England Swings

Met Bevie for too much fun in London. My flight from Kuwait to Heathrow, on a 777 airplane with real seats (yay!) was uneventful except that while I was waiting I fell asleep in the airport lounge. Luckily the ticket agent gave me nudge on the shoulder or I would have missed boarding. I took the tube from Heathrow to our hotel all by myself. London was cloudy (yay!), cool (yay!) and rainy (yay! yay!). No sand. Loved it!

For the next 3-1/2 days we went to the movies (Bruno), saw a play (Wicked), walked a lot (Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalger Square), went into the sky on the London Eye, took a river cruise on the Thames, hopped on the bus and saw just about everything -- some of it three times: Westminster Abbey, Tower of London, Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Beefeaters, Queen's Bank, a statue of Winston Churchill, a statue of Abraham Lincoln, No. 10 Downing Street, Parliament, Big Ben, Hyde Park, Marble Arch, St. Thomas Hospital, Admiralty Arch, Globe Theater, MI6 Building (no James Bond), Scotland Yard, HMS Belfast, Buckingham Palace, St. Paul's Cathedral, Cleopatra's Needle, BT Tower, Waterloo Bridge, Oxo Tower, Nelson's Column, Royal Air Force Memorial and Victoria Station. We didn't go inside all of these places, but we did see all of them from our tour bus; some of the places more than once. Did I mention that we went by quite a few places quite a few times?

I also got a haircut (yay!), ate fish 'n chips, chicken with mushroom pie and mushy peas (my new favorite food.)

The last day we met my cousin Gina and her husband John at Harrod's and then walked to the Victoria & Albert Museum for lunch. Gina is the daughter of my dad's cousin on his mother's (Freudenthal) side. She is researching a family tree and is also looking to commemorate our lost relatives in the Stolperstein Project in Germany, where brass cobblestones are set in the pavement outside the last home where deported Jews lived. The stones have the names, dates and fate (if known) of the deportees engraved in them. I did not know Gina, but she had visited my dad's cousin Lisa (with whom I correspond) in Uruguay and then contacted me about a week ago to see if I would be ok with the memorial idea. Just so happens she lives in London.

John, Gina, Bev and I had a delightful lunch. Gina told us some family stories that I'd not previously heard and gave me a picture of my grandmother that I had never seen.

After lunch we took the tube back to our hotel, then out to Wimbleton to have a lovely dinner with Bev's mom, Pam, and Ed at their long-time friend Joyce's beautiful home.

I had an uneventful tube ride back to Heathrow, changing trains without incident. Steve and Joe picked me up at the airport, I took a 4 hour nap and then back in the swing, working at the USO. (See next post.)

As it stands right now I am unable to upload any of my pictures from the past two weeks. The camera says my little thingy is "locked," (it's not) so I cannot take pictures, view pictures or put anything onto my computer. I'll have someone who knows what they're doing take a look at it. Sigh . . .