25 March 1998 9:16am
A typical ham and cheddar sandwich morning, from Harts, £1.95 I think. It's
raining! Rather severely, actually. I went looking for the bus to Cambridge,
which Vij had recommended last night, but I couldn't find it. Just my luck. I
ended up walking along Bayswater Road for a while, hoping to find the right
stop, but gave up and ended up taking the Tube again, from Bayswater to
Paddington. From the Paddington Tube stop I walked across the street to
Paddington Station.
What a great train station! Huge, but it's easy to figure out which trains go where, and when. There's an automatic ticket terminal, like a big ATM, that's extremely easy to use. I hope. I bought a round-trip ticket for Windsor for £6.40. I hope. I think I worked the machine correctly. I'll probably end up in Scotland, but what the heck, I'm on holiday.
I boarded the train a few minutes after nine; it was scheduled to depart at 9:12, and we should be moving any minute now.
Hey, we're rolling!
The stop says "Ealing Broadway." I think I'm on the right train. The views are very industrial; lots of warehouses, lots of barren fields, and lots of gray sky.
We are heading for Windsor, aren't we?
Windsor is ... wet. It's been raining since I got here, and it was raining when I was here two years ago. Is it possible it's been raining all that time? Could be, with all the gray in the air.
Windsor is actually a lovely town, with the of course impressive Windsor Castle standing right there, outside the train station ... it's worth the gray and wet. It's a pretty quiet morning, but there are, as usual, school kids about, apparently on yet another field trip. They've gathered in the covered area outside the train station (a very nice station, by the way), and are having lunch. I wish I had a dime for every school kid I've seen eating lunch since I got here.
The rain was annoying enough that I didn't feel like exploring that much, so I just sort of wandered around the town for a bit. I bought a cool shaving brush for dad, £10, and a few trinkets for Jeff and Linda. Lots of little antique stores and tourist-trap type places. But low-key, nothing too obnoxious.
11:52am
There's a sign in the alley here on the wall of a building on Queen Charlotte Street that says:
Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead
Queen Charlotte Street
which is fifty one feet
ten inches in length
is recorded as the shortest
street in Britain
11:56am Lunch at:
The Three Tuns?
It's a pub that says it was established "c. 1518." A sign on the wall proclaims:
The Three Tuns is the earliest surviving building connected with the government of Windsor. It was probably built in 1518 for the Trinity Guild, which since the 13th century has provided the governing body for the town.
Sounded like a nice pedigree for me, so I went inside. As I walked in the door, I heard the radio playing, "It's My Party (and I'll Cry If I Want To)."
I couldn't, in good faith, go in. I like Leslie Gore, but as theme music for a 16th-century pub, she doesn't cut it.
25 March 1998 12:11pm
So I'm now in the Fort & Firkin pub, a few minutes walk away. Dunno if it's really old, but it sure looks and feels right, for a pub. I think we're across from the Thames ... there's a river there, anyway. Ooh, good beer! I got a pint of Fort Ale for £1.90, purchased from a Scottish guy with a heavy accent who couldn't figure out how to work the till. And they're playing loud and lousy British pop music over the sound system. That's more like it!
12:23pm
I've had a pint of the Fort Ale. 4.3% alcohol. Now I'm working on a pint of the Royale. 3.5%. Being I haven't had breakfast, only two pints of beer so far today, I'm feeling a bit buzzed.
A couple of Irish lads are sitting next to me, talking about something very passionately, but dang if I can understand a word they're saying. I love it!
My steak-and-kidney pie arrived. Ah, genuine pub food. Time for another beer! Well, maybe not yet. Ooh, the pie is quite hot, I burned my tongue. Better let it cool a few minutes. And as long as we're waiting, I'll write in my journal.
[Another verbatim entry]
So far I've walked around Windsor, got cool shaving brush for Dad, name magnet for Linda, 99p. Brush was £10, made in 1910 (they say). The guys over here are rather splendid blokes. Tasted the beer - a bit "thin." Nicely bitter. Saw woman pushing a pram. Raining on and off. Royal Train Station here is pretty cool. I'll go back for Liam nametag for Jeff.
1:10pm
Got Liam tag for Jeff.... Now sitting on train back to Slough from Windsor, don't know how long until it takes off. Oops, there go the doors. It's 1:12 ... doors shut but no movement ... 1:15, on the way! Actually 1:14:30.
There are dozens of buses parked in the lots here. Laundry outside on the line in the rain [there were rows and rows of tour buses parked on the outskirts of town; I'm sure some of them were to Legoland, which is a sort of Lego Disneyland here. That's what I heard, anyway, I never went there. As for laundry outside on the line in the rain -- almost every single house we passed has a clothesline in the backyard, and almost every single clothesline was draped with clothes. I don't know if it had been sunny earlier, or if people just hang their clothes outside no matter what].
Back to Paddington! I think I was on the slightly wrong train; there's an express and local version of the train from Slough to Paddington (and vice versa), and I apparently got on the express one. Not that I'm complaining! But I did end up back in Paddington rather quickly.
I bought a Paddington Bear key chain at the station for Sibyl (£2.99), and a Cadbury Caramello bar for myself at the 7-11 across the street. Then I took the Tube back to Bayswater, bought several papers at my little local vendor (The Sun, Sport, and The Evening Standard -- I really envy the British their selection of newspapers), and an egg & bacon sandwich from Harts, followed by a pint of milk at Marks & Sparks. A lot of shopping for so few items!
Back at the hotel, I napped a little, until 4:30, then walked along Queensway and west (down Bayswater Road), but I was still a bit tired so I returned to the hotel for a while.
Then, around 7-ish, I walked over to Vij and Denise's place, for dinner (my hotel was only a few blocks from where they live, at the Victoria League Youth Hostel). I'd invited them out for dinner, but Vij works as a caretaker for the Victoria League House, which houses students from all over the world who are staying in London (I want that job!), and he needed to stay in that evening. So, instead, he and Denise invited me to join them for dinner, a wonderful home-cooked meal of curry and very yummy Indian food. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever be able to return their generosity and hospitality!
After dinner, we just hung out and chatted for several hours, catching up on each other's lives, and that's when I found out that Michelle's other sister, Simone, was getting married in Singapore in the end of June. I had been invited (this was news to me!) and was I going to go?
It was short notice, and I had short funds, but I'd already missed going to Ben and Michelle's wedding (they got married in December of '97), which I'd intended to go to but couldn't, for several reasons ... how could I pass up the opportunity to see Michelle and Ben and Denise and Vij and the rest of their family again? So I said, "Absolutely. I'll be there!"
Should be grand!
We had a great evening, and we finally said our goodnights at around 11pm; I wandered back to my hotel and fell asleep around midnight. Before I left, they asked if I wanted to get together with them and a couple of their friends tomorrow, just to do something together, one last time before I went home. Sounds like a good idea to me. On to Thursday!
