morden is in the same time zone as Mill Hill East, so there’s no need to adjust your watches”. Driver Northern Line

Forget Hollywood, forget New Zealand - if you want to know the true home of Middle Earth then come to this tiny pub on the road north out of Oxford. The ‘Eagle and Child” or ‘Bird and Baby” as it is sometimes called was the meeting place of ‘the Inklings” a set of Oxford literary figures such as C S Lewis, Neville Coghill and Professor John Rule Tolkien who would meet in the ‘Rabbit Room” and read to each other extracts from their work. For the visitor it offers a vision of a world gone by - a world of open fires, hearty conversation and good ale. And I can safely vouch that the food is good too.

This review is going to have a different sort of perspective than other ones. Of course it will have all about Oxford Street and shopping, etc, but it is from the view of someone who actually lives in London, not a tourist.

If you want to visit London, there are certain times when things are happening. Here is a quick rough guide on what’s going on during the London year:

February:

London”s Chinatown, the area around Leicester Square, celebrates Chinese New Year in the true style, with dragon dancing, traditional music, parades and entertainment.

I studied abroad at Exeter College at the University of Oxford. And I have to say that I had a pretty fun time there. Though a lot of the times, I was physically lodging books into my head to write those weekly essays, I had an unusual amount of free time to explore the city and its surroundings.

One of the busiest transport networks in the entire world is based right here in London.

Its common name is “the Underground” a name adopted in the 1930’s along with its famous Red circle and Blue stripe through.

Yet the tube network was started much earlier in the late 1800’s.

The underground was a complex maze of tunnels constructed deep underground to solve the transport problems that were beginning to affect London.

Lack of space was an issue above so the answer was found below.

I spent September 1984 and September 1986 traveling through England, Scotland, and Wales with a girlfriend. We had a fabulous time and I always wanted to go back for more, but life got in the way and I never did. It wasn’t until last year, when our choir was invited to sing Evensong services for a week at the York Minster cathedral in York that Penguinman and I started making plans. He’d never been there, and I immediately laid out a terrific trip for us. But when he gently suggested that we couldn’t see in two weeks everything I had seen in two months, we did some serious pruning. Nevertheless, we were in the UK from August 28 to September 22 of this year, and every minute of the trip was wonderful. Well, almost every minute…

London is one of the worlds more exciting cities. Over the past weekend, I made a short trip to see how things have changed over the numerous years since my previous visit. Many things are much the way I remembered them while others certainly had changed. I really enjoyed this most recent visit and hope to get back again later this year, when another air-fare sale breaks out.