London Deep Freeze

For those of you who have visited London, this photo of a street running by Trafalger Square will probably look very odd - there is very little traffic! Because of the storm, almost no one came into the city on Thursday (we heard on the news there was greater than 17% absentee-ism in London). Thursday morning we set out by foot to walk to Piccadilly, where we caught a bus to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Usually Peter would make this 50 minute walk by foot, but, since the sidewalks were rather ice-covered, due to the winter storm that hit on Wednesday, and, probably because he knew that walking with me would take at lease another half hour to 45 minutes, he decided we should take a big red bus. What was surprising to us was the paucity of traffic in the inner city. Well, we shouldn't have been surprised, because the news media have been going quite gaga about the storm, the airport closings, the trains not running, the roads completely messed up. Of course, England doesn't usually get much snow, so it's rather like Washington, D.C. and other southern places in the US - they just don't have the equipment to deal with this kind of weather. The young man at the desk in our hotel was quite surprised at the weather, and the temperatures, we described for Minnesota. But, as I told him, we have tons of rock salt, sand, and many, many snow plows - and, even so, from what I've read online about the current weather in Minnesota, there have still been a lot of problems. Here and in Germany (where we're going on Sunday), the main problem we've heard about seems to be a lack of grit! No, not the sisu type of grit, but the sand type of grit. I have no idea why there seem be shortages of this substance, but it is a major issue. I can tell you that several home owners have apparently decided to use kitty litter on the sidewalks in front of their homes, which makes a dreadfully slippery mess, and our hotel owner apparently used table salt to melt the ice on the tiles in front of our hotel. That wasn't exactly slippery, but it wasn't very effective, either!

Well, we did go to the V&A, which I'd never been to before. It was quite fun riding on the bus - though we decided not to ride upstairs, as the windows up there were totally fogged over. We saw a fascinating exhibit about India - before and after the British East India Company took over. The exhibit materials were wonderful and extremely varied - including a great paladin in which the Maharaji's women would have ridden, a thrown type object that was mounted on top of a full-size stylized replica of an elephant, in which the Maharaji himself would have ridden, amazing jeweled harnesses for horses and other animal members of the retinue. And, of course, there were maps an a detailed timeline. After spending a lot of time in this exhibit, I decided to take my coat, hat, and gloves to the coat room, as I was feeling way, way too hot!

Peter wanted to check out their newly reopened ceramics exhibit, but that turned out to be very disappointing. It was organized in a somewhat random fashion, and the labels were almost totally lacking. And, there was very little early pottery at all. However, I didn't mind, because my feet were tired from standing on marble floors, and I was hungry. So, we went to the museum cafeteria and had lunch!