January is almost over and almost nothing happened. Luckily I still have some catching up to do with December, and December was a busy month. Both Alice and Monica came and spent nearly a month here. The initial plan, conceived in the heat of Houston summer, was to spend the Christmas in Prague. However, the prospect of planning something like that given the hassles connected with getting a Czech visa for Alice convinced us to abandon the idea. Instead, we thought, we will hop on the train, zip through the chunnel, and in a little bit more than two hours we will be in Paris. Sounded simple and romantic, but the romance started to evaporate as temperature started to drop. Spending a couple of days in Paris when temperatures hover around 3 degrees, the sky is gray and trees have no leaves had little appeal. How many tourist booklets do you know where they show Paris in December? There must be a reason. We can just as well shiver in London! And that is what we ended up doing.

Luckily, there are lots of things to do here, even when the weather is cold and murky. I had weeks of unspent vacations and initially thought that I will take Alice and Monica around. The first trip was to Camden Market, a place just north of the London zoo, which I stumbled on during my random walks through London. It is a vast complex of little shops selling, how can I put it gently, an almost endless variety of junk. In addition, this appears to be the part of town, where if you do not have at least 2 inch bolt coming out through your cheek, you do not count. I think of it as a human zoo and find it endlessly entertaining and thought that Alice and Monica would too. But they seemed kind of lukewarm and mildly bored and it became clear to me that I misjudged them. Well, I did not. It turns out that somehow they found my presence intimidating but the place itself interesting enough to go back a few days later on their own. This ended my ambitions as a family tour guide, a function which was subsequently filled by Kumiko.

(Click on the picture to see it full size, use a back button to return to this spot.) I did join them on one trip – to the Tower of London. December is probably a good time to go, the fortress was appropriately forbidding and I hate to imagine the long lineups which must develop during the summer season. Other than this I limited myself to providing tickets to plays: we ended up seeing The Reduced Shakespeare, Blood Brothers, Lion King and Stomp. Some were better than others, but all were good and expensive.

This brings up a rather interesting question of costs. Before we left Houston I queried one of my colleagues who preceded me to London about the cost of living here. He suggested a very simple formula that works most of the time: the nominal prices in pounds are close to the nominal prices in dollars in the U.S. To put it differently, using today’s exchange rates, everything is about 1.8 times more expensive. This does not apply to housing, which is much more expensive, or entertainment – a movie ticket at 18 dollars per person is fairly steep, at least by Houston standards. And so, relatively speaking, a ticket to a play for 50 dollars is not that bad (I was buying last minute, 50% discounted tickets). If you want to see the Tower of London, it will be 8 pounds ($ 15). On the other hand, lots of things are free. Most of the museums are free. You can buy a bus ticket for $3 and ride double decker buses all day. A pint of beer is about $ 5, but bread, milk and pastries are only few pennies and you do not pay for visits to a doctor. So, using the method of dollar cost averaging, it all somehow works out in the end.

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