Walking Through London

On 09.12.09 Allie and I spent the day walking around London. We started out around noon with a very loose agenda. Our original plan was to start out by going to a statue we had seen briefly from a bus that we wanted to examine closer. We had a rough guess as to its location, so with map in hand we set out on the tube. But we forgot that they do lots o maintenance on weekends…so after failing three times to find a line that was actually running, we surface on Oxford Street and decided to walk. There’s lots of shopping to be done on Oxford St. though, so we decided to peruse for a while first. We went into a store called H&M and picked outfits for each other. We both have impeccable taste when it comes to fashion.

After H&M a man on the street gave us directions to the statue we were seeking. The route he gave us took us through a small park and some really great neighborhoods. We also passed a few embassies. We found the statue and discovered its name, Quadriga—‘quad’ meaning ‘four’ and ‘riga’ meaning ‘chariot.’ The statue depicts the Angel of Peace holding back the Horses of War. I really love this statue. It is very fluid in its depiction and symbolic in its message.

Allie took several pictures of the monument, as well as pictures of me as I sat sketching. It was my first sketch in a long time, and I really enjoyed spending the time to draw.

We set out from ‘Quadriga’ to Harrods…which was quite an experience. Harrods is HUGE. I don’t believe I will ever be wealthy enough to purchase anything there, but it sure was fun to look. It’s almost more of a museum than a store.

We ate lunch at a little sandwich and coffee shop called O’Keefe’s. It was just a little out of the way place, and it seemed to me like they probably didn’t get many tourists there, because as we sat to eat our Cornish pasties (a sort of a mix between a meat pie and a hot pocket) the man who worked there came to sit by us and ask about where we were from.

After lunch we rode the tube to St. James’ Park, a large park across from Buckingham Palace. We sat on a bench and read our books because the weather was beautiful. Our final plan for the day was to go to Fleet Street (home of Sweeney Todd) and eat dinner at ‘the only good Mexican restaurant in London’ but it turns out that Fleet Street is in a financial district, and therefore nothing is open on the weekends…not even Mexican restaurants. So we came home and ate Chinese instead. It was so fun to just spend the day killing time and seeing sights. I LOVE London.