Archaeological London

Got into London not too jet lagged and happily experiencing next to nothing in the way of security delays. Hopped on a local train which took us to Blackfrier Station and then a short walk across the centuries old Blackfrier's bridge to our comfy, tiny, hotel room. We were starved by supper time and could not come to agreement on the option of eating at the nearby Tate Mordern museum cafeteria, so we ended up spending an outragous $120 CAN for a mix of appitizers at a greek restaurant at the Bankside dock on the Thames River.

Karen and the boys crashed back at the hotel and I went out for a 2 hour night stroll to explore Waterloo train station and the touristy Southbank.

Sunday we got up and had the free breakfast at the hotel -- an impressive array of English cheese, French pasteries and terrible instant coffee. We then went for another random stroll, this time past Shakespear's Globe Theatre, onto a quick riverboat past London Bridge (which Alden still is singing is "fallling down, falling down...") to the Tower Bridge. We walked around an amazing little medieval corner of the city and chanced upon some excellent coffee and gelato for unbelievably low prices before treking over the Tower Bridge to one of our Queen's properites at the London Tower.

There we happened upon Archaeology day, marked with festive tents out on one of our Queen's lawns, and lots of happy archaeological elderly volunteers around, showing samples of Roman pot shards, neolithic cherts and a frieghtening array of dead aminal bones, all dredged up out of the River Thames right infront of the London Tower. Elwyn and Alden (both wearing suitably archaeological Tilly hats) were photographed for the archaeology societies newsletter by the president of the society -- a sort of Eric McLay of London. She told us that in a few minutes the gate down to the river would be open. It is only ever opened to the public for one day a year, for two hours that day during low tide, so that the archaeology society and their supporters could go down to the river and look for what the tide had sorted out since the previous year. Everything you find you can keep, though real goodies they encouraged that you give back to the society. So, we got the the shrot queue, were issued latex gloves, rubber boots (the river is still the dirty, stinky old Thames), and bottles of drinking water and we were let down. Alden was the youngest archaeologist in London by a long shot. We instantly started finding things -- edwardian stoneware, victorian pottery, lot of difficult-to-date clay smoking pipes, some intersting old glass, and a horde of modified flint, used in muskets. It was fantastic fun.

Then we walked back to the hotel, got our bags, caught a London cab to the massive Waterloo Rail Train Station and boarded the Eurostar train for a civilized three hour ride under the English Channel to Paris.

Arriving in Paris right in time for dinner, our friend Reiko (who is lending us her appartement) met us and took us out for supper at a classic french restaurant (I had some kind of tasty white fish in a rich, creamy sauce with a hint of artichoke hearts (yum!). Elwyn and Alden fell asleep at the table, waiting for the supper to arrive, and we had to carry them back to the appartment (up six flights of stairs, as there is no lift in this old building).