I’ve just returned from a five-day trip to England, in which we saw the sun for an aggregate of about 15 minutes, but I miss the English weather already. It’s supposed to be 102 today in Washington, D.C., and 104 tomorrow. Factoring in the heat index, it will feel like a place well within easy commuting distance of hell.
June went down as the wettest June in the U.K. since rainfall records began to be recorded in 1910, with over 5.7 inches of rain. The British newspaper The Independent also noted other “lousy” and “disappointing” characteristics of the June weather: it was also the second least sunny June, with only 119 hours of sunshine, and also the coolest since 1991.
Given Britain’s reputation for wet, cool weather, the fact that records were set is saying something. But at least the Brits have a good sense of humor about their miserable weather. Reuters reports that Belgium is considering taking legal action against a weather service that made a long term forecast for a rainy summer on the Belgian coast.I was at Wimbledon last Monday in the rain and I asked a security guard I was chatting with if June had seemed especially dismal to him.
“You can always count on crap weather here,” he said. “That’s why you find the English on holiday in Spain, Greece and anywhere else where the sun shines.”
The Brits are so accustomed to bad weather that the Guardian’s weather map for the U.K. (see above) included the following key icons last week: showers, heavy showers, light rain, rain, thundery rain, thundery showers, overcast/dull, mostly cloudy and sunny intervals. How’s that for crap weather? In the States, we just get showers, rain or thunderstorms on our weather maps.
Five years ago, on a mid summer retreat to Newfoundland, the coldest place I could find within 1,000 miles of my home, we encountered a similarly gloomy, yet very detailed forecast. We were driving up to a town called Twillingate and heard a weather forecast on the radio that had us in tears. The presenter used the words “patchy fog, patchy drizzle” and “patches of patchy fog and patchy drizzle,” over and over and over again to describe the forecast in every town in Newfoundland, which has a climate almost as bad as the U.K.
“Why doesn’t he just save time and say the weather sucks in the whole province?” my wife asked, quite sensibly.
With the Olympic Games set to begin in London on July 27, one can’t help but wonder how much Britain’s notoriously wet weather will impact the events. According to a story in the Associated Press, five weather forecasters will be “embedded with the games and working around the clock, providing long- and short-range forecasts for the event.” But they could have 100 forecasters and it isn’t going to change the gloomy reality that the athletes can probably expect wet weather.
And yet, I rather prefer the chilly gloom to baking in the heat and humidity we have here in Washington. For those of us who call this place home, we’re more or less stuck here, but I feel compelled to pose a polite, yet pointed question to the tourist hordes that come here every year in July and August: why? What the hell are you thinking? Washington is wonderful in the spring and fall and miserable in the middle of summer.
Call me crazy but I’ll take 62 degrees and drizzle over 104 with humidity any day.
The 2012 Olympics are quickly approaching and people from all over the world are making travel plans to go see The Games in person. While most people know the event takes place July 27 to August 12, and that the location for this year is London, there are a lot of facts about the Olympics that people do not know. To help people get to know the quirkier side of the event, My Destination has created a fun infographic.
Did you know at 62.7 meters, the Olympics stadium is 1.5 times taller than Rio de Janeiro‘s “Christ The Redeemer” statue? Or that the logo for the 2012 Olympics cost £400,000 to create, the same price it would be to adopt a panda in China for 365 years? These are just some of the fun facts you’ll learn from the infographic.
To view the infographic, continue to the next page.
Twenty-five years ago, while on holiday in London with my parents, I insisted that we make a pilgrimage out to The All England Club, where Wimbledon, tennis’s grandest tournament, has been held nearly every summer since 1877. The tournament wasn’t on at the time, but we checked out the club’s museum, which offered a tantalizing glimpse of the fabled Centre Court, and bought some souvenirs that I hoped would make me the most intimidating, bad-ass 14-year-old tennis player in Buffalo, New York.
It was a hideous, ill-fitting T-shirt with wide horizontal green and white stripes emblazoned with a massive, tacky Wimbledon crest, along with a Wimbledon towel that probably cost my parents far more than it should have. I was still years away from being able to legally purchase a pornographic magazine and I still harbored delusions that I was going to be the next Boris Becker. Sure I was.
I wore the shirt and used the towel at every opportunity, in the belief that they might give me some mystical edge over my opponents. In the pre-Internet era, I was pretty sure I was the only kid in Buffalo who had some gear from Wimbledon and I wanted everyone to know it.My tennis “career” fizzled but I never lost my love for the sport or my desire to return to Wimbledon so that I could actually see a match on the court where my heroes – Borg, McEnroe, Becker and a host of others – had met triumph and disaster and treated both just the same.
A quarter of a century after my first visit, I finally had an opportunity to return to Wimbledon this week after I scored a ticket for “Magic Monday,” when all 16 men’s and women’s fourth round matches take place in one day-long tennis orgy unique to Wimbledon. A contact at the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) lined up a ticket for me and I was told to report to gate 9 around 11 a.m.
I was up at 6, like a child waiting to open his presents on Christmas morning and turned up at the gate around 9:30, on the hope that I might be able to enter the grounds and hit the museum before play was due to start on the outside courts at 11 a.m.
“You’re an hour and a half early,” said the puzzled young woman who was sent out to the gate to deal with me. “I can give you a grounds pass, and you can enter in an hour and then later on I’ll have a ticket for you.”
She had no idea that I’d been waiting to see some tennis at Wimbledon my whole life and another hour meant nothing to me. But the skies were as threatening as Mel Gibson in a drunken fury and I still didn’t know if I was going to be given a ticket for Centre Court, which has a retractable roof, or Courts 1 or 2, which do not.
After spending the next hour walking around cutesy Wimbledon village in a persistent drizzle, paranoid that I’d somehow manage to lose my ticket, and half-tempted to buy a tasteless Wimbledon warm-up jacket circa 1973 at the Oxfam charity shop down the road, I made my way into the club and immediately felt a giddy sense of accomplishment.
It was raining and all the courts were covered but there were self-important looking juniors lugging big tennis bags around on their backs, ushers in distinctive blue blazers with white trim directing foot traffic and hordes of well dressed white people eating strawberries and cream and drinking Pimms that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Morgan Stanley company picnic. This was the place – Wimbledon, baby.
My fortunes improved when Kate, one of the ATP’s angels sent from heaven, handed me a ticket for Centre Court just as the rain stopped and play began on the outside courts just after noon. The outside courts have a very limited seating capacity and since those who have only grounds passes don’t have the right to enter the show courts – Centre, 1 and 2 – it’s a bit of a mob scene trying to get near the action on these courts.
I spent half an hour watching fragments of the Mikhail Youzhny-Denis Istomin through some flowers and a bush on the periphery of Court 18, (right) the intimate little court where Nicholas Mahut and John Isner duked it out for more than 11 hours in a first round match in 2010.
Before heading out to Centre Court to see Roger Federer face Xavier Malisse, I spent some time exploring the grounds and taking note of all the unfamiliar, peculiarly British terminology. There was the Officials’ Buttery, the Debenture Holders’ Entrance, Henman Hill and a host of other very British-sounding places.
And what about the food and drink? Aside from the signatures, Pimms and Kentish strawberries and cream, there’s an astonishing variety of food on offer beyond the standard hot dogs/pizza/beer sporting event fare. At the Conservatory Buffet, there’s dressed torby crab and smoked Shetlands salmon; at the reservations-only Wingfield Restaurant, where Thurston Howell and Lovey would have felt very much at home, you can tuck into some pan-fried Anglesey sea bass, caramelized summer squash, or some smoked Glousctershire Chicken.
But I didn’t come to Wimbledon to eat squash. I came to watch the world’s best brutalize little yellow balls on a court fit for royalty, so I headed up to what the Brits refer to as gangway 304 to take my seat at Centre Court.
Centre Court has been described as tennis’s cathedral or temple, and it does feel like hallowed ground. As soon as you enter the stadium, your senses are flooded by the green, pastoral feel of the place. The flood of green-the grass on the courts, the seats, the paneling of the structure, the tarps that lie on the side of the court, the Wimbledon crests emblazoned behind both baselines – all green – seduce you into a weird, content, better than drugs, everything-is-right-in-the-world haze.
The court seats 15,000 fans but it feels remarkably intimate. Federer, who has won this tournament six times, looked sluggish to begin the match and each time he shanked a ball off the sides of his racket, the crowd gasped as though they’d just heard the Queen rip a loud fart at a State Dinner.
In one game, Fed shanked two balls and a portly businessman with an American accent behind me said to his trophy wife, “What the hell is going on?” as though he was at a fine restaurant and had just been given a tough piece of meat. The crowd had paid to see Federer work his magic and had no tolerance for error.
A visit to Wimbledon is a pilgrimage for a hardcore tennis fan and the ultimate status symbol for a wealthy American dilettante. Centre Court is filled mostly with the well heeled, but take a walk up above Court 18 and check out the hardcore lot, who camp out in the hopes of scoring tickets and you’ll understand that Wimbledon isn’t just for the rich.
Midway through the first set, Federer left the court and the crowd began to murmur, speculating about what was going on. The chair umpire announced that he had taken a medical timeout, and suddenly the notion that tennis’s greatest champion, a man who has never retired due to injury in a tennis match, might actually lose prior to the quarterfinal round in a major for the first time in 8 years. What was wrong with him?
“He must have pulled something,” said the large man behind me.
“He didn’t pull anything,” said his wife, who was coated in makeup for the occasion. “He’s probably just got diarrhea or something. I mean what are they supposed to do if they have to go to the bathroom?”
Federer eventually got his act together, and won the match, as he always seems to, and the woman behind me fell asleep on her husband’s shoulder, but was rudely awakened by Victoria Azarnenka, one of the next combatants, who wails and shrieks with every shot as though she’s in the final stages of childbirth. Azarenka made short work of Serbian beauty Anna Ivanovic and was later characterized by Patrick Kidd, writing in the British newspaper The Times, as a “noise pest” who “lived to squawk another day.” Kidd opined that she sounded like a wounded seagull falling down a well and I couldn’t agree more.
I spent 9 and half hours at Wimbledon, taking in three full matches, two of them uneventful, three large glasses of Pimms, two rain delays and two trips to the Wimbledon Shop. I made my way out of the club and walked towards the Southfields tube stop, proudly sporting a Wimbledon umbrella and Wimbledon hat. These days, anyone with a credit card and an Internet connection can buy these trinkets, but still, I felt like a member of the club – if only for a day.
London is an amazing city for art, culture, dining and nightlife. It can get a bit overbearing at times, though. If you want to get away from it all you’re in luck. There are plenty of day trips you can do.
One of the best destinations is the university town of Cambridge 60 miles to the north and easily accessible by train or bus. With its Gothic towers, verdant gardens and storied history, it makes for a pleasant change from the big city. The university was founded in the 13th century and is divided into several colleges each with its own character and traditions. In the town itself, winding streets lead to atmospheric pubs, medieval churches, museums and shops. Cambridge is compact and walkable, and it’s easy to get out into the beautiful Cambridgeshire countryside.
Sights
The colleges are one of the main attractions. King’s College is the most spectacular and also one of the oldest, having been founded in 1446 by Henry VI. The chapel with its 16th century stained glass and the “Adoration of the Magi” by Rubens is a memorable sight. Its soaring fan vault ceiling can be seen in this photo by Tom Thai. Another popular college is Trinity College, which has graduated more than 30 Nobel Prize winners. Sir Isaac Newton used to teach there. The 17th century library designed by Sir Christopher Wren is a must for any bibliophile and features an incredible collection of rare manuscripts including an 8th century copy of the Epistles of St. Paul.
The Fitzwilliam Museum is the university’s art museum and has a large collection of European masters, Asian art, a medieval armory, illuminated manuscripts, artifacts from ancient Egypt, plus lots more. An unusual aspect of the displays is that most are simply hanging on the wall or on shelves as if they were the collection of some eccentric and vastly wealthy collector. Unfortunately, someone stumbled on the stairs in 2006 and knocked over a Ming vase. Luckily he was British, so there wasn’t an international incident, but please be careful.
St. Bene’t’s Church is the oldest of Cambridge’s many churches. Much of the original Saxon construction from c. 1020 is still visible, including the tower, which you can climb to get a photogenic view of the town.
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Step into a bit of English and American history at The Eagle, a traditional English pub that started serving in the 15th century and became popular with American aviators from the nearby air base during World War II. Many of them wrote their names on the ceiling of the back room with candles and lighters, and you can still see their burnt scribbles. The Eagle serves the usual pub fare, including real ale and a fine Sunday roast. The Cambridge Chop House is set in a medieval wine cellar opposite King’s College. You can’t get much more atmospheric than this. The cuisine is a mix of traditional British and Continental favorites.
If English cooking is getting a bit too heavy, try the Rainbow Vegetarian Cafe. This cozy little place serves some of the best vegetarian food in England, literally. It was named cafe of the year by the Vegetarian Society. Besides vegetarian food, it also serves a good variety of vegan and gluten-free choices. Even a dedicated carnivore such as myself can appreciate the friendly service, heaping portions and internationally inspired dishes.
Outings
If you walk through town you’ll be sure to get bushwhacked by touts hustling boat rides. Boats generally hold 3-4 people and the punter stands on the stern with a long pole and pushes along the shallow River Cam. You can hire someone to punt for you or do it yourself. Either way it’s a serene way to spend a lazy afternoon.
My personal favorite outing from Cambridge is the walk along the River Cam to Grantchester. It’s only 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) and you can do it on foot or by punting. Grantchester is a little cluster of thatched roof houses and a famous tea garden called The Orchard. Lawn chairs, a sparkling river and high tea make this one of the most relaxing spots in England. I simply can’t sink into one of those chairs without drifting off to sleep. The Orchard was founded in 1897 and soon became a favorite for university students. Before World War I it was the meeting place for the “Neo-Pagans,” a literary group that included Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke. Check out the free Rupert Brooke Museum at The Orchard to learn more about the life of one of England’s most cherished early 20th century poets.
What’s this? A knife? A razor? Actually, it’s Chinese currency dating back to the 5th-3rd century B.C. It’s one of the many rare and unusual pieces on display in the newly reopened money gallery at the British Museum in London.
The Citi Money Gallery looks at world history through money, starting with the Bronze Age and going right up to the Age of the Credit Card. This has always been one of my favorite galleries in the British Museum because it shows the artifacts as dynamic parts of society, not simply objects to be admired. Trade, credit and the evolution of the state are all covered.
The refurbished gallery includes some current events as well, such as the rise of payments through mobile phones in Haiti. The 2010 earthquake wrecked the banking sector, and Haitians quickly adopted a form of payment through phone calls that is a leader in the world.
As much as we travelers want to break free of our everyday lives, money matters are still an essential part of travel. Whether it’s discovering that nobody takes credit cards in that remote third-world town or that your American ATM card won’t work in Europe on weekends, money seems to crop up again and again.
Sometimes that can be amusing, like when you change 20 dollars into Somaliland Shillings and get so many 500-shilling notes that you can’t stuff them into your pocket. Possibly the weirdest travel experience I had was in the early ’90s when I went into a bank in Iran and saw a big banner in Farsi and English reading “DEATH TO AMERICA.” Right under it was a teller’s counter with a sign saying “American Express Travelers Checks accepted here.” The Islamic Revolution is all well and good, but business is business.
Exotic foreign money also makes for interesting souvenirs and gifts. Check out our gallery for a sample of money and its use around the world.
