London parks, part 1. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens

London has lots and lots of parks, and most of them are fantastic: heavily-used but also well-maintained, well-designed, generally welcoming and beautiful.

Today we cycled over to the Victoria and Albert Museum (about which more some other time) and then went by Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, two of the Royal Parks in London. (Though they are technically separate, H.P. and K.G. are entirely contiguous and functionally a single entity.)

In addition to being the most famous of London Parks, Hyde Park is also really big. This is probably its most important feature, in fact: it's a giant park in the middle of some of London's most expensive real estate. It's otherwise slightly uninspiring.

The first image in this post is a typical Kensington Gardens vista: lots of really big old deciduous trees standing on a nice lawn.

The second image shows a lot of people undergoing ritual foot-washing in the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.

The third image shows the Albert memorial. I don't know why, but everything named after Albert is unbelievably tacky, except possibly for Royal Albert Hall.

A few more insights from watching the prologue

1. Time-trial bikes are hideous. I think it's because the aero tubes are big and flat so they use them as billboards. Mere issues of performance are insufficient to justify possession of such an ugly bicycle.

2. If you have to have a time-trial bike, get a Colnago. They were easily the best-looking ones.

3. All sports commentators, everywhere in the world, sound like morons. I think it's because they have to fill all the dead space, so they say anything that comes into their heads.

Tour de France comes to London

We went to see the Prologue today. They shut down Hyde Park, Green Park and St. James Park as well as much of the surrounding streets for the race. It was quite amazing that they shut down so much of central London. Gorgeous day too, after days of rain, hail, flooding, sleet, and other apocalyptic weather.

It was kind of hard to take good pictures (our camera is a bit slow) so this is one of the few that came out okay.

We did have a great view from the London Cycling Campaign area. LCC had a special reserved area about five km into the course. Since we had ridden our bikes up to to watch, they let us into the LCC area. See below. My LeMond has been fixed by our favorite bicycle shop, Brixton Cycles, which appears to be full of bike punks. Kind of reminds us of Berkeley.

Hail, 3 July 2007
In England one can always resort to talking about the weather. This was a recent storm, leaving drifts of hail by our front door. Fortunately there was a brief calm spell during our bike ride home. We made it just in time.

Tonight's meal

Tonight we had a fine rump steak (purchased from Farmer Sharp in Borough Market) with a rocket-and-tomato salad (what we used to call arugula, being Americans) and baking powder biscuits. This American meal in honor of the Fourth of July, a celebration of our emancipation from the hated British.

To drink, we had the Domaine Vincent Girardon 2004 Santenay Premier Cru. It is delicious, with complexity, and length, and enough fruit to keep you going but not so much you think it's from Australia or California or some other awful place. Quite highly recommended.

Introductory post

Hello.

We (monkeys and aethelred) are Americans living in London, England (so long as sea levels stay relatively low—we blame our countrymen).

Alice's Law is a blog dedicated to us and things we find interesting (food, wine, beer, whisky, London and other cities, urban planning, parks, architecture, landscape architecture, Japan, subway systems, books, manhole covers, bicycles, biology, and so on ad nauseam).

No doubt we will eventually post something on some subject other than this blog. We hope you—yes, all of you—will enjoy it.