My wife and I will always want to be in London. It’s too charming, too beautiful, too much fun. There’s so much energy radiating even if you’re just walking around. However, after three visits in five years, the question is what reason we may have to come back to London.
People cheered when the lights went down. Lots of things in life come with hype — the release of a new iPhone, a certain American football game this Sunday — but how many of them come with the expectation that it be brilliant at worst, life-altering at best? How many of them come after you’ve …
Continue reading London Travels: Waiting for “Hamilton” no more
My wife noticed it first as we were getting ready to leave the National Gallery yesterday. She looked out a narrow window and saw the sun peeking over Trafalgar Square and the London Eye in the distance between buildings.
America doesn’t have a national stadium or sports arena. Sure, there are lots of historic, important ones — Madison Square Garden (especially for college basketball fans of a certain vintage), the Rose Bowl, the Los Angeles Coliseum, the Superdome, Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field — but none of them are a be-all and end-all.
As we were visiting Hampton Court Palace, my wife had a question — why does Henry VIII, the palace’s most-famous former occupant — carry such cultural resonance?
Our trip to Hampton Court Palace meant taking a train outside of central London through the … outskirts? Suburbs? What are they called in England? We went past neighborhoods of homes in close proxmity with small, fenced-in back yards, people playing football on miniature pitches, a busy playground. We shared a train with a seemingly …
When you’ve been someplace a lot like my wife and I have been to London — three times in the past several years — there are things that become so familiar, that they’re like your own.
Somehow, I don’t think King George was singing that his “sweet, submissive” and “loyal, royal” subjects would “be back” for the purposes of robust trade when he threatened to kill their friends and family to remind them of his love, but I’ll double-check when I see “Hamilton” Wednesday night.
One of my wife’s and my favorite travel stories involves Shannon Airport in Ireland. Three years ago, we had a layover there going from Boston to London, and next to the bright, sparkling duty-free shop was a terminal that looked like it had last been touched in 1974.
One of the few things my wife and I feel like we’ve missed on our trips to London is seeing a show at the National Theatre. By the time we went on a tour there this year, it was our last day in the city before going to Edinburgh, and we were going to see …
A Silly Place 