On our first night in London we slept in a room that was most likely used for storing brooms and mops at some point . It was so small that I would bang into the wall-mounted, flat-screen television while trying to climb into bed. And the bed wasn't even large enough to handle the length of my 5' 8" frame. The place did make me feel like a big guy, but Elenka said we needed more in a room. The final two nights we stayed at the Apex City Hotel, down by the Tower Bridge. It was at least four times the size of the first room and made for much fun and happiness.

 
London is building some very cutting-edge office space in its financial district, quite close to the Apex Hotel. There's one called the gherkin. It looks like a black pickle standing on end and it's affectionately known by Brits as the butt-plug. The Gherkin is or was owned by the insurance company Swiss Re, the firm Elenka first worked for when she graduated from computer school. I tried to convince her to drop in and have a word with them, perhaps try and swing a six-month contract, but she wouldn't have any part of it. The new city hall is another one of these thoroughly modern dillies. Looking at it from a distance it conjures images of a full-face army helmet. The kind a science-fiction soldier might wear - very Vaderian.


We quite enjoyed St Paul's Cathedral and the 560 or so steps it takes to get to the top of the dome. Back down by the entrance way I just happened to bump into a guy I drank beer with fifteen years ago in Toronto . He told me that back home the same cronies sit on the same type of stools, drinking the same beer, but now in a pub just across the street because the old one had been torn down. I told him that the move must have been quite a shock. He looked at me blankly.

 
I'd wanted to visit London ever since watching "The Tudors" series on television a few year ago. Specifically, I was there to see the spot where Ann Boleyn's head had been severed from her body on the lawn of the Tower of London. The area now has a small memorial made of plexiglas. Where the TV series was spectacular, the site of the beheading didn't quite cut it.

 
In the end, the winning London landmark was Westminster Abbey. Elenka expressed what I was feeling when she said the Abbey had a Sagrada Familia feel to it - Gaudi's cathedral master-work in Barcelona - where odd statues of admirals and politicians and animals fill the inside. Some of the ceilings had a Gaudi-like feel to them as well . The Abbey is/was used as a burial site for Kings, Queens, soldiers, scientists and poets alike. There was one though that I found peculiar. Charles Darwin, who pissed off church people far-and-wide with his evolution theory is entombed in the Abbey. While the Catholics have saints alone as icons, the Protestants aren't nearly as judgemental.

 
Elenka and I spent three remarkably sunny days in London. We drank beer, ate fish and chips and walked, likely averaging 25 kilometres a day. By the third day we were beginning to see the same landmarks a second time.

 
Thank you, producers of "The Tudors". Had it not been for you I never would have seen London.