Trip to London

The risk of going abroad is pretty substantial. I know I talked about risk/reward in my last long blog post about quitting my job and moving to Columbus, but bear with me on that concept. The risk of going abroad is that you will spend too much money at a place you don't like with people you can't stand. Also, there is the risk that if you pick one place over another then maybe in your life you won't get the opportunity to go the silver medal site. Life isn't like the movie Groundhog Day because you can't go back in time and try to get it right again. You have one shot. (I loved the quote below from a street in London.)

One reason M and I picked London and Paris were because they were two places on our bucket list. They were two places that we couldn't go through life without seeing. M has actually been to both places, but only briefly in Paris and maybe (hopefully?) not the same type of trip as she had done before in London. Those two places were worth the risk because of all we have heard and seen about the cities.

Now the good news is that so far this trip has been amazing. I am sitting in a small hotel room a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower and thinking back on our trip to London. Those were four wonderful days that I will look back fondly on. The food was much better than the expectations of English food. Whether or not we were in a pub (which we went to a decent amount) or a real restaurant we were consistently impressed. My favorite traditional English meal was a simple fish & chips meal at a place near Trafalgar Square. My favorite overall meal was the duck confit at a place called Henry's (located on the road Piccadilly Circus).

Other than eating our way through London, we also did the big tourist sights. A quick rundown of what we saw:

• Tower of London
• National Gallery
• Buckingham Palace (we went to see the changing of the guard one day)
• Imperial War Museum

• London Eye
• Westminster Abbey
• Harrod's
• Big Ben
• Backbeat (a play at the Duke of York theater)

Out of the list above our favorites were the National Gallery, Imperial War Museum (we spent about 3 hours there) and the play (Backbeat) about the forming of the Beatles. I could go on and on about the merits of those three activities specifically.

I am going to get some rest now in anticipation of our first full day in the *Kansas City of Western Europe.

*I'm assuming that if Kansas City is known as the "Paris of the Plains" then actual Paris must be knowns as something like the Kansas City of Western Europe.