Thursday, April 30, 2015

London, Part II (UK)

2015 was the first time that tickets were required to attend the official New Year's Eve festivities in London. Of course, since we hadn’t intended to be in the city for the holiday, we were out of luck. Watching the queues forming and the temporary barriers cordoning off whole sections of the city, we hatched a harebrained scheme.  

While the city was still preparing in the early afternoon, we would stick to the parts of London that we thought would be inside the barriers later. Booking a late afternoon tea at the café inside the National Gallery would give us a valid excuse to wait and lounge around eating scones and cakes in the warmth. When evening came, we would just pop out the front door, and bob’s your uncle, we’re in Trafalgar Square with the crowds. Everything went according to plan until they started kicking people out of the National Gallery early with no more people milling about Trafalgar Square than usual!

Plan B was going back to having low expectations and just seeing how it would all pan out. When we opted for a movie to kill a few hours, I realized it was my first time in a cinema in England. Curiously enough, tickets were assigned seating, and the theater seemed to be several flights of stairs down in the basement. Glittering holiday lights and the sleek new models of the red double-decker buses gave the streets a festive air, and Peking duck beckoned to us from nearly every window in Chinatown. We went back later to a restaurant doing brisk business only to find we were the last sober customers of the night. The duck was superb, but the drunken hooligans shouting demands and berating the wait staff had us hightail it out of there as soon as we’d finished.  

In the end, Trafalgar Square – apparently not part of the official festivities any longer – was actually very pleasant. The big Christmas tree was brightly lit, and there were enough people who weren’t lucky ticketholders, mingling and drinking out of paper cups and flasks to create a lovely atmosphere. The minimal police and crowd control in effect only made themselves known with the occasional “Please stop climbing on Nelson’s statue” over the bullhorn. The oddest part was the lack of a countdown clock… deliberate, I imagine, in an attempt to deter unofficial gatherings. The result was that any spotty cheering in the crowd made everyone else grab their smartphones to check the time. When midnight did arrive, we could just about see some of the higher fireworks over the Thames as they cleared the buildings closer to the riverfront. The square cleared out quickly after midnight, and the city’s fantastic public transport plans with temporary hubs for buses and trains in different directions funneled crowds smoothly away from the central London and for free!  

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