London Jaunt- Sightseeing with a newcomer

It's always nice to show someone who has never been to it around a place you love. It's even better when they seem to genuinely enjoy it and grow to like that place too. I've been the novice before, being showed as a wide-eyed wonderer around Oxford, sitting in The Eagle and Child pub where Tolkein and C.S. Lewis sat, and soaking up the city. Recently, a friend from university, who was staying with a mutual friend of ours as she does "the season" in my favourite city of all time, London, became that novice as the three of us set off around the surprisingly compact network of sights to see in the city.

We met in Covent Garden. I was sat in a nice pub just off the actual square, down a side street a little way, called The Roundhouse. I was waiting there because, both being girls who take a lot of interest in clothes they had taken a detour to Chancellors Wharf where they shopped. One of them was wearing a just-bought summer dress which looked great, mainly because the most I could tell you about it was that it was incredibly yellow. They took delight in a branch of Ben's Cookies and a shop selling "really nice" but expensive tea-sets. I took more interest in the various drinking establishments here, there and everywhere.

We stopped at a tiny place on a corner, Charles Dicken's Coffee House. It looks not unlike a greasy spoon, and has what we all agreed was perhaps the nastiest toilet cubicle any of us have been in in London. Still, it did have pictures of Dickensian characters as portrayed by contemporary artists, and the names definitely didn't age well. Among them was a Dick Swiveller.

Then we decided to wander towards Trafalgar Square, one of many places the newcomer (her local city, which she loves, is Manchester) had never been. Through there, with a few photo opportunity's, we headed towards Buckingham Palace.

On the way we saw Gagarin's statue. It's smaller than I had imagined, more hidden out of the way, in a corner at the end of Horseguard's Parade, and not really a patch on either of the gigantic monuments they have to him in Moscow.

In London

It was still a nice touch, seeing where it fit into the oh-so-crammed tapestry of tourist topography the capital has become.

And in Moscow.

From the palace it was on to Parliament, where we sat in front of the river for a while, then headed to the Southbank for more coffee and cake, then wandered around for a bit by Leicester Square (dug up and boarded off) and Piccadilly Circus (with the signs scaffolded over). It was a nice day out, and for only £10 to get into London from where I am (admittedly with a 16-25 railcard) I'll be having a few more London Jaunts soon, just to a)keep my sanity being currently unemployed and b) having something to write about.

As Benjamin Franklin puts it- “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”