Here is London, giddy London

I'm skipping over Paris for the time being because most of the photos are from there. Instead, I give you a fun bulleted list about London:

• I heartily recommend Covent Garden and the West End as a base of operations and place to stay. You can walk to a large number of tourist destinations and it's incredibly lively on the weekends. The Covent Garden Hotel is a phenomenal establishment but is expensive even for London ... which means lodging is only vaguely purchasable with money. I think they'd prefer precious jewels.


• Seeing Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre was a total hoot. We saw Titus Andronicus which the Globe has staged like a slasher flick; blood, gore, amputations and so on. During the rape of Lavinia, someone actually puked and keeled over. Good times.


• Take the guided tour of the Tower of London. Part of the fun of being a Yank tourist is that everything seems very old in London. The Tower and Westminster Abbey are the epicenters of the mad oldness. But only the Tower comes with a tour by the Yeoman Warders. Our guide, Alan, absolutely knocked 'em dead.


• We saw Children of Men in Leicester Square's 2000 seat Odeon Theatre which has both premium and ticketed seating, both of which I love. The downside is that the good seats are like $30 each. Did I mention London is preposterously expensive?


• The Tate Modern is the only art musuem we stopped in and it didn't disappoint. The way they group the art thematically is a lot of fun and, while massive, it's a very comfortable museum to explore. Also, the Tate has the single best piece of video art I've seen, Video Quartet by Christian Marclay.


• Street names basically change at every intersection and there's no organizational scheme to speak of. This can make navigation ... challenging. But it's a fun place to explore in a wandery fashion so this may as well be seen as a virtue.