Last day in London and on to Paris

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Knowing that this was our last day in London, we crammed as much as possible into the hours before 4:00, when we'd have to tube it to St. Pancras station to catch the Eurostar train to Paris.

Breakfast at our budget hotel was as bad as we feared -- white toast only (sorry, no brown bread), accompanied by coffee that tasted like instant. (I should have known to order tea.) Overall, the Queensway hotel was disappointing and I do not recommend it. You can call the hotel something to do with the queen, but that doesn't make it fit for royalty. Oh well, it was clean and a relatively inexpensive place to lay our heads for the night in a busy and costly city.

Ignoring the white toast, albeit so nicely displayed on a toast rack, we stopped in at a Pret-a-Manger cafe for a proper breakfast and then grabbed some bikes and headed to the British Museum. The docking station there is right across from RADA, where many of our favourite British actors trained, so I was sure to point that out to Dave.

I had promised my Sri Lankan student that I would track down this statue, the Bodhisattva Tara, an 8th century treasure from his country which is also evidence of the presence of his particular form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka at this time in history. 
The museum was not as busy as it had been when I visited in April, although we still could not get a good gander at the Rosetta Stone.


We enjoyed wandering around this marvelous building, examining various treasures, for about an hour. Our favourite room was the Clocks and Watches. Featuring timepieces from their invention until modern times, this exhibit was simply fascinating. It was especially intriguing to see how many clocks from the 1600s, say, still keep time today.

We then took the bikes again (the same ones we had dropped off were waiting for us -- nice!) and rode down to Trafalgar Square area. It was quite different this time, with no London Marathon ending. A quick foray into the National Gallery and St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a quick pass by Canada House, and it was back on the bikes to the hotel where we collected our luggage and legged it to Paddington Station to take the tube to St. Pancras Station. 

There we collected a refund on the Oyster cards, ate dinner and finally boarded the Eurostar, Paris-bound, at about 5:00.

Canada House, home of the High Commission of Canada

The train ride was about 2 hours, and the time went quite quickly. To our disappointment, we didn't even realize when we entered the Chunnel (we went through two tunnels) and came out in France. We were glad not to have any disruptions to our trip, with the refugee situation as it is. I didn't see any sign of problems, so it seems we were on the train at just the right time.

We arrived in Paris at about 9 p.m. We knew that our hotel was just a short distance from the Gare du Nord, so we walked through crowds of people, mostly men, to the Rue de Deux Gares. What a shock! Although we thought it was crowded around the train station, that was nothing compared to this street. We practically had to push the crowds aside in order to reach the end of the street, where our hotel was located. And the hotel was not a pleasant surprise either.

It was dark when we arrived, but I took these photos the next day. The inside was, if anything, slightly worse! Our room's window was right behind the plastic covering. 

I think this must be one of those hotels that solicits good ratings in exchange for something, because it had decent ratings on Expedia; and the photos on the website also made it look better than it really is. This is the first time I have felt misled to this extent. When I traveled alone, all the hotels were better than I expected, and the so-so hotel in London was not really any worse than it appeared on the website. But this one... And it wasn't especially cheap either. It was also extremely noisy during the night: noise from the train station, from the bar across the street and even from other rooms.