The Lurkyloos Do Disneyland Paris in the Snow! UPDATED 10/18 - How to Get to Paris from Disneyland!

Yeah, right now I'm trying to work with the assumption that it won't be open to set myself up for a pleasant surprise if it is, rather than disappointment if it isn't. We shall see!
 
Day 2: La-Di-Da! Harrods + Buckingham Palace + The Ritz!

When I was growing up, “Buckingham Palace” and “The Ritz” were terms frequently used by my family to denote ultimate, nigh-unattainable levels of class and elegance (as in “Pick up my toys? What is this, Buckingham Palace?!” and “Put on pants? What is this, The Ritz?!”). On our first full day in London, I finally got to see both of them in the space of a few hours!

The whole day was one big monarchy-fest, starting with a trip to Westminster Abbey (where royalty is married and buried), then a visit to the Banqueting House (scene of the only regicide in English history), followed by a trip to Harrods (site of a controversial tribute to Princess Di) before our Buckingham Palace tour and dinner-dance at The Ritz.

We started our day early, with a room-service breakfast to save time. They brought us a huge bucket of ice but no water or anything else to put ice in except, I guess, the orange juice? Apparently Americans have a reputation for loving ice! I was still feeling a little spacey and decided not to fuss with re-learning the subway yet, so we took a black cab over to Westminster Abbey. London was DESERTED on Saturday morning at 8:00! We asked the cabbie if it was always this dead, and he said, “Only in January and February.” So there’s a hot tip if you want to know when crowds are lowest in London…

Another hot tip is to get to Westminster Abbey an hour before it opens, like we did! We were first in the non-existent line, which gave Patrick time to run around taking photos of the exterior. And I’d purchased our tickets online to make our entry that much quicker. By the time we were almost done with our tour, the place was PACKED, so I highly recommend going first thing in the morning.

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This is the main entrance, but to get in, you have to go around to the right where the two towers are. We know this because we played a game of Human Ping Pong instigated by two staffers at either end who kept sending us back and forth between them until a third staffer gave us the definitive answer!

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Actual entrance!

A couple of these shots were taken later in the day, when it began to get crowded, but I wanted to show you the whole thing now!

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My absolute favorite thing about Westminster Abbey is the new statues over the Great West Door. In 1998, these 10 vacant niches were filled with depictions of 20th Century Christian martyrs, including Martin Luther King, Jr.! How cool is that? An American on one of Europe’s most famous chuches! There’s also a guy with glasses—you don’t see that on Notre Dame or the Duomo of Milan! You can read the full list here.

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The statues were added in 1998. The yellow safety cone was added in 2018.

About 20 minutes before the abbey opened, the guards moved our tiny line up to the North Entrance. This gave Patrick a chance to shoot some of the goofy gargoyles overhead.

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Say “Ahhhhh…”

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OK, now here is the bummer part: No photography is allowed inside Westminster Abbey. They say it’s because they don’t want the act of taking photos to distract from the atmosphere of a working church, and I can see their point. They do have a gallery of photos online, so I’ll add a few of those here.

There is an excellent audio guide with visual accompaniment, interviews with curators and conservators, and even reflection audio at some spots where narrator Jeremy Irons invites you to think about your place and purpose in the universe. (If you miss his narration from Spaceship Earth, you will be happy to know that every audio tour you take in England will be narrated by Jeremy Irons!)

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© Westminster Abbey

The tour starts at the north entrance and has you walk down along the aisle behind the pillars on the left of the photo below, toward the The Tomb of The Unknown Warrior, one of the most somber and touching memorials in the abbey. In 1920 an unidentified British soldier killed in World War I was interred here in a casket made of oak from trees at Hampton Court Palace, affixed with a medieval crusader’s sword chosen from the Royal Collection by King George V. It was covered in soil from each of the major battlefields of WWI during a ceremony attended by tens of thousands of mourners. The black marble plaque laid on top is the only memorial in the entire Abbey over which no one may walk. Queen Elizabeth II’s mother started the tradition of royal brides leaving their bouquets on the tomb when she laid hers atop it (in memory of a brother killed in WWI) on the way into the Abbey for her wedding.

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© Westminster Abbey

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© Westminster Abbey

The nave houses a series of chambers, starting behind the elaborate Quire screen.

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© Westminster Abbey

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© Westminster Abbey

The Quire, looking toward the Sanctuary and High Altar

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© Westminster Abbey

Looking back toward the Nave and Quire Screen

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© Westminster Abbey



The High Altar is where daily religious services are held, as well as, you know, the weddings of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Prince William!

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© Westminster Abbey

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© Westminster Abbey

Behind the High Altar is the Shrine of Saint Edward the Confessor, the king who built the first royal church on this site as a place to house his own tomb. He died a week after it was finished! This area was under restoration when we visited, so I was glad to find a photo on the abbey website.

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© Westminster Abbey

Off to the sides of this area are numerous other tombs, but the monument to Lady Elizabeth and Joseph Nightingale is my favorite, cuz it’s the creepiest! Apparently it may have been based on a nightmare experienced by Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, who dreamt of a skeleton standing at the foot of his bed before it slithered up under the covers up between him and his wife. Legend of Sleepy Hollow author Washington Irving called this monument “among the most renowned achievements of modern art” (and we know what kind of taste he had)!

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© Westminster Abbey

The North Transcept is the top of the cross formed by the wings of the abbey and where some of the most famous burials are, including…

Queen Elizabeth I…

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© Westminster Abbey

Mary, Queen of Scots…

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© Westminster Abbey

and Elizabeth of York and Henry VII…

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© Westminster Abbey



… who built the magnificent Lady Chapel in which his tomb lies.

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© Westminster Abbey

The chapel is dedicated to THE lady, The Virgin Mary, not, like, all the ladies of the world

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© Westminster Abbey

The tour takes you back down the nave to Poets’ Corner, a cluster of memorials to poets, writers, playwrights and musicians. Among those actually buried in the abbey are Geoffrey Chaucer (the first person interred in Poets’ Corner), Charles Dickens, George Frideric Handel, Rudyard Kipling and Sir Laurence Olivier.

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© Westminster Abbey

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“Pose for my what…? Look, I’m busy—this Messiah ain’t gonna write itself!”

At this point the tour leads you out into the Cloisters to see some of the oldest parts of Westminster Abbey, including the Chapter House, which dates to about 1250. Originally it was used by Benedictine monks for daily meetings, but it later became a meeting place for the King’s Great Council and the Commons, predecessors of Parliament. We’d seen it multiple times on Monarchy, so we were very excited!

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© ChrisVTG Photography

All around the room are original paintings from the 1400s and 1500s depicting scenes from Revelation, except for a set known as “the Last Judgment or Doom Group” (either of which would be an excellent name for a metal band!).

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© Klaus D. Peter
 
In the Chapter House’s vestibule is Britain’s Oldest Door, dating from 1050. Behind it is Britain’s Oldest Broom Closet.

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© Blog.Travelpod.com

I think this may have been where it finally started to dawn on us that all this stuff is not just really old, it is really REAL. It’s especially revelatory for American Disney fans, who are not surrounded by this kind of antiquity in their daily lives and have only seen facsimiles in Disney parks.

Our last stop (before the obligatory gift shop) was the Coronation Chair commissioned by Edward I to hold the Stone of Scone, which he stole from Scotland in 1296. Scottish kings had been crowned on the stone for centuries, and it has been used in every English coronation ceremony since 1308. In 1996 the stone was finally returned to Scotland (on the provision that it be leant out for each subsequent coronation) and you’ll get to see it when I write up the first Edinburgh day of this trip report!

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© Westminster Abbey

So is Westminster Abbey worth a trip? If you are an English history buff, a fan of the monarchy, a lover of gothic architecture or have binge-watched the entire David Starkey Monarchy series, yes. If you’re not as familiar with these people and what they represent, then maybe not. As we shuffled past each tomb, it did feel a bit like our final exam after months of cramming on the subject. (“Henry III… was he the one played by Peter O’Toole or the one played by Kenneth Branagh?” Answer: Neither! Nobody’s made a movie about poor Henry III!).

But it was also fascinating to finally be able to put all the pieces together as we gazed on effigies of kings and queens whom we’d only seen in paintings. A lot of the carvings are based on death masks, so it’s kind of like looking at the real person. And believe me, Elizabeth I was no Cate Blanchett! (Although, if all the Lola visual-effects rumors are true, Cate Blanchett is no [longer] Cate Blanchett either!)

Before we left, we grabbed a quick bite in the cafe, which is housed in the monks’ former food vaults. I highly recommend their Millionaire’s Shortbread, and Patrick loved his first English tea.

We had a lot of time to kill before our Buckingham Palace Tour, so we decided to hit up a nearby site covered by our Historic Royal Palaces membership, Whitehall’s Banqueting House. It was a short walk away, right past another classic tourist spot…

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Yep, that’s Big Ben under there! (Side note: Be prepared to be told that “Big Ben” is actually the name of the bell, not the tower or clock, NUMEROUS times during your stay in London, usually by Jeremy Irons.)

Way to go, England! Our one big trip over, and your No. 1 landmark is under refurbishment? Disney needs to at least lend these guys some tarps with a photo of the tower on them…

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“I’m hideous—look away until at least 2021!”

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Along the way we discovered a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of Parliament Square! It turns out to be one of several copies of a statue in Chicago that was created based on a life mask and hand casts of Lincoln’s. This one was a 1920 gift to the British, who naturally followed proper etiquette and placed the statue out where the givers can see it whenever they visit.

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“Well I don’t know what to do with it either, Prime Minister. Just set it next to Big Ben so the Americans will be sure to see it!”

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This Abe can’t sit down the way Disney’s can, but he doesn’t leak oil either!

Also, there was a pigeon.

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“Cor’ blimey! Ain’t you Yanks ever seen a pigeon before?”

When we reached the Banqueting House, we were delighted to discover that the Horse Guards, headquarters of The Queen’s Life Guard, is directly across the street, and you can take pictures of the guards on duty.

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They do a smaller guard-changing ceremony that is not quite as spectacular as the one at Buckingham Palace, but here you can get right up close to the horses and guards.

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Like, dangerously close!

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The Banqueting House is cool for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s the last remnant of the ginormous Palace of Whitehall, Henry VIII’s 23-acre, 1,500-room government seat and royal residence that was bigger than The Vatican and only eventually eclipsed by Versailles. Second, it is the site of the 1649 beheading of King Charles I, the only English monarch ever executed by his people.

But my favorite aspect is that this building launched the trend of neo-classical architecture that took England (and subsequently America) by storm. Think about the architecture of Washington, DC and basically every state capital in the US. All of those buildings look the way they do because of this building by Inigo Jones (not to be confused with expert swordsman and father-avenger Inigo Montoya). When it was built, the Banqueting House was surrounded by Tudor buildings and stuck out like a sore thumb. Now it looks just like every other building on the block!

But of course we didn’t know any of this when we were standing outside shivering in the rain, so we didn’t take a photo. I found this Wikimedia Commons image that illustrates how anonymous this groundbreaking building looks today.

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© Paul the Archivist

The Banqueting House’s other claim to fame is the magnificent set of ceiling paintings by Peter Paul Reubens (not to be confused with Pee-Wee Herman alter ego Paul Rubens) commisioned by King Charles I to glorify the reign of his father, King James I (of King James Version Bible fame). Since the paintings are basically the only reason tourists visit the Banqueting House, Historic Royal Palaces has cleverly provided numerous beanbag chairs for guests to lie on so they can study the ceiling!

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© Grahampurse

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There is a super-detailed audio guide—perhaps too detailed, considering that you’re just looking at the one room and the only thing in it besides the paintings is a fancy chair. It’s the only audio tour we gave up on before the end (don’t tell Jeremy Irons!). Soporific narration + bean bag chair = naptime for Lurkyloo!

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“Zzzzzzzz—SNORT!—Where am I? Why is Patrick on the ceiling?!”

After that, it was off to Harrods! Once again, we were too distracted to get an establishing shot. Fortunately, my Twitter pal ZZ Gator visited just a few weeks after we did and supplied me with this fabulous photo!

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Harrods started on this site in 1851 as a one-room operation and is now the largest department store in Europe, covering 5 acres with 1 million square feet of retail space. In December 1883 it burned to the ground, but Charles Harrod still managed to fulfill all of his customers’ Christmas orders and make a record profit. The store’s motto is Omnia Omnibus Ubique, which means “All things for all people, everywhere.” Although today it should probably be “All things for rich people, everywhere…”

Harrods was a BIG DEAL to me when I lived in London. I was a starving student who ate almost nothing but mashed potatos, which I could stir on the stove while sitting on the bed in my closet of a flat. I used to wander around Harrods’ magnificent food hall, pressing my nose against all the glass cases like a Dickensian street urchin before finally settling on which single piece of candy I was going to buy. So I was very excited to be able to return at a time in my life when I can afford at least two pieces of candy!

It took me a while to find the food hall. Like a dad on a road trip, I refused to ask for directions or rely on anything but a 20-year-old memory of the store layout, which meant we went up and down the same elevators and escalators multiple times, trudged through endless labyrinthian corridors reeking of posh perfume, and passed this guy at least twice!

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Please look after this bear? This bear needs to look after ME!

At last, the scent of the carvery grabbed us by the nostrils and dragged us in the right direction.

Each room of the food hall has a different theme. One room is full of different counters where you can eat prepared food, sort of like LA’s Grand Central Market or Original Farmers Market, only super-swanky: caviar, sushi, Champagne, seafood, steak. Another room has produce, meat, fish and all the other raw ingredients of a fancy meal. And then there’s my favorite room, which has all the candy and cake counters, plus coffee and flowers.

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“‘Allo, guv’ner!”

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Coffee beans, not chocolate chips (or am I the only one who thought this could possibly be a vat of chocolate chips?)

For my fellow cake lovers….

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A uni-cake!

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But a funny thing happened when I finally got back to my Mecca. We were standing in a snaking line to buy pastries, jostled on all sides by the Saturday afternoon crowds thronging the windowless, stuffy food hall when something snapped and I wanted out. Immediately! I could tell just by looking at the crumbling, barely frosted slices of cake they were cutting that no dessert I bought was going to taste as good as it looked, and it wasn’t worth it to me to be in that stifling atmosphere one second longer.

Here are some of the pastries we didn’t buy…
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Instead we escaped to the fourth-floor Terrace restaurant, an airy sort of greenhouse that is possibly the only place in Harrods with windows.

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© Harrods

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The food was just OK, but we were cozy inside with a view of the rain soaking the Knightsbridge rooftops—I was in heaven!

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Spatchcock Chicken

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Fish & Chips with Mushy Peas

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Fried Artichokes

On our way out, I wanted to show Patrick Harrods’ fanciful Egyptian room, which apparently so overwhelmed him that he didn’t even take a picture. Wikimedia Commons to the rescue again!

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© Targeman

Right around the corner is the sort of cheesy but still touching Princess Diana memorial that Dodi Fayed’s dad installed when he was owner of Harrods. The store is now owned by the State of Qatar, and apparently there are plans to remove the memorial.

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I actually saw Princess Di at a makeup counter in Harvey Nichols, a posh department store right down the street from Harrods, about a month before her death, and somehow it made the tragedy even more traumatic for me. It felt a bit ghoulish to see a lipstick-smeared glass from her last meal on display in the middle of a department store.

So on that somber note, we stumbled out of Harrods and into a taxi to… Buckingham Palace!

Right as we hopped out in front of the palace, a helicopter made a dramatic landing in the park across the street. As a dumb American, I was hoping against hope that this was the Queen returning home from Balmoral, but of course there’s no way they would have let us do a tour of her house if she was due back that day, and they certainly wouldn’t set her down on the other side of a sprawling boulevard. (Unless the pilot was an Uber driver.)

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“Welp, it’s as close as I could get, Your Majesty—mind the traffic!”

Buckingham Palace was the first thing I booked for our trip. Never visiting the palace is probably my biggest regret from the time I lived in London (well, that and eating mashed potatoes for every meal…). Usually, they’re only open for tours for a couple of months in the summer, while the Queen is on vacation. But I was thrilled to discover they’d introduced an Exclusive Evening Tour for a few weeks this past winter, and the last two days happened to coincide with the first two days of our trip! (The tour has since been extended, and it runs March 31-May 7!) The group is limited to 30 people, and you get a souvenir guide, a glass of Champagne (or cider) and a 20% discount in the gift shop. I can’t figure out if we got to see more rooms than are on the regular tour or if the “exclusive” part was that we got to go when it wasn’t summer. Either way, it was a fantastic tour!

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© Royal Collection Trust — This totally was not happening when we arrived!

First, the bad news: No photos are allowed inside. Fortunately, the souvenir guide is full of great photos, drawings and paintings, so you can just focus on seeing the rooms without a camera in front of your face.

Also, if you are a fan of The Crown, I must warn you that the inside of the real Buckingham Palace looks nothing like the one on the show. But the place they use, Lancaster House, is right around the corner!

There are some wonderful online resources if you want to see more of the inside of Buckingham Palace. The official website has some excellent 360-degree tours of several rooms.

Even cooler, Google Expeditions has created an amazing virtual tour of the palace interior that allows you to click around 360 degrees while the video is playing.


The Google Expedition begins in the same place we started our tour, the Marble Hall. We were introduced to a cheerful young tour guide who’d just returned from a week’s holiday at Walt Disney World! She had all the qualities you want in a guide: enthusiasm, knowledge and a strong set of pipes!

We learned that the Queen was due to return in just a few days, so things might be in a bit of disarray for our tour as the staff prepared for her arrival. (The disarray consisted primarily of a large dining table that had been moved from one room to another, and BOY did it throw our guide for a loop!) We also learned that the Queen comes in the very same entrance we did whenever she returns to Buckingham Palace, and she walks through the Marble Hall to the Grand Staircase. And that’s what makes Buckingham Palace unique: It’s one of the few working palaces left in the world, where people actually live!

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© Royal Collection Trust

Buckingham Palace came about when King George IV (whom Regency novel fans will know as “Prinny”) bought Buckingham House and set about making it into a palace with the aid of architect John Nash. But the first monarch to actually live in the palace was Queen Victoria. She had portraits of her greatest forebears hung all around the Grand Staircase to help symbolically establish her right to rule.

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© Royal Collection Trust

I love this 1845 watercolor of the Grand Staircase by court artist Eugène Lami. It makes our tour group of 30 look positively dinky!

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© Royal Collection Trust

Through the doors at the top of the stairs is the Guard Room, an antechamber leading to the Green Drawing Room, and inside it were my favorite pieces of art on the whole tour: life-size statues of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert that made you almost feel as if you’d seen them in person (albeit in an idealized, give-Emily-Blunt-and-Rupert-Friend-a-run-for-their-money sort of way).

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© Royal Collection Trust

This is the second version of the statue Prince Albert gave to Queen Victoria for her birthday in 1842. Apparently he decided the shorter kilt and bare feet on the original made it “too undressed.” It’s like a boudoir portrait in marble!

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© Royal Collection Trust

The Green Drawing Room is home to a collection of rare Sèvres porcelain and some elaborate window treatments that would make Carol Burnett one heckuva Scarlett O’Hara dress!

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© Royal Collection Trust

This exquisite portrait of King George III’s three youngest daughters by American artist John Singleton Copley is our guide’s favorite piece in the whole palace. Apparently it was originally criticized because, instead of prim and stately poses, the children were depicted behaving like, well, children!

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© Royal Collection Trust

The Green Drawing Room opens onto the Royal Throne Room. It looks more grandiose in this photo than in person. For some reason, it didn’t feel all that imposing to me in person—maybe because of the rando dining table dumped in the middle of it!

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© Royal Collection Trust



There… fixed it…

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© Royal Collection Trust

The room that really took everyone’s breath away was the Picture Gallery. You round a sort of anonymous corner and then there is this HUGE long hall stretching away to infinity! For a moment you could hear nothing but a series of gasps as each cluster of tourists rounded the corner.

This photo must’ve been shot about half of the way down the hall—it runs the length of the building and is about half the length of an (American) football field. Nash placed the gallery on the first floor, in the center of the building so that it would be used as a reception hall rather than just a hushed, empty museum stuck away someplace. William and Kate’s wedding cake was displayed in this room.

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© Royal Collection Trust

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© Royal Collection Trust

At the end of the gallery, through the Silk Tapestry Room (three guesses what’s in there, and the first two don’t count!) is the East Gallery, home of my favorite painting in the Royal Collection.

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© Royal Collection Trust

Painted by Franz Xavier Winterhalter in 1846, this portrait of the Royal Family is notable for a number of reasons: It skillfully depicts Victoria as both sovereign and mother (giving Albert a little more prominence as the traditional head of the family); it is the first royal family portrait to be almost photojournalistic, because the subjects aren’t looking directly at the viewer; and Victoria later said it was one of her three favorite portraits of Albert. But the reason I love it is… LOOK AT THAT ADORABLE BABY! She’s doing exactly what a baby would do if you were trying to get a candid photo of a family!

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© Royal Collection Trust

Our next stop was The Ballroom. By this time we’d pretty much been beaten into submission by all the gilt and crystal and opulence, so we didn’t even gasp when we entered the largest room in the palace (and formerly the largest room in London!).

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© Royal Collection Trust

In addition to state banquets, this room hosts about 25 investiture ceremonies per year. This is where the Queen or another member of the Royal Family bestows an honor like an Order of Merit or a knighthood on about 50 people at a time. Twenty-five ceremonies per year is like twice a month! This is when I started to realize how much work it must be to be part of the Royal Family.

If you go through the door on the right in the photo above, you get to the State Dining Room, where smaller events or things like post-dinner coffee are held. (“Smaller” events, like for 100 people!)


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© Royal Collection Trust

The Blue Drawing Room is not blue. I mean, the wallpaper supposedly is, but…. come on! How hard would it be to splash a bit of blue paint around? This room served as the palace ballroom before Victoria had the big ballroom added in 1855.

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© Royal Collection Trust

One of the main attractions in this room is the Table of the Grand Commanders of Antiquity, which is a sort of monument to hubris. Napoleon commissioned it right after he conquered all of Europe and crowned himself emperor. It depicts Alexander the Great and 12 other great military leaders of ancient times in porcelain and gilt-bronze. But it was not finished until 1812 (see “War of…”), and then it sat in the Sèvres factory until Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. Eventually it was given to King George IV by France’s Louis XVIII to commemorate their allied victory over Napoleon. Moral of the story: Never get involved in a land war in Asia, go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line, or commission a fancy table likening yourself to great military commanders of antiquity!

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© Royal Collection Trust

From there we were lead to the Music Room, where, we were told, Prince Charles’ 40th birthday party was held. Apparently Elton John and Stevie Wonder played! We also learned that the man who created the parquet floor boasted at the time, “At 50 years hence it would be good as it is now; you might drive carriages over it.” Judging by the fact that there’s a rug in this photo, I’m thinking they drove one too many carriages over it!

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© Royal Collection Trust
 


The last room on the tour was the White Drawing Room, which we were told was done over by Queen Elizabeth’s great-grandmother, Queen Alexandra, whose portrait hangs over the fireplace.

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© Royal Collection Trust

Our guide said that everyone who sees the painting thinks the artist, François Flameng, did a little old-school Photoshop on the Queen because she was 64 when her portrait was painted. But she actually looked that good! Check out this photo of her taken the same year the portrait was painted (she’s the one on the right). She also started the trend of high necklines and choker necklaces at the turn of the last century (think Gibson Girls), simply because she was hiding a scar. Even crazier, society ladies would affect the “Alexandra limp” she acquired after an illness in 1867!

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© Royal Collection Trust

OK, back to the room. One of its most famous features is the door hidden behind one of the grand mirrors flanking the fireplace. It leads to a secret passageway the Queen uses to get to the state rooms from her private quarters, and sometimes guests get thrown for a loop when she magically appears or disappears during a function!


But the funniest story was a continuation of the “Stevie Wonder plays Prince Charles’ birthday bash” tale. Apparently Stevie Wonder was escorted into this room afterward and, upon learning there was a piano in there, plopped down at this priceless 250-year-old antique belonging to Queen Victoria and started playing. Isn’t she lovely, indeed!

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© Royal Collection Trust

The tour was probably the perfect length, but I was still bummed when our guide announced that we’d reached the end. I mean, there are 775 rooms in the joint, and we only saw 10!

We were led down the Ministers Staircase…

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© Royal Collection Trust

…to the Marble Hall, where they had glasses of Champagne, cider, sparkling water and still water waiting for us. This hall was designed for displaying sculptures but lacked natural light, so most of the sculptures on display here now were originally displayed elsewhere. Our guide told us to take as long as we liked to admire the artworks, and that we were all welcome to enjoy 20% off in the gift shop.

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© Royal Collection Trust

The merchandise was surprisingly well designed, and with 20% off burning a hole in my pocket, I broke down and got a fancy teacup to use for my traditional rainy-day hot chocolate.

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I have been going through a 12-step program to curb my addiction to stuffed animals, but Patrick finally enabled me into a little stuffed corgi that we named Willow, after the Queen’s favorite dog.

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Just like the Queen’s corgis, but with less pooping!

As we waited in line to check out, we got to talking with The Other Americans on the tour. They are from Omaha, but the woman’s mom lives in the tiny little town of Grass Valley, CA, where I grew up. Small world!

When we were ready to leave, the guides handed us a bag with our two souvenir guidebooks. Then a nice girl escorted us across the famous courtyard, through the arch that Prince Phillip is always grumpily speeding out of in a convertible on The Crown, and right out the front gates. It was surreal!

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We were just IN there!

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Patrick and I agreed that Buckingham Palace was the highlight of the day. The tour was so well organized and executed, and what we saw was amazing. I would actually do the same tour again. Patrick said he had to keep reminding himself that if it looked like gold, it was real gold. If it looked like marble, it was real marble. Nothing was a Disney fabrication here! At the same time (and especially compared to, oh, Versailles) the place felt… cozy? Human-scaled, at least. Nothing was SO over the top as to be incomprehensible. It definitely has a British sensibility.

OK, how’re you doing? You still with me? We’re almost done… Just one last amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience to recount…

After the tour, we took a cab back to the room and got gussied up for Live at the Ritz, a weekly supper club held in the Michelin-starred Ritz Restaurant, an over-the-top ornate room in THE Ritz Hotel. I mean, there are others, but this is the Ritz that Irving Berlin was talking about in the song “Puttin’ On the Ritz” fer cryin’ out loud!

I almost wished we were just going for lunch so we could really see the amazing interior in daylight…

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© The Ritz London

But I’ve had a fascination with supper clubs ever since I saw The Rocketeer, so I knew we had to splurge on the full experience.

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The Ritz… has a lot of ceilings, I guess..?

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Apparently Patrick didn’t think anything in the lobby at eye level was worth photographing, but I kind of agree. I was surprised how small and sort of anonymous the lobby was. Maybe it’s one of those places that doesn’t have to be grand because all the luxury is in the service.

The Palm Court Tea Room is pretty spectacular, and it’s another place I wish we could have photographed in daylight.

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© The Ritz London

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We were down the hall in the Ritz Restaurant. I’d mentioned our anniversary when I made our reservation, so they seated us in this prime table right by the dance floor!

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We decided to order off the a la carte menu and pay the £30/person “entertainment charge” instead of ordering from the £110 set menu. I dunno if it saved us that much money, but at least we got something we wanted to eat!

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Fancy!

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Shmancy!

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Our amuse bouche: Looks like dessert, tastes like fish!

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Foofy drink!

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Scallop appetizer

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Beef Filet with Ox Cheek, Onion and Red Wine

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Fillet of Sika Deer with Red Cabbage, Elderberries and Chestnut

The food was good but not amazing, and pricier than it should have been for the quality. Like Disney Signature Dining food! Actually, the whole experience was pretty much like an International Food & Wine Festival or Tables In Wonderland event. You pay a bit too much, but you get to do something slightly unusual for that place.

As the live band played a sedate mix of standards, pop and R&B, a few couples took the floor. There was one couple who seemed like regulars and danced to almost every song. There was a family who all danced in a big group. And there were a few other couples like us who seemed to be celebrating a rare special occasion. Well, not exactly like us… Let’s just say we put the “trip” in “trip the light fantastic.” (Ten years is a looooong time to go without dance lessons!)

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At the band’s first set break, somebody fired up a smoke machine and put on a brassy recorded tango as two dancers sashayed onto the floor. I got my eyeballs all loosened up and ready for some major rolling, but the dancers were so dang good that you had to admire them through all the cheese…

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Good and FAST!

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That’s some real poltergeist stuff right there!

They did three sets with three costume changes in between the live band’s sets, so there was always something to look at besides, you know, each other.


via GIPHY

After dinner, our waiter surprised us with a tiny and tasty little cake! It was the only free anniversary dessert we scored on the whole trip (Walt Disney World, this ain’t!) and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

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And then he surprised us again with a tray of tiny fancy desserts to help the bill go down smoother.

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And then we dropped dead of sheer exhaustion. No! We made it back to the hotel and got in our jammies and slept on the floor cuz the dog called dibs on the bed.

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Up Next: Sir John Soane’s Museum, Kensington Palace, National Portrait Gallery + Amazing Dim Sum!
 
Seems like a lovely day in London! I definitely enjoyed visiting Buckingham Palace (I think it was the first week they had opened for the summer).

Coffee beans, not chocolate chips (or am I the only one who thought this could possibly be a vat of chocolate chips?)
I saw the picture before reading the caption, and thought it was chocolate too!
 


I just stumbled upon your TR and I'm so glad I did!

You visited some of my favorite places and I'm truly enjoying your take on them. Looking forward to hearing about the rest of your trip!
 
Day 3: Sir John Soane’s Museum, Kensington Palace & How Not to See the National Gallery

Today was less hectic than yesterday, but only slightly. We still managed to hit three interesting tourist spots and have one of the best meals of our trip!

In the morning we got to sleep in a little bit because the first stop on our itinerary didn’t open until 10 AM, and our tour wasn’t till 11 AM. So we had another room service breakfast that was basically just a reconfiguration of all the ingredients in yesterday’s breakfast. Then I figured out how to get Oyster Cards at the nearest station and got us on the Tube! Navigating the Tube again after 20 years was just like falling off a log (with slightly less bruising). Everything came back to me right away, and soon we were zipping all over town underground. I was starting to get a swell head about it until the last trip of the night, when I took the wrong exit at Leicester Square and we got hopelessly lost in the dark. More on that later…

Our first stop today was Sir John Soane’s Museum, which I’d selected because I’d read somewhere that it is one of the world’s finest house museums, left largely in its original state for nearly 200 years, per the owner’s will. But what I was expecting and what it turned out to be were quite different.

Sir John Soane’s museum overlooks Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest public square in London. What I thought we were going to see was a generic example of a Regency-era (my favorite) London home and how a family lived in it. What we actually saw was a monument to one man’s individuality and foresight, a combination home, architectural lab and research library filled with more than 40,000 objects of art and architecture collected on Soane’s world travels. It’s basically a real-life Adventurer’s Club!



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Soane acquired three townhouses over a number of years and remodeled them into one large house.

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Sir John Soane is fascinating because he was one of the most celebrated neo-classical architects of his time—and considered by architects today as the first modernist—but nearly everything he designed has been destroyed or remodeled out of existence. (You will recall, class, that classical architecture was introduced to England by Inigo Jones when he designed the Banqueting House, which we learned about in the last installment of this report!) Soane’s most famous work was probably the Bank of England building, but it was extensively rebuilt in what one architectural critic called “the greatest architectural crime, in the City of London, of the Twentieth Century.” About the only things left are the Dulwich Picture Gallery, where Soane introduced the now-standard concept of overhead lighting via skylight, and the museum made from his home.

This is Joseph Michael Gandy’s visualization of all the projects Soane designed that were actually built, up to 1815.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Joseph Michael Gandy

Patrick’s favorite piece in the museum was Joseph Michael Gandy’s visualization of all the projects Soane designed that were never built, including a grand entrance arch for London seen at the very front here. (Patrick’s take-away on Sir John Soane: “He sure liked columns!”)

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Joseph Michael Gandy

Soane also had a dramatic personal life, rising to great social status from a background as the son of a bricklayer at a time when class was rigidly defined by birth and practically the only measure of a person’s worth. He married for love and toiled in obscurity for some time before becoming wealthy overnight when his wife inherited her uncle’s fortune. At the end of his life he was so famous and well regarded that he was able to have a Private Act of Parliament passed to circumvent succession laws so that his profligate son would not inherit (and inevitably destroy) his house and its vast library of architectural resources.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Soane’s library and dining room are considered ahead of their time and have influenced generations of architects


I expended a LOT of energy on planning this part of our trip—like, a disproportionately large amount considering the size of the museum and our ultimate enjoyment of it. A lot of this was due to their not publishing the 2018 tour schedule until almost the end of January 2018. It was also a bit confusing which tour(s) we should take in order to see as much as possible, and I almost booked us a private, after-hours candlelight house tour just so we could be sure to see it all. But I came to my senses when I realized that £800 was more than I’d paid for a full-day tour of Versailles or, you know, my first car!

I ended up booking the paid (but reasonably priced, at £12.50) Highlights Tour and the free Private Apartments Tour so we could be sure to see everything. It turns out that the Highlights Tour actually includes the private apartments, something not mentioned on their website until a few days after I turned in my visitor survey card…. But I was able to make another couple very happy when I handed them my tickets as they were being turned away from the booked-up Private Apartments Tour!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — This is where you meet for the free tour!

The museum seems very professional and polished from its website, but as with any institution run largely by volunteers, things were actually a bit rough around the edges. Staffers ran the gamut from friendly and helpful to grouchy and rude. Bulky personal belongings are a VERY BIG DEAL at the Soane museum. This is understandable because almost nothing is behind glass or roped-off, so there’s always the danger that if you turn around too quickly you could knock over a priceless Ming vase or something. To solve this, they give you a plastic bag to put your small items in and have you check bigger bags in what the website refers to as the “cloakroom.” However, the volunteer staffing the place was adamant that we could not check our coats in the cloakroom (perhaps because they weren’t actual cloaks?), nor would we be allowed to carry them with us. Having no car to stash them in, we finally persuaded the guy to let us leave our coats and enter the museum… only to discover that there is actually a large bank of free lockers for guest use on the bottom floor! Could he possibly not know about them? Was he just messing with us? It was very weird and kinda set things off on the wrong foot.

We were also sharply scolded several times during our visit for offenses ranging from accidentally attempting to exit via the wrong door to wearing a small hip pack that had been approved by the Grumpy Gus in the cloakroom and the woman collecting tickets (although, to be fair, hip packs are a fashion violation).

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — If this were Japan there’d be a sign on the other side of the door listing all the things you will potentially be scolded for by the volunteers, maybe even with wacky diagrams!

However, once I stopped into the restroom, I was immediately cheered up by the discovery that there are actually still toilets being manufactured by Thomas Crapper & Company! (OK, yeah, it turns out that the word crap predates Thomas Crapper, but still!!!)

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Our tour was hosted by the very enthusiastic and knowledgeable Director of Visitor Services and started in that famous library and dining room. This is another no-photography place, but I was able to find a lot of great photos online!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — That’s Soane’s portrait on the left



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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

Probably the one thing everybody remembers most from this room is the model of the mausoleum Soane constructed upon his wife’s death.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

Does the shape look familiar? In 1924, Soane Museum trustee Sir Giles Gilbert Scott won a competition to redesign British telephone boxes with a concept based on the shape of Soane’s tomb!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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Based on a tomb, feels like a coffin!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — No doubt the crack in that big vase is from somebody brushing it with their coat.

These rooms definitely had an Adventurer’s Club feel but without, like, talking marble busts. Although if they did talk, it would probably be to scold you for breathing on the artifacts!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum



From the dining room we were led through a small room where Soane would spiff himself up prior to meeting guests.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

Our next stop might’ve been the coolest part of the whole tour. Normally you have to wait until enough people gather to be let into this room, but on the tour they escort you right inside. The Picture Room houses Soane’s ingenious system for displaying 118 paintings in a tiny 13 x 12-foot space. He rigged up a series of movable walls that exponentially increased the usable hanging space. One set of walls even opens to reveal a view down into another room of the house. The panels are rearranged at various times throughout the day so visitors can see different works of art, including the famous series A Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

The room is lit by skylights, natch…

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum


The view through here is into another room!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

Soane owned several works by Italian painter Canaletto, who is famed for his depictions of Venice, Rome and London (and I’d bet dollars to cheesecake chimichangas the Tokyo DisneySea restaurant Canaletto is named after him!). We were told that this one is valuable because it came from the painter’s early period, before he started farming out work and splashing Pixar IP all over the place.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Antonio Canaletto’s Riva degli schiavoni, Venice

From there we were led into a gallery in the back part of the house, where architecture students would come to do research.

Before the Internet, my dad used to keep filing cabinets full of reference photos to help him draw objects in his illustrations. Soane’s collection is a reference file writ large! Before photographs, architects needed drawings, paintings, models and sometimes actual pieces of the monuments they saw in Greece, Italy and the other artistically significant locations they traveled to for inspiration. Anything Soane thought was interesting or instructive came home with him, and he ended up acquiring numerous artifacts that, well, belong in a museum!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Just a small portion of Soane’s huge collection of architectural artifacts, casts and reproductions



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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum



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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

One of the most significant artifacts is the sarcophagus of Egyptian Pharoah Seti I, which Soane bought when the British Museum refused to cough up £2,000 for it. You can see part of it at the bottom of this photo.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

It’s crazy to me that you can still see the drawings on the inside of the sarcophagus, especially considering it was kept outside for a number of years before Soane bought it.


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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

Because it is made of alabaster, you can put lights inside the sarcophagus to make it glow, something Soane did during the three-day party he held to celebrate the installation of the sarcophagus in his basement! Apparently the museum still lights it up once a month or so when they offer candlelit evening tours.

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Can you imagine if today’s paparazzi had to DRAW the parties they attended?

Other stuff just lying around Soane’s basement…. NBD!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum



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© Sir John Soane’s Museum
 
Our next stop was the breakfast room, which overlooks a small interior courtyard. Soane multiplied the natural light in the room by hanging numerous mirrors.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Derry Moore

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

One of the other interior courtyards houses a monument to Soane’s beloved dog, Fanny. So far, nobody’s won any design competitions by copying this tomb!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

Up the stairs we go!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

On the top floor are the private apartments of Soane and his wife. After his death, they were refashioned as offices and an apartment for the museum’s curator. It wasn’t until 2015 that they were restored to their original appearance, including replicating the original wallpaper based on scraps found under layers of paint and paper. The refurbishments were helped along by the meticulous records Soane kept of most of the rooms, including paintings by Joseph Gandy.

This is Mrs. Soane’s sitting room. The large painting over the fireplace is a later addition depicting a bust of Shakespeare and every type of flower mentioned in his works.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Gareth Gardner

Soane kept no records of the appearance of his wife’s bedroom, but he did have Gandy paint it after he turned it into a model room following her death. The restoration team was able to work from Gandy’s paintings.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Joseph Michael Gandy

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

The Model Room houses one of the largest collections of architectural models in the world. The largest model is made of cork and depicts the ruins of Pompeii as they appeared in 1820. After Soane’s death it was cut in half to save space, and the other half was thrown away! But the museum found the world’s only cork model expert in Germany and had him re-create the missing half for the new display.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

Needs LEGO guys…

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

Apparently Soane used to invite visitors to tour his bedroom and bathroom because they were so unusual at the time: steam heating vents, interior windows to allow light to pass between rooms, and indoor plumbing for a sink, bathtub and flush toilet. When he died, Soane left instructions that the lid on his tub remain sealed until 59 years after his death. A big ceremony was held when they finally cracked it open, but all that was inside was junk, including false teeth. It’s assumed this was some sort of last prank, but once again, John Soane was ahead of his time!

You can’t see the tub in this shot of his bathroom, but you can see a cool thing they’ve done to show one of the scraps of original wallpaper incorporated into the reproduction wallpaper.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Gareth Gardner

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Here’s Gandy’s depiction of the bedroom, which shows the bed facing the opposite direction.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Joseph Michael Gandy

Two of the windows seen in Gandy’s painting…

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Gareth Gardner

At this point they took us down a floor to the South Drawing Room and talked about paintings or something. I was too distracted by my inward seething over some overzealous docent’s royal scolding when Patrick accidentally tried to leave the bedroom by the wrong door.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

At the end of the tour we were released to see the rest of the house on our own. All that was left really was the basement kitchen.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

As we found numerous times on this trip, once we were turned loose from a tour, our experience of an historic site consisted mainly of wandering from room to room naming the objects we saw.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Huh! A stove!

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum — Ah yes… Plates!

After passing along those tickets to the 1:15pm Private Apartments tour, we set out across Lincoln’s Inn Field for the Fields Bar & Kitchen, where your admission ticket to Sir John Soane’s Museum gets you 15% off (unless you brushed against or looked crosswise at anything inside the museum, in which case it gets you another scolding). Don’t sit just inside the door on a cold day—it doesn’t latch and, if you are Patrick, you will spend the entire meal leaping up to close it behind every guest.

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I think our pizza was maybe good… ? Unless it’s Giordano’s, it all tastes the same to me.

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You will not believe it, but this vegetarian pizza was mine. I don’t know what came over me, and I promise it won’t happen again!

After lunch, we strolled around the corner toward Old Square at Lincoln’s Inn. Last year, Wonder Womanbecame my all-time favorite film, and though most of it was shot on a backlot (and in Italy!), there are a few filming locations in London I wanted to try to see on our trip. Old Square is where they shot Wonder Woman’s arrival in London, and I thought we could just walk right up to the spot.

First we tried to get there via a gate just to the left of this building.

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But there was a security barrier and a booth attendant who was quite insistent that no one could enter, even on foot. We weren’t the only ones interested in getting in—they turned away several other groups of tourists.

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Yeah, they are super-serious about this no-entry thing at Lincoln’s Inn



Our disappointment was short-lived as we were immediately distracted by this marker for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in the street.

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Ooooh looky! A monarchy thingy!

We decided to walk all the way around the campus and see if the opposite gate was admitting visitors. This took twice as long as it should have because Patrick stopped every three feet to take a photo. Apparently only these turned out:

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I was super-bummed to discover the gate on the opposite side was unmanned and locked. Of course, all this could have been avoided if I’d done a simple Google search and seen that the grounds at Lincoln’s Inn are only open on weekdays. I don’t know how, in all my copious planning for the trip, this simple detail escaped me. I will blame it on needing the brain space to store the French phrase for “Where do you keep the cake, and may I please have all of it?”

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If you look through the bars and toward the left at the back, you can just glimpse the edge of the square that was used in the movie. Great photo tour, eh?

We decided to hop the Tube and head for Kensington Palace. Along the way we stumbled on Patrick’s favorite building again, Staple Inn, one of the few remaining Tudor structures in London! It dates to 1585, when it was used as a wool “staple”—a place where wool was weighed and taxed. Unlike most other Tudor structures, it survived the Great Fire of London, and even the Nazi Blitz. The two peaks on the right actually belong to a house the same age as the original wool staple that has since been incorporated into the inn.

I give you…. Photo Practice!

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Nice juxtaposition of architectural styles here… I’m gonna say they’re “Tudor,” “Fancy-Style” and “Modern Bore”
 
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I dunno… I feel like putting a dragon on your city entry marker says “Keep out!”

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Even the Tube is a great place to practice taking photos!
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We got off the Tube at Queensway and hoofed it through Kensington Gardens toward the palace. Kensington Palace is interesting because it is both a museum and a working royal residence. The state rooms are open to the public, but the rest of the place is divided into apartments for people like the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (if you remember Princess Margaret renovating her nest in ’60s mod style on The Crown, that apartment now belongs to William & Kate, who completely renovated it again!), Prince Harry (I hear his one-bedroom will be for rent again soon), Princess Eugenie and a raft of lesser known royalty. In fact, Kensington Palace has been a sort of dormitory for people related to the crown since the end of Victoria’s reign, to the point that waggish Edward VII (the one who abdicated for Wallis Simpson) referred to it as “the aunt heap.”

Initially I was interested in Kensington Palace because it is where Queen Victoria grew up, and they have an extensive exhibit of her personal belongings and furnishings in the preserved suite of her rooms. But these were being refurbished during our visit, so the palace was downgraded to “if we have time” status. We ended up having time, and since it’s included free in the annual membership we bought to Historic Royal Palaces for skip-the-line access to the Tower of London, we gave it a go.

This statue of Queen Victoria in her coronation robes was sculpted by her daughter, Princess Louise Caroline Alberta. Canadian readers might be interested to know that the province of Alberta was named after her, as well as Mount Alberta and Lake Louise. She is also famous for having the windows of her apartment in Kensington Palace bricked up after discovering her husband climbing through them one night to visit a lover!



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Another sinking building?! London’s really gotta get on that!!!

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We were pleasantly surprised to learn that a simplified version of the Victoria exhibit was open during the renovation. Although there was barely anything in them, we did get to see the room where she was born and the room where she held her first privy council meeting the morning she was awakened with the news that her uncle had died and she was now Queen of England.

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One of the rooms had a small exhibit on Victoria and Albert’s love story. My favorite piece was this veritable boudoir portrait Victoria had painted to give to Albert as a birthday present. She usually looks so severe in paintings and photos—I feel like I’ve never seen her looking so fresh and natural.

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Check out this quote from one of Albert’s letters — our wedding anniversary is February 4th! (Victoria & Albert’s anniversary ended up being the not-nearly-as-awesome February 10th.)

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I have to think this uniform of Albert’s is a reproduction cuz it isn’t in a case. Or maybe Kensington Palace also employs the Soane museum’s Sharp Scolding method of preservation.

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Princess Victoria’s doll house
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The rest of the palace is more about its first royal owners, King William III and Queen Mary II, as well as later occupants King George I and King George II. I gotta be honest with you, it was not that interesting to me. Maybe if we’d gone here before Buckingham Palace I would have been more impressed.

Also, all I remembered about William & Mary is that there’s an American college named after them. Oh! And that William was basically invited by the British to invade their country (he was Dutch) and depose his wife’s father, who was Catholic. And that Catholic-phobia (in the form of the Act of Settlement 1701) was the same reason they tracked down 52nd-in-line George Louis of Hanover to succeed Queen Anne as George I. Golly, I guess those Monarchy DVDs really worked!

This is the King’s Grand Staircase, in which William Kent depicted 45 members of George’s royal court, as well as himself and his mistress. (I wonder what Mrs. Kent thought at the unveiling ceremony!)

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Sheesh! All that money and he couldn’t afford real columns?


The King’s Gallery is the largest stateroom in the palace and looks almost as it did when King George I had it done over by William Kent in 1725. Kent also did the ceiling paintings of scenes from the life of Ulysses.

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Over the mantle is a dial connected to a wind vane on the roof that showed King William which way the wind was blowing, where his navy was probably heading and when the mail would arrive. Note the way the wind dial depicts Great Britain (erroneously) as being the same size as France!

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The gardens were redesigned by King George II’s wife, Queen Caroline, in the mid-1700s and retain the “new” look today.

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The Cupola Room was the first project designed by William Kent and the most opulent of all the rooms in the palace. (The King’s Grand Staircase was his last project—see: Mrs. Kent.) Kent was an architect, furniture designer, scenic painter and landscape architect who eventually defined the look of Georgian period architecture and decorative arts—all because he beat Sir James Thornhill’s bid for decorating this room!

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At the center is a huge musical clock. It once contained an organ that played pieces by Geminiani, Handel and Corelli, but this was removed in the 1800s (probably because there’s only so long you can stand to hear the “Hallelujah Chorus” on the hour, every hour!).

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The paintings on the clock’s four faces represent the four ancient Monarchies of the World: Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome.

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King William III’s Baroque throne chair….

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We instantly recognized this room from an episode of Monarchy where they talked about the birth of King James II’s son, James Edward Stuart, in this bed. Because he was Catholic, the Protestant establishment spread bizarre rumors that the baby was an impostor smuggled into the bed in a warming pan to replace a stillborn baby. Even crazier, he actually was smuggled out of the palace in some laundry a few months later during the “Glorious Revolution” that overthrew his father and brought William and Mary to the throne!

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The Queen’s Gallery is a bit more sedate than the King’s Gallery (maybe cuz William Kent never got his mitts on it).

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She also had her own, much less showy staircase.

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See! Even somebody who lived in the palace had to embroider a family tree to keep all their kings and queens straight!

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On the bottom floor is the Diana: Her Fashion Story exhibit, which runs till January 6, 2019. It wasn’t quite as large as the exhibit we saw at the Queen Mary in Long Beach a few years ago, but it’s a similar idea, and really well done. The exhibit charts her rise from “Shy Di”—a girl whose entire wardrobe comprised one dress, one shirt, and one nice pair of shoes because she borrowed the rest from friends—to one of history’s style icons.

I particularly liked the costume sketches with fabric swatches. Who knew the dress she wore to Prince William’s christening was so bright? The swatch is practically neon in person!

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My favorite of all the gowns was this one designed by Catherine Walker for Di’s visit to Saudi Arabia. With its sequined falcons (the national bird of Saudi Arabia), high neckline and long sleeves, it perfectly encapsulates how she would work with designers to create something themed to the host country and respectful of local customs yet still stunning!

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On our way out, Patrick shot the newly renamed White Garden, which was replanted last year with 12,000 mostly white flowers to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s passing. As it was February, we saw about 12 of those 12,000 flowers, but you can see some great shots of the garden in full bloom here!

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We shut down Kensington Palace (like, the guards were literally shooing me away from the doors as I desperately hung on to the free WiFi) but still had some time to kill before we needed to be at dinner. I’d made all of our dinner reservations around 8pm so that we would never feel rushed while the museums were open, but sometimes that left an awkward gap.

I decided to show Patrick Leceister Square, my old stomping grounds when I was too young to have taste yet. It turned out to be just as commercial as it was 20 years ago, if not moreso, but there’s also a nice grassy central area now thanks to the 2012 Olympics-related renovation. I was bummed but not surprised to see that the Häagen-Dazs had been replaced. It was a full-blown cafe, with table service and a real menu of desserts like fondue and waffle sundaes. They used to serve this flavor you couldn’t get in the States called Chocolate Midnight Cookies: Chocolate ice cream with chocolate cookies and huge pockets of fudge. Le sigh… Of course, now you can get ice cream with bacon in it, so what am I complaining about?

Patrick didn’t take any photos, so I went looking for a Wikimedia Commons image and, whaddya know—this shot from 2012 has my beloved Häagen-Dazs in it!

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© Romazur



Leceister Square didn’t take very long, so I thought maybe Patrick should see Trafalgar Square. I won’t bore you with a history lesson on Trafalgar Square (though I was perfectly happy to bore you with one on a semi-obscure British architect!), but I will recommend this fascinating article on its history. And by “fascinating” I mean HIGH-larious in its choice of this image to illustrate the “Trafalgar Square’s Drinking Fountains” section:

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“No YOU just pooped in this drinking fountain!”

The National Gallery was not on our itinerary for this trip because, well, we’re just not that into art museums. But when we got to Trafalgar Square, we noticed hordes of people streaming in and out of the Gallery and discovered that it’s kept open later than other tourist attractions in London—and free!—specifically so that art-averse American plebs like us will stumble in when everything else is closed. Well played, National Gallery!

Patrick didn’t take any photos of Trafalgar Sqaure or the exterior of the National Gallery either (I’m starting to see a theme to his photography here… Landmarks and monuments: No. Pigeons and safety bollards: Yes!) so it’s Wikimedia Commons to the rescue again…

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© DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0



Well will ya lookit that? The National Gallery has the same dome as The Ritz! Say, wait a minute…..

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Must’ve gotten the dates of my photo files mixed up!



When I lived around the corner, I loved the fact that I could pop by and see a real Van Gogh whenever I wanted. The National Gallery holds several famous Van Goghs, as well as Monets, Rembrandts and Michelangelos. Which makes it the perfect place to catch up on your Instagram feed…

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“How many times is that cat gonna flush the toilet?!”

What’s so funny to me is that, because photography is allowed, all the famous works are surrounded by crowds desperately trying to snap cell phone photos of paintings instead of actually looking at them. If you like the art, why not get a postcard or poster or some other format that actually, like, looks good? (And yes, Patrick took a bunch of his own cell phone photos, but only for YOUR benefit, Dear Reader!)

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“Oh yeah! This photo’s going over the mantel!”

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“Perfect for that blank space above the toilet!”



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“I’m thinking… kitchen!!!”

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“The baby will love falling asleep under this one!”

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“Well, it’s no ‘Dogs Playing Poker,’ but I guess it’s good enough to put in the poolhouse…”

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“Bonus art! Three paintings in one shot!”

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“Honey, shoot the plaque too so people will know what it is!”

I’m no connoisseur, so I got inordinately excited over being able to identify this painting as a Canaletto, thanks to our trip to the Soane Museum.

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Canaletto did an awesome job on this Epcot concept art!

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This is The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, who in 1533 painted the first Highlights magazine back cover. Check it out….

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Head-on…



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From the side….

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Satisfied that we’d gotten our (no) money’s worth, we headed around the corner to our hotel and got ready for our anniversary dinner at Duddell’s London. It is the first outpost of the famous Duddell’s in Hong Kong, and I chose it because it’s inside a former church (and, it turns out, turn-of-the-century operating theater… gack!) so I thought Patrick would get a kick out of it. Also, he loooooves dim sum. Heck, I love dim sum—who doesn’t?

We grabbed a cab and got our first and only female cabbie of the trip! When she told us that thing about less than 3% of London cabbies being female, we asked why that is. She theorized that women have too much family responsibility to have the time to learn The Knowledge (that 3-year test you have pass to get a license). She said she only took it up because her brother passed on and she needed something to distract her, but that she’s found it quite rewarding.

We weren’t sure she’d let us out in the right place at first (how could we have doubted The Knowledge?) because it didn’t look much like a church at ground level, in the dark. Here’s a glamour shot from the restaurant so you can see how cool it is!

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© Duddell’s



There are two reasons I wish we’d had lunch here instead of dinner: 1) They only serve the full dim sum menu at lunch and 2) It’s hard to get really great shots of the place without light streaming in the windows! Fortunately, Duddell’s website has a ton of glamour shots—please indulge me while I post a bunch.

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© Duddell’s – Ed Reeve





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© Duddell’s – Ed Reeve

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© Duddell’s – Ed Reeve

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© Duddell’s – Ed Reeve

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© Duddell’s – Ed Reeve


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© Duddell’s – Ed Reeve

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© Duddell’s – Ed Reeve
 
So this is what it looks like at night….

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We really enjoyed our meal here—like Top 2 of the entire trip! It felt like a San Francisco or New York restaurant, but in a good way. If we had one of these in LA, we’d be there a lot.

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“Best anniversary EVER! Thanks for planning this, Carrie! You’re the best wife I ever had and everything you do is art!”

I ended up being glad we’d gone for dinner because it allowed us to get THE best Peking Duck I’ve ever had. You only need a half order for two people, and what you don’t finish the first go-round, they bring back to you later.

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Quack!

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Here’s another official glamour shot, because we ate it too quickly to get photos:

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© Duddell’s

From the menu: “Using classic Cantonese spices, this iconic dish takes over 48 hours to prepare. The duck is air-dried in order to separate the skin from its meat, resulting in delicately crunchy skin which melts in the mouth. Served with 8 types of condiments, diners can create their own combination of texture and taste…with fennel sugar, aged mandarin and sesame dressings, white wine bean sauce, pomelo, pineapple, cucumber and spring onion. ”

(Don’t worry, that’s just a dangling participle: Diners are not the ones being served with 8 types of condiments!)

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This is the best shot we got and I can’t figure out what this is! Maybe some of the leftover duck that they brought back?

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Egg Fried Rice and Honey-glazed Char Siu Pork

We also got the Dim Sum Symphony appetizer, which was the perfect taste of their full dim sum menu. I love how the one on the top left looks like he’s rallying the rest of them in a jailbreak….

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“Right, you lot, ‘ere’s ‘ow it’s gonna go! Knuckles, Mumbles, Steve: You jump onna Daniel Boons and catapult right frew da Tommy Trinder!”



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“Vinny, Sparkles—you geezers ain’t got eyes, won’t make it off the Aunt Mabel! Best duck and dive inna hot mustard while I have a butchers.”

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“Crickey! We’re blown! Everybody scapa!!!”

After dinner we walked to the Tube stop just around the corner and headed for Leicester Square Station.

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When we got there, I confidently sashayed out one of the four exits without looking at which one it was or where it would put us. The trouble is, there are a bunch of streets that cross each other all around the station, and I got hopelessly turned around in the dark. It was also unexpectedly sketchy in this central, highly populated area of the city on a Sunday night at 10:00. For some reason, the only people we encountered were menacing drunks and people talking to themselves very forcefully. I became so rattled that when I spotted the familiar green glow of a Shake Shack, I lunged for it like it was the last lifeboat on the Titanic.

So I broke my cardinal rule of avoiding American chain restaurants while traveling abroad, and it was totally worth it. I’d been kicking myself all day that I hadn’t ordered any kind of cake or special, non-hazelnut/coffee/white chocolate dessert to celebrate our milestone anniversary. But here we were, on the 10th anniversary of our fabulous Disney wedding, nursing chocolate Concretes at a Shake Shack 5,000 miles from home, and somehow it was the perfect way to celebrate. Afterward, Patrick took things in hand and hailed a black cab for the embarrassingly short ride back to our hotel. Whew!

Up Next: Visiting the Set of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance!
 
(You will recall, class, that classical architecture was introduced to England by Inigo Jones when he designed the Banqueting House, which we learned about in the last installment of this report!)
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However, once I stopped into the restroom, I was immediately cheered up by the discovery that there are actually still toilets being manufactured by Thomas Crapper & Company! (OK, yeah, it turns out that the word crap predates Thomas Crapper, but still!!!)
I love it!

We were told that this one is valuable because it came from the painter’s early period, before he started farming out work and splashing Pixar IP all over the place.
:rotfl2:

The Model Room houses one of the largest collections of architectural models in the world. The largest model is made of cork and depicts the ruins of Pompeii as they appeared in 1820. After Soane’s death it was cut in half to save space, and the other half was thrown away! But the museum found the world’s only cork model expert in Germany and had him re-create the missing half for the new display.
That looks sooo cool! I love models, so I wish I had known about this house for our London trip a few years ago!

I will blame it on needing the brain space to store the French phrase for “Where do you keep the cake, and may I please have all of it?”
I will need to add that to my list of French phrases!

The gardens were redesigned by King George II’s wife, Queen Caroline, in the mid-1700s and retain the “new” look today.

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One of my more relaxing memories of London was when I was finished with Kensington Palace before my parents, so I went out and was lounging against one of the small inclines in the center lawn (it was a lovely May day). A helicopter flew low overhead, so I looked up and waved and I swear someone waved back. When my mom came out she said - did you see the Queen's helicopter!

This is The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, who in 1533 painted the first Highlights magazine back cover. Check it out….

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Head-on…



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From the side….

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That is so freaky, but so cool!

She theorized that women have too much family responsibility to have the time to learn The Knowledge (that 3-year test you have pass to get a license). She said she only took it up because her brother passed on and she needed something to distract her, but that she’s found it quite rewarding.
Hmm, I wonder how they deal with Uber now-a-days?
 
Thank goodness you updated... I was beginning to worry.... I am so hoping that you get to the Paris portion of your trip before we leave...
Great TR... Can't wait to read on mate...
 
You mentioned being underwhelmed by Kensington Palace and wondered if it's because you saw Buckingham Palace first.

I did see KP first and I, too, was underwhelmed. I'm not sure what I was expecting but it didn't deliver. I'm still glad I visited and I did enjoy having tea at the Orangery.

Loving your report!
 
One of my more relaxing memories of London was when I was finished with Kensington Palace before my parents, so I went out and was lounging against one of the small inclines in the center lawn (it was a lovely May day). A helicopter flew low overhead, so I looked up and waved and I swear someone waved back. When my mom came out she said - did you see the Queen's helicopter!

WHOA! That is an awesome story! I bet she did wave—she probably waves in her sleep, poor woman. It's like her primary job function!


Hmm, I wonder how they deal with Uber now-a-days?

I read this New York Times article about the Uber vs. Black Cabs fight going on in London right now, and it is fascinating! It's one of the reasons I tried Uber a few times, because I wanted to support somebody like the woman interviewed. But then we had so many bad experiences that I gave up...

Thank goodness you updated... I was beginning to worry.... I am so hoping that you get to the Paris portion of your trip before we leave...
Great TR... Can't wait to read on mate...

I'm so sorry it's taking forever! These first two full days have each taken me more than 24 hours to write because we went so many places. Fortunately, there are only 2 more London days before.... DISNEYLAND PARIS!!!!

You mentioned being underwhelmed by Kensington Palace and wondered if it's because you saw Buckingham Palace first.

I did see KP first and I, too, was underwhelmed. I'm not sure what I was expecting but it didn't deliver. I'm still glad I visited and I did enjoy having tea at the Orangery.

Loving your report!

Yes! I think if we'd been able to have tea in the Orangery, it would have elevated my impression of the palace tremendously. I feel like having a meal makes the experience more complete—I love museum cafes too! I was so disappointed to learn that it was closed for refurbishment during our trip.
 

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