Greenwich is posh again. Upton Park still isn't
Trip Start
Apr 25, 2008
1
10
12
Trip End
Ongoing
London,
United Kingdom
Friday, May 9, 2008
Finished at the BL a little early today and took the Light Rail out to Greenwich [geek alert!]. They've done a lot of work on the Maritime Museum, which has a nice display of nautical navigation instruments, and they've done a huge upgrade at the Royal Observatory -- Harrison's clocks that won the Longitude Prize were fabulous -- the first three almost look like Rube Goldberg devices, or like something a Victorian might build in the hopes that it might double as a time machine. Also saw a few nice telescopes, including the tube from one of Herschel's scopes, and Edmund Halley's wall quadrant (picture one-fourth of the rim of a bronze circle, carefully ruled -- essentially a wall-sized protractor. Very nice.
My hotel room is proving to be a striking example of "you get what you pay for". Hotels in central London are notoriously expensive -- savings-account-emptying expensive. Almost nothing under a hundred or two hundred pounds a night, and the dollar is worth half a pound. I started prowling the web for a room about a month before I left. My favorite Youth Hostel was already booked for the weekend, and I was having trouble looking forward to dorm-style accomodations at any of the other hostels. I kept casting a wider and wider net until I found "The Central". It's on the far east side of London -- Zone 3 on the Underground, a fifteen minute walk from the Upton Park station. A steal at 24 pounds a day (with breakfast!). I checked in to a narrow sliver of a room, overlooking a curry shop, with a pub underneath.
I tossed my bag on the bed and it went through to the floor. Not enough slats to hold the mattress against my backpack -- didn't bode well for me. I gathered the kindling and propped it in a corner. There are two dozen rooms over the pub, shareing four toilets and four showers. It wouldn't be so bad if (a) it was air conditioned (b) it had been cleaned once the blitz was over (c) the pub downstairs didn't get rented out for private techno-music floor-rattling dance parties. It's a reasonably comfortable sliver of a room, but I feel like I've been miniaturized and trapped inside a speaker enclosure.
For all it lacks in decor and quiet, the people I meet at breakfast are interesting -- mostly Eastern Europeans and English people who live in the country -- mostly amused at the ramshackle state of affairs -- mostly travellers on a budget like myself -- and the neighborhoods that I walk through on the way to the Tube station are pretty amazing -- in some, women wear black over everthing save a slit for them to see through; in others they dress as skimpily as is possible. I think I've identified three sorts of cultures -- one Indian, one African, one Arab (and I feel pretty ignorant when I try to guess with any more precision than that) -- within each, there seem to be traditionalists who dress very conservatively and free spirits who dress outlandishly Western. They seem to walk down the streets unaware of each other (actually a pan-London skill) and keep pretty much to themselves. It's far off the beaten path, but I'm glad I got a chance to see it.
