(A Friends reference — yes I watch too much old TV.)

I arrived on Christmas Eve and Luca on Christmas morning. I got over my panic of how to get him into the city from Heathrow — I still cannot get over the fact that the tube and buses completely shut down on Christmas Day. Used to also be on Boxing Day. I mean, London is a big international city and surely not everyone celebrates Christmas? Not to mention some people who do might want to go somewhere?!

Well, thankfully megabus and another private company started running buses just from the airports to one stop in London. And then you’re on your own. So I walked the 2.5 miles to meet him at Victoria Coach and we Ubered back to the apartment. At 7:30 am. The nice thing is I got a few photos of empty London as the sun was rising.

We’re staying at my cousin’s place in the Southwark area of London if that means anything to anyone. (Just south and east of the Thames … walkable to the Borough, Elephant and Castle, and Southwark train stations.) Funnily, she’s in Portugal with her husband for the holidays and we barely have any overlap except a few days after Luca is gone. In some ways it makes things easier but I’d love to catch up with her!

Oh well. I was hoping to find a Chinese restaurant (in walking distance) to the apartment for our traditional Tao Christmas meal — but couldn’t tell online if the closest decent sit-down was open on Christmas. They weren’t answering their phone which normally is a bad sign but with Chinese restaurants one cannot reach a definite conclusion only with that (and of course the message wasn’t updated). So we walked over. It wasn’t. But the Indian restaurant next door was open all day for a special (pricey) prix fixe three course Christmas meal with a glass of bubbly. It was tasty and we had a nice Christmas meal.

Luca was pretty exhausted after skiing in VT with NY friends just prior to flying over and I haven’t been sleeping really well so after a little saunter to walk off the huge lunch, we had naps and chilled at Sharon’s apartment the rest of the day. And booked a few things for the upcoming week. A lovely Christmas. I’m very glad to be with my baby.

My son tells me it’s a Boxing Day tradition to play soccer (here football) all day. And he wanted to see one so my Christmas present (from him) was to go to a game.

It was pretty fun actually. I never heard of the teams — Fulham and Wolverhampton (Wolves) — and they played in what Luca says is one of the smallest stadiums in the English premier league. Called Craven Cottage. Our seats were pretty close.

It’s like Wrigley. In the middle of a residential neighborhood though also close to a large park (Bishop’s) along the Thames.

Between walking and the (now running though maybe less frequently) trains, we got there in under an hour stress free. Oh and they tied though it was a nail biter — both goals were scored in the last 15 minutes or so of playing time. The fan chants were pretty funny (particularly from the away team) though I honestly could not understand much of what they said. There was an older guy sitting next to me and I kept thinking his voice totally reminded me of someone. Couldn’t place it and then it hit me — Alfred P Doolittle (Eliza’s father in My Fair Lady). I kept expecting him to break into song … “just a few more hours” … then “I’m gettin’ married in the mornin’.” Of course then I couldn’t get the song out of my head. Oh well.

Afterward we went for pub food in the Notting Hill area (thank you, Hugh Grant). We are officially disappointed with the beer selections. In the groceries and the pubs. They don’t seem to carry stouts/porters except Guinness in the places we’ve been. Scotland (and Ireland) had better choices. It’s not what I expected but I’ll survive. It is better than Spanish cervezas! I should’ve taken a photo of the pub as it’s very cute and a known local and tourist spot (Sun in Splendor). Wednesdays are trivia night but it’s sadly on hiatus until after the holiday period.

The next day was the long coach tour bus ride out to Stonehenge. In my three months of travel I hadn’t used a tour group to get to anything. But we wanted to see Stonehenge and it’s not terribly convenient to do via trains and buses. And the tour is actually about the same price as doing it on your own. Plus they combine it a lot with side trips elsewhere. I thought Bath would be nice to show Luca though I’ve been there before so we did the two together. In 12 hours.

Sone people are disappointed with Stonehenge. I thought it was really cool. First of all, in all the photos you see, they always just show the stones and you don’t realize how huge they are. I left people in to appreciate the scale.

OK the selfie isn’t the greatest way to see scale but you can check out the folks in the background. The tallest stones are like 14 feet high and another 7 feet of the stones are buried underground — which helps explain why after 5000 or so years they’re still standing. (Well a good number of them anyway.)

That big rock in the foreground of the first photo is called the heel stone. They think there were two, one at each end of the “avenue” that would’ve bisected the ring. But the really cool thing is that on summer solstice, when the sun rises directly behind the heel stone, it hits the exact center of the Stonehenge circle, between the two center tall stones.

They’ve put the helpful arrow on the ground to mark the spot! Modern day Druids descend upon Stonehenge at summer solstice although it’s getting out of hand and they’ve had to put in rules to keep the stones and surrounding bank and ditch from being ruined. Meantime it’s been scientifically proven that Druids did not have anything to do with Stonehenge– their dates do not overlap.

There are times when you can walk among the stones but it’s on special tours which we didn’t do. So we walked around the stones in a circle and I liked seeing it from the various angles. You could sometimes see more into the space.

The stones are made of bluestones (the littler but very heavy ones in the middle — they were dragged 150 miles from Wales) and sarcens (the huge columns and lintels which are local but would still be dragged 22 miles). Of course they don’t know why the bluestones were brought so far (presumably via a raft of sorts) or exactly how any of it was done with primitive man and tools. They’ve ruled out aliens but I’m not sure!!

The last cool thing was that the builders actually did a tongue and groove kind of construction method with the stones. If you look at the rightmost single stone and the other single stone inside the circle on the left, they have small bumps on the top. It’s the “tongue” and when it had a lintel on top, there were grooves so they could place the lintel on top to help secure it from falling off… doing this with ancient heavy stones and figuring out how to lay it exactly in the right place (not to mention creating the tongue on groove on the heavy Sarcen stones to begin with) absolutely makes me consider the alien theory!!

There’s a lot more of course but I’ll let you look up Stonehenge yourselves for more info!

Next, Bath. We spent most of the time in the Roman Bath museum.Lots more information than what I saw in 1985 — I don’t remember the whole museum existing the last time I was there. I was impressed of course with their engineering and social structures. No wonder the Romans were a superpower before they fell apart (!). Of course there was a lot of old carved stones and stuff to Minerva (Athena to my Greek mythology lovers). Also interesting to see the recreations.

There were several different rooms for cold baths, tepid baths, massage and changing rooms, and separate areas for women and men. And of course we sampled a bit of the waters — tastes a bit too much of sulphur and iron but I’m sure it’s healthy! That’s about it. We spent the rest of our time mostly in a pub (more Guinness and a small cider) where we chatted with locals. Pretty amusing. Our final shots of Bath as the sun was setting and we were leaving. It was a long day and we went out for dinner upon returning to London. (Pizza! But the restaurant was clearly run by Italian — Calabrese — immigrants.) Obviously Luca’s preference.

Anyway Luca is still sleeping which gave me the time to finish this blog post. And I just realized this isn’t really much about London despite the title. But you get the idea.

Happy belated Christmas!!