Sunday, July 11, we’re at Newark International Airport [EWR] by 8 am.  At 10 am, Continental flight #18 takes us to London; it’s a six hour flight but we have two individual seats and besides Bryan sleeps most of the way.

At 9 pm GMT, we arrive at Gatwick Airport, south of London and take a train and then a taxi to Matt and Paul’s home in Brixton.  [For more details, see the notes on New Year’s Eve in England.]  We’re quite lucky in my remembering their address as we’ve forgotten to take their phone number with us!

A little after 10 pm, we’re safely ensconced in their home in front of a heaping bowl of Matt’s Tuscan-style vegetable soup; he’s quite a good cook.  After a simple bottle of Pinot Grigio (yes, they remembered that it’s Bryan’s favorite), it was lights out at 2 am.

Monday, July 12.   Around 2 pm, we take a long walk through Brockwell Park, a lovely park nearby which features a lovely café at the top of the hill.  Unfortunately, the food is about what one would get at a school cafeteria.  At least Bryan enjoys his English breakfast!

Paul then goes swimming at the Brockwell Lido (the public swimming pool there) while the three of us walk into Brixton center.  For those of you who haven’t been there for ten or twenty years, the town has transformed from a dangerous hotbed of poverty to a stylish yuppie suburb (I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad).  The town even has its own website.

We walk along the market stalls of Electric Avenue (remember the reggae song by Eddy Grant?); I believe it's the first electrified street in the London area.

We have a drink at Ritzy’s (a combination movie theatre and café) and we’re back at the flat around 5 pm.  Because of London’s northern latitude, the days are extremely long now, so we go back to Brockwell Park to lay on the grass; we also meet up with their friend Cas (Carolyn).  I continue to be impressed with their circle of friends to which we’re being introduced; quite varied but all quite nice.

For our first evening, Matt has cooked “bangers and mashed” for Bryan along with a "rocket" salad.  Here's your international food translations:  The bangers are fat sausages; mashed are the potatoes.  Rocket is the lettuce known in America (and most of Italy) as arugola; in Italy it's often also spelled rucola or other variations.  Looking for eggplant?  Try aubergine.  And lovers of zucchini need look no further than courgettes.

After dinner it’s off to Camberwell Green to Father Red Cap, the local gay bar.  It’s supposedly singles night, but there’s only eight people there and a stupid contest is going on.  Nonetheless, we meet Bridget and Jude and wind up practically closing the place.  We don’t get to bed until after 3 am (about 8 am to my American time-zoned body).

Tuesday, July 13, Bryan and I pick up new travel cards (enabling unrestricted travel on the underground and bus systems) and head into South Kensington and Brompton Road.  After a quick lunch at McDonald’s (don’t even say anything, please), we head over to the Victoria and Albert Museum where we spend a couple of hours seeing areas we missed six months ago, including a glass exhibit and ironworks.

At 5 pm, we tube to Piccadilly Square in SoHo, walking up Shaftesbury Avenue (the theater district) and then to Trafalgar Square.

At 6:30, Bridget and Jude take us to Wagamama, a very popular and well-known Japanese noodle shop on Lexington Street (the long queue to get in proves it - even my cousin mentioned it to me recently).  Everyone sits at long tables, the waiters take your order and punch it into hand-held transmitters connected to the kitchen.  As the food is ready, it’s rushed to your place with no regard to your fellow diners – the food is most important!

Bryan has taken a short mpeg of the restaurant; you can hear the sounds of the place plus a 360 degree panoramic sweep.  Just request it and it will be emailed to you (it's about a sixth of the size of a floppy or click the link).

Jude, being a confirmed meat eater, only has some ebi katsu (breaded shrimp), plain noodles and a Kirin beer; Bridget has yaki soba (friend noodles with shrimp, chicken and vegetables) and an elderflower concoction; Bryan has yasai soba and a Sapporo beer; and I have kare lomen (a superb Thai-style coconut, coriander and lime soup with beansprouts, ramen noodles and char-broiled shrimp) and a “gusto” (fresh-squeezed lemons, apple juice and guarana – boy, the English have a wide range of soft drinks!).  The bill is only 30 quid (less than fifty dollars) for all of us.

Next stop, the Vauxhall Tavern (near Vauxhall Station) to see the Divine David (imagine a cross between Marilyn Manson and the late Boston drag act Sylvia Sydney) and friends.  There, Matt and Paul and some of their friends join us.  We later find that included in the audience (unbeknownst to us) is Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys; although we do meet up with a former busboy at Dick’s – yes, it is a small world.

Part of the Divine David’s entourage this evening is Miss Chloe Poems, a strident left-wing – um – poet, and Jay Cloth, a silent, sepulcher character named after a brand of dishrag.  Yes, it’s quite an unusual evening as they are all dressed in a sort of drag but go to great pains to put down traditional drag shows as demeaning to women (and quite right they are).

And we gay boys are not spared at all – the strongest comment I remember is “Remember, self-congratulation is not emancipation” (regarding gay pride parades).  The show ends before 2, but it’s almost 3:30 again before bedtime.

Wednesday, July 14, Bastille Day, the Brockwell Café again.  Later, Bryan and I take a long walk to Brixton center, stopping for a small bite at Z, a semi-French bistro with a decent gazpacho and warm duck salad for me but quite large and tasteless calamari for B.  Along with a couple of vodkas, the tab is twenty pounds (a little over thirty dollars).

Bryan also picks up his first piece of matte white ceramic of the trip at a small store (Bleu, 403 Coldharbour Lane) where we meet the owner and artistic director, Moses Otunla.  Although B was attracted by the ceramics and small items from the 30's, and they have an unusual range of periods and styles besides those, their speciality is fine furniture.  You can e-mail them if you think you'll be shopping in London any time soon.

Bridget and Jude have invited all four of us to their apartment for dinner in Elephant + Castle (remember we stayed there over New Year’s).  Jude has been telling us of her special variation on spaghetti bolognese made with minced (it means chopped over there) pork, tomatoes, onions and garlic and this Italian gourmet is going for the testing!

We pick up three bottles of wine (a Gallo white zinfindel, a Pinot Grigio in a very unique double-walled insulated bottle and a 1995 St. Emilion – guess who picked that one? – although it really wasn’t very exceptional) and various flavors of Haagen-Dazs ice cream in individual serving cups at Tesco’s.

Well, let me say for the record that her version of bolognese was quite tasty!  No complaints, indeed I go back for seconds.  I’m not really a food snob, I just require incredibly tasty food.  A long and heated “discussion” about art takes us to 1 am and we’re home and asleep by 3 am.

Quick side note:  I believe that taking a daytime flight on Sunday has allowed us to totally throw off our internal time clocks; we’ve shown no signs of jet lag and an amazing ability to adapt to various time schedules.

Thursday, July 15, Bryan is awake for an hour in the early morning to catch “The Big Breakfast” or the Big Brekkie as it’s fondly known.

By 2 pm, we go to Herne Hill Station to a nice café – Pullen’s at 293-295 Pullen Road.  Paul has a bowl of olives and deviled whitebait (little fishies).  The rest of us have superb Philly cheese steaks along with a carrot-coriander soup for me, potato wedges and salsa for Bryan.  With drinks the tab is 33 pounds (about fifty bucks).  And for those who say there's no good food, this place serves an unusual array of tasty foods, including some Indian variations (although on a later night, the waitress admitted that no one had tried the Indian special all night so she couldn't tell me if it were any good!).

By 3:30, Bryan and I are packed, in a taxi and on the way to Liverpool Street Station for the train to Harwich.

After having called a variety of bed and breakfasts in the area, and finding them extremely expensive (and, frankly, it is Harwich), we've decided on the Cliff Hotel in Dovercourt.

We take a early evening walk through town (Dovercourt is part of Harwich from what I can tell).  Then dinner in the hotel’s restaurant; the appetizers are good (Bryan has mushrooms in a very tasty garlic cream sauce and I have cream of asparagus soup).  But my lasagna was brown and greasy and B’s cheeseburger somewhat plain.

Friday, July 16, I sleep poorly and even Bryan is up by 6 am, even bathing first (yes, there’s no shower or even a shower attachment here).  We’ll look forward to a real shower in Amsterdam (everyone believes I have this shower fetish thing, so I might as well oblige them).

A buffet style breakfast is included in the room and it’s quite tasty; I have scrambled eggs which are a bit runny but very good while B has fried eggs and bacon that was more like ham.  And the coffee is very, very good with steamed milk on the side.  A side note:  it seems that the English, having accepted coffee, are determined to outdo their American cousins – and often succeed!

By 10 am, we’re in Harwich International Port where we upgrade our ferry tickets to include the Panorama Lounge.  Note to travelers:  if you’re going to Amsterdam from London, you can get a combined ticket for the whole affair with a savings as well.  And although you don’t have to stay overnight in Harwich, it was a pretty town and relaxing as well.

Do you have your passport ready?  Click on this view of the port to continue the journey ...