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sunny day in London
Tuesday, March 25 2003
setting: North Atlantic Ocean
Once in London, we caught the Underground and rode it out to the Knightsbridge area, where we walked around enjoying the unexpectedly warm, sunny weather. Spring was well underway here and, given the state of buds and leaves on the trees, over a month ahead of the season we'd just departed in the Catskills.
We toured the Science Museum (which was free), mostly looking at their collection of 60s-era American spacecraft. Everything about them read-1960s to my eye, from their electronics to their styling. It was hard for me to imagine this technology having ever been cutting edge, let alone unequaled in our own time. Some of the equipment appeared to hearken back as far as the stone age: one nose cone displayed in mid-split revealed two halves that could have been designed by a Native American canoe maker.
For a time we sunned ourselves in a narrow park across from the Victoria and Albert Museum and I briefly fell asleep. Then we went in to look at their Art Deco exhibit, but it was only open to the press.
We were wary of English cuisine, particularly given the quality of the meals we'd just had on our British Airways flight (is there anything worse than British airplane food? British hospital food? British hospital airplane food?). So we opted for Britain's adopted cuisine, Indian food. We ducked into a place called Shaheen and had their lunch special. Unfortunately, their food wasn't very good. Flavorless Indian food is definitely more offensive than food that was never intended to have flavor to begin with.
The flight from London to Johannesburg wasn't particularly crowded, and, after Gretchen complained to the flight staff about a nonexistent bladder infection, they gave us a whole middle row at the very back of the plane. For some reason the staff on this British Airways flight were exceptionally schoolmarmish, chastising us for every little trespass. By the end of the flight I was so traumatized by their reprimands that Gretchen couldn't convince me to stand with her by a rear window to watch the sun rise over the Indian Ocean. The plane was then in the process of landing and I didn't want to have to have a stewardess ordering me to my seat, not even one more time.
As we flew over the Equator, I was in an airplane bathroom filling the basin with water and letting it drain out. This was a science experiment I'd wanted to do since I was a kid. Since this was to be my first time in the Southern Hemisphere, now was my chance. I wanted to see which way water swirled as it drained in both hemispheres and over the Equator. Perhaps this was due to the motion of the airplane, but I found the water swirled either direction both north and south of the equator. Interestingly, though, at the moment we were passing over the equator, it didn't swirl at all.
See some photographs from the South Africa trip.
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