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Moving to London from the US has made me realize how much there is to see in this fine city and how much simply cannot be seen during a single visit. Every time I have a guest in town, I’m overflowing with ideas of what we could see and do based on my own faves and their interests, but we can never cover it all.
But I’ll be damned if we’re not tryin’ this week! As I’ve been chronicling so far, this American expat in London and my good friend visiting from the States are painting this town red, white, and blue in the spirit of the Union Jack and our Star-Spangled Banner. Yesterday, we tackled the big stuff central to London tourism, and today we decided to get our shopping thang on in west London.
To start, the iconic red double-decker bus is always a nice transport option to have your guests try at least once, and make sure they sit up top! It sounds cheesy, but when you haven’t ridden on one before, you really do get a kick out of the elevated perspective as well as how those drivers manage to maneuver through the twists of these narrow streets. So I chose this option for getting to Notting Hill so that my friend could take in the scenery that one misses in the Underground. Hopping off at Notting Hill Gate, Portobello Road was my friend’s request to scope out the famous market and its antiques, fashions, and foods to be had. In addition to me pointing out the usual sites from the film Notting Hill (the fake travel bookshop, the real travel bookshop, the house that no longer has the little blue door…), my friend acquired a couple fabulous bags, a necklace, and properly hokey Royal Wedding souvenirs for friends and family. Score!
Given our not-so-early start this afternoon, we then decided to high-tail it to the British Library so we could see its manuscript room before it closed (my friend is a librarian in Los Angeles, so just as bookish as I am if not more!). The tube was our best bet for transport in this case: Central line out of Notting Hill Gate to Holburn, where we could connect to the Piccadilly Line to Kings Cross Station. Once you pass the impressive, almost Candy Land-ish St. Pancras station/hotel/London apartment building, the library is just at the next block, where you can see several stories of books (literally) on walking in, and across the atrium and to the left you’ll find the room of literary treasures that includes Jane Austen’s writing desk, Charlotte Bronte’s handwritten Jane Eyre, Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” the Magna Carta, back-of-the-envelope lyrics (again, literally) of The Beatles, star charts, and religious texts including the Gutenberg Bible. And it’s free.
But enough of the intellectually and culturally significant. It was time for more shopping. We returned to Kings Cross and hopped the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus for the famous Oxford and Regent streets—for an American frame of reference, I’d liken this area to NYC’s 5th Avenue and Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Feeling a little peckish, though, we first bopped over to the Soho branch of Pho for some healthy Vietnamese cuisine and my previously-blogged-about weasel poop coffee. You heard me. And what can I say? It was on my friend’s must-do list!
Next on that list: Liberty of London. Ahhh…we spent such a nice amount of time there. Liberty has an abundance of beautiful, beautiful items—clothing, books, furniture, homewares, toiletries, crafts, fabrics (of course!), and on and on—but just being inside there is an experience, and you’ll likely find yourself suddenly desperate to purchase something tattooed in one of its famous fabric prints just to be able to carry a bit of that specialness home with you. It makes me wish I could bear blowing my nose into cloth so I could one day finally justify buying one of those pretty handkerchiefs… Bah! I just don’t think I could do it.
So, once again, we find ourselves home at my London apartment and kicking our feet up with a glass of wine to decompress from another day of covering a lot of London ground. What tomorrow holds the UK weather might just have to determine for us… I’ll be sure to keep you posted should you find any of our excursions remotely in keeping with what you might like to do yourself once you relocate to London!
buildings that are not normally open to the public for a two day burst of activity. I could only do one day and the choice was overwhelming so we picked out a few contrasting buildings and missed out on some great ones, like a chance to go to the top of the BT Tower, closed since the 1980 but you had to be quick off the mark to book that one! We saw inside the 
Back to Open House…. We popped our heads into the lobby at the former Daily Express building on Fleet Street which is a temple to art deco. Fleet Street used to be the home of all the London based newspapers and entered the language as a collective name for national papers. However, new technology coupled with the force of change from the Murdoch empire saw the end of this era but the wonderful buildings remain. The photos showthe pristine interior and art deco exterior that housed the Daily Express. From here we went for a complete 
contrast with the Middle Hall at Temple. Temple is one of the legal areas of London where the lawyers have their chambers as it’s close to the Royal Courts of Justice. 
The late night opening at the 
considering what they had to work with and yet some sections of these maps would be just guesswork which was fun to see. This was a temporary exhibition but the library’s permanent collections are well worth a visit if you are interested in old and not so old books and documents. They have rooms with original copies of the Magna Carta, medieval illustrated bibles and sacred Jewish texts, an Audubon book of birds and even the handwritten lyrics of several Beatles songs, mostly in John Lennon’s hand.
An ideal place to start is from King’s Cross Tube station. First of all, head upstairs from the Underground into the main station to see Platform 9 3/4, where Harry Potter’s cart is pushed half-way through the brick wall as he makes his way to Hogwarts! Then, just a block or so beyond is the 
free) feature of the library is its manuscript room, where you can find original writings of the likes of Jane Austin and Charlotte Bronte—read my 
Another 15-minute walk will take you back into the vicinity of Russell Square, so you can have a rest in its large garden before tackling the mammoth 
civilizations, you can experience different visual forms of literature in ancient languages—be it mythology sculpted into the 
