There weren’t many people on the plane from Minneapolis to London. My husband, Mike, and I could have had our own aisles, our own sections, our very own bathrooms. Granted, we were traveling in the off-season, but also, dollar-wise, visiting Europe has become rather stupid. Thanks to our huge national debt, the war in Iraq, and a bunch of other financial factors I don’t really understand, the dollar is losing value by the day. Three years ago, a dollar bought almost three quarters of a British pound. Now, it buys just more than half. That’s a nearly twenty-five percent slide, making a tasty Orangina beverage, which costs $2.50 here, the equivalent of $3.50 in London. We paid three dollars for M&M’s and four dollars for a bottle of plain water. Carbonation costs extra.
Nevertheless, we were determined to vacation in what we would come to know as the most expensive place on earth. We’d never been, after all—never seen all that history. We had relatives to stay with. We had savings and the necessary devil-may-care attitude. So, after a disorienting layover in Reykjavik, Iceland (it was nine in the morning local time and still pitch black outside), we made London at around noon on a Sunday.
Spending money in London as an American felt like spending money in America as a Mexican. Dollars drifted away like pesos, confetti, vapor. It was a humbling experience, coming from a country where we’re taught to swagger, own the place, no matter what or where. On our first night, by the time Mike and I headed out for dinner, the pubs had all stopped serving. We wound up at a pizza place, where we split a twenty-five-dollar mini pizza pie (we steered clear of “the American,” a pepperoni version intended for people who like their pies “strong and simple”) and a four-dollar bottle of water, and walked back to the house where we were staying.
In fact, mostly we walked, to avoid the cost of the Underground—cabs were out of the question—but also to view life on the streets. Neither of us is particularly fond of the theater, but we can appreciate an odd situation. We traversed Hyde Park, where we came upon a monument to all the animals who had died in battle. It was embossed with the words, “They had no choice.” We saw the ornate Parliament building and Westminster Abbey (a splurge, since total admission cost around thirty-five dollars), which is basically a giant graveyard full of royalty and other less important people. A coffee stand served cappuccino directly on top of the graves of the least important people. We passed through the financial district and stared down into the swirling brown Thames. We toured several free museums, and stood outside several that charged admission.
We saw many sites missed by rich people in cabs: the graphic porno flyers in those quaint red telephone booths; the metal fencing that’s been painted so many times it’s clotted with texture; and graveyards where the words have weathered off the stones. In east London, we found an ancient pub called the Town of Ramsgate. It’s right on the Thames and its claim to fame is that pirates used to be hanged out back on scaffolding at the foot of the Wapping Old Stairs. How the Brits love their gore. From the tourist-packed Tower of London where hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were decapitated or hanged or left to rot in their cells, including two of Henry VIII’s wives, to tours of Jack the Ripper’s killing territory, to these Wapping Stairs, the British are simply fascinated.
At the Ramsgate, my husband and I finished a rather bland traditional English meal of bangers and mash and a pasty chicken pie (total cost, an eye-popping forty dollars) and then went out back to view the spot where Captain Kidd met his end in 1701. According to an excruciatingly detailed placard inside the pub, as Kidd stood atop the scaffold with a rope around his neck, he pointed at a woman in the crowd and yelled, “I lain with that bitch three times, and now she comes to see me hanged.” Not much of a commentary on his performance, joked my husband. Kidd’s body was left to bloat and be picked apart by crows.
We trekked and trekked. For rest, we usually ducked into the pubs, where, if you’re lucky, you get a glass of beer for five dollars. And where you can hang around all day reading a complimentary copy of the Guardian, which is convinced that all Americans are fat and caught in the grip of a misdirected morality craze. London pubs admit dogs and Englishmen with missing teeth. At one particularly charming pub, the Warwick Arms, Mike was at the bar buying me an extra special bitter. A regular, who had obviously beaten us to the scene by a few hours, slurred in heavily accented English, “Steady, boy.”
“Why am I silly?” my husband responded.
“Stea-dy!” he bellowed. “Is there somethin’ wrong with me English?”
“Well, I’m English as a second language!” The guy had to laugh. He kept laughing as Mike paid the bill.—Jennifer Vogel
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