2006-08-01 Wedensday, March 24 We got up around 8 and had a bit of breakfast at the hotel - it wasn't all that much (or even interesting), but then again it was REALLY cheap, considering the rather high quality of the rooms and the excellent location. It was my choice that we stayed near the Bayswater/Notting Hill area as I have been there a couple of times before and really like it. So, naturally when we left the hotel we went down to Queensway, walked through Whiteleys (supposedly the oldest shopping centre in London, although it closed in 1981 and only re-opened with a new ownership (and in a totally renovated (newly-built?) building) in 1989. The original centre opened around 1851. The founder William Whitely was killed in his very own shopping centre in 1907, BTW) and continued down Westbourne Grove towards Portobello Road. Westbourne Grove is a very interesting road, with a lot of shops, cafés and restaurants - it's only just become trendy in these last 10 years or so, but it seems to be doing quite well by now - judging by the real estate prices advertised by the dozen or so real estate brokers from Queensway down to Portobello. Portobello Road isn't all that great on a Wedensday morning, and it was further scared by a whole lot of road work going on, so we went on to Ladbroke Grove, up the hill (where we checked out the church on the corner of St. Johns Gardens), and down again towards Holland Park Avenue. On the way to the Notting Hill Gate Underground we visited a couple of nice bookstores, and search high and low for an ATM (you wouldn't think it necessary to actually search for an ATM in London, would you?!). Anyway, that done we went to the exact opposite part of the city, by going to Tower Hill Gate to take the Docklands Light Railway out east to Greenwich. Despite having lived in London for a year, Hans had never visited Greenwich - it was my fourth visit to the place.. So, I volunteered for the guide for the day position, which I quickly regreted as we decided not to go up to the observatory, but east along the river instead - a part of the area which I had never visited before. The actual reason why we went all the way out there was because Hans wanted to see the Cutty Sark - when we saw the queue, however, we decided to go find a pub instead and have some lunch. This turned out to be a rather good idea, as the weather turned against us and it started raining heavily just a few minutes before we found the pub that got the honour of serving us lunch: The Yacht (next to the rather more historic, but also rather more expensive Trafalgar Tavern) by the river, on the very narrow Crane St. We had a riverside table with an excellent view of the exquisitely ugly Millenium Dome, so it was all worth it. We considered going back to the city by touring boat, but decided against it as we didn't have all that much time to spend in London. Also, the weather was bad, and I had tried it a few times before. It is a nice tour, though, and I recommend it if you've got 1½ hour to spare. So we went back to the DLR station, and back to Monument (or Bank... Possibly...). From here we immediately continued on to Embankment as we had arranged to meet Charles, a friend of Hans with whom we dined the day before as well, at Charing Cross. I had read about the Sherlock Holmes pub in some guide, and as I'm quite fond of Conan Doyle's stories about the detective I naturally had to see it. And.. Well.. It's not a great pub - it's okay, but not great - but it does actually showcase a lot of Conan Doyle memorabilia which is more than can be said of several other London pubs taking names from famous fictional (or non-fictional, for that matter) characters. So if you like the stories and take an interest into the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, you may want to pay this place a visit. It is just a (very) few minutes walk from Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square. We had to be at the Criterion theatre at Piccadilly Square at 19:30, so we decided not to go see anything in particular. Instead we just walked north from Trafalgar, crossed over Leicester Square, and walked around Soho for a bit. After having been to one so-so pub (whose name I can't remember - Soho is packed with pubs), we ended up at the rather excellent Red Lion pub in Gt. Windmill Street. This wasn't an entire coincidence as I had been there the summer before as well. I happened to be reading a biography about Karl Marx at the time, and read about a certain pub in which Karl Marx was commissioned to write the Communist Manifesto. The pub was the Red Lion in Gt. Windmill Street. The Red Lion is not an ordinary pub - the decor is rather modern, the windows aren't screened and the walls are white. It seems to be quite a decent place to watch sports, it is only a few hundred meters from Piccadilly, the prices are reasonable, it doesn't get much cleaner, etc. - so, we stayed there for a few hours, had a couple of snacks and pints, and then went to the theatre (via Tower Records on Piccadilly, which I hear have been taken over by Virgin recently?). The show was The Complete Works of Shakespare - abridged, and it was hilarious. I had booked a few months in advance because of a special web offer, so we got two second row seats for £10 a piece! This was very lucky, as a couple of the audience on the first row had their programme ripped apart, and two other (un)lucky members of the audience got pulled up the stage to take part in the performance. I'm not always that keen on audience participation in such plays, but the actors knew what they were doing and it was some of the most fun I've ever had, I think. We went straight back to the hotel afterwards - we only stopped to grab a few burgers at the Burger King on Queensway to have a bit of late dinner, which we brought back to the Leisure Inn. Tuesday, March 25 We got up early (really!!), and still didn't even have the time to get breakfast at the hotel, as our train for Holyhead departed from Euston at 08:45. It would have been just as cheap to go to Dublin by a Ryanair plane from Stanstead, but neither of us had seen Wales before, and it is a very comfortable and relaxing way of travelling so we enjoyed the next 4 hrs. or so, while we travelled through the British and Welsh countryside - well, the British countryside, the Welsh seaside, as we travelled along the north coast of Wales from Chester to Bangor, before we crossed the channel to the Island of Anglesey and finally the very small Holy Island on which Holyhead is situated. The train ride took us through such great cities as Milton Keynes, Rugby, Stafford, Crewe, Chester, Rhyl, Colwyn Bay, Llandudno (of Decline and Fall fame) and Bangor. The Stena Line boat from Holyhead left at 13:45, and we arrived in Dun Laoghaire (pronounced Leary - a shame, really - phonetically pronouncing Laoghaire sounds much cooler ;-) a few hours later. We then took the local DART service along the bay to Connolly station in the center of Dublin. We walked down Talbot St. and up Gardiner St. to find our hotel, Dergvale, at 4 Gardiner Place, a short walk north of O'Connell Street. Dergvale is a small but very cozy and friendly hotel, in a rather sleazy part of town. A lot of GAA fans stay at the hotel due to its relative vicinity to Croke Park, but also (and especially) because the building was once the home of Michael Cusack, co-founder of the GAA. After 1½ hours of sightseeing the the center of Dublin, we decided to go back towards the hotel, still in search of a Celtic-pub. And finally we found one - Frazers - at the north end of O'Connell St., and apparently THE place for Celtic fans in Dublin. When we arrived at the first floor of the pub there were a couple of hundred fans already - within the next hour or so, this number was doubled. What an atmosphere, what a match - what a time it took to get a beer!. But still, this was one of the highlights of the entire tour. We arrived back at the hotel around 23:45, and almost immediately went to bed, having had a long and hard day. The hotel, BTW, had the best hotel beds I've ever slept in - it may, of course, be because I got the king-size while Hans slept in a single ;-)
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