London, A Little Dirty

So, a few weekends ago, Rebecca and I were visited by a most welcome house guest. Mike came and visited before he flew back to Vancouver.  Before I start this story, I feel that it is important to explain the friendship dynamics that me and Sanchez have. Firstly, Mike and I went to UBC together and then met up again in Arizona, him in Globe and myself in Morenci. An average visit with him meant that I/a group of us would stop in globe on the way to Phoenix and we would then spend the next two days trying to decided what to do. This usually meant that what we did was meander about, drink, eat, and discuss what we thought we should do, which was usually not much. I personally thought it was great. Add in Woot and the trifecta of indecisiveness was complete and don’t get me started on the inability to make decisions if you added Jarred.

But let’s continue with the story at hand. About a month ago, Mike emails to let me know that he will be in town and that we should hang out. Simple instructions and I quote “Yeah, let’s do something. I don’t really want to see the tourist stuff.” OK, this is going to take a bit of thought. Usually Rebecca is the master at things to see in London, but she loves to do all the things I would probably define as touristy. But, yeah, there are a bunch of cool things that we can do in London that aren’t touristy at all. I’ll do some research and we’ll figure something out.

Advance to Thursday before he gets here. Shit! Sean you’ve not done a lick of planning, as usual. Well, we can discuss with Mike when he arrives to get a better feel. But there is a couple really neat bars we could go too, some different food options. It will be good.

Friday, Mike comes into London, where I of course am late to pick him up, but it’s all good.  We chill, for the night and decide what to see Saturday. Here is a look at the photo’s of what we did in London.

Figure 1 - The Tower of London

Figure 2 - The Globe Theater

Figure 3 - St. Paul's

Figure 4 - Big Ben

Figure 5 - Westminster Abbey

Figure 6 - Buckingham Palace

As you can see, the "no tourist things" went out the window. We even got a pub lunch of fish n Chips in there.  We walked from the Tower of London all the way to Buckingham Palace and made sure to see every thing on the way. Including a lovely piece of 2 inch steel sheet in the Tate Museum of Modern Art. I still say the artist took the easy approach and the piece would have been much more striking as 3 inch plate, but what do I know.  I also learnt that my wife is in the wrong profession. Most would agree and say that she has the personality for school teacher or some other peppy position. But, what she should be is a tour guide. Without a doubt in my mind. Walking about giving the details on each thing that we walked past. I highly recommend the experience.  Unfortunately, Mike’s camera decided to bugger up. Right at the end of the two week vacation.

After the walking tour of London we spent the evening at a Canada Day BBQ. Simple BBQ, nothing to really mention, except that one of the hosts friends, who is actually a old house mate apparently will let anybody in the world stay with at his apartment, so he brought the two people currently crashing at his place. An Austrian hitchhiker and a shaggy dude wearing pants with one leg red and the other green. I won’t lie, when I saw them I immediately thought about Lance and his love of crazy people.

But alas, Sanchez had to be on a morning flight out so we had to end the visit and we sent him on his merry way to Heathrow and on his adventure back to Canada.