My blog

My spine and the weather meant that this year's holidays with our last minor child were spent in England instead of on the slopes.
We booked flights to Luton with Wizzair at an attractive price, considering the post-COVID times, of PLN 500 per person for a return journey, plus luggage for those with a comfortable seat for PLN 600.

We stayed for a while with a cousin, whom I send my warmest regards and thank her once again for her hospitality, and for a while in a hotel located in a busy part of London, right next to Paddington Station. A modest hotel, not overly comfortable, but proudly revealing to us traces of its former Victorian glory for a not-so-exorbitant price for the capital of the empire, £79 per night.

We traversed London mainly on foot, taking at least twenty thousand steps a day. But we also helped ourselves with the seventh longest tram line in the world and the metro that reaches everywhere. I bought a ticket for the first journey - three stations in zone one for £6.50 - from a machine, but a moment later I discovered that they have installed a cool solution that allows you to pay with a contactless card or phone. When you enter, they take one pound from your card, and you pay the rest by tapping your card when you leave. A monthly ticket in zone one costs £150, and for all zones, of which there are nine, you have to spend £400 per month.

However, I experienced the greatest emotions related to transport somewhere else. I was never good at tasks that required reflexes and did not allow for corrections. That is why I knew that I would not make a career as a pilot, sapper, or parachute tester. However, once in a lifetime you have to try everything, so I decided to drive on the left side.
Just to be on the safe side, I had added all the insurance I could to my car hire, but I was still full of pants when I started the engine of my £80-a-day Kia Sportage. Fortunately, driving in these strange, mirror-inverted circumstances turned out not to be all that difficult, and by the second day I was even replying to text messages while driving, and only once in half a thousand kilometres did my inner Pavlovian dog tell me to go off a roundabout the wrong way.
St Paul's Cathedral - £20 entry - we climbed 528 steps to heaven. It was in this most famous Anglican church that the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana took place.

About Stonehenge, 100 miles west of London - £20 entry - some say it's a pile of stones, others say it's a magical place built four thousand years ago in an unexplained way and for an unexplained purpose. I've been there, I've seen it, and I think I'm inclined to the former.

In Notting Hill, London’s chic and fashionable district, we dove into the second-hand clothes stalls on Portobello Road. Maja’s vintage jacket shot was celebrated with a smoke a few steps from Hugh Grant’s bookshop, where Julia Roberts bought a book.

In the Tate Gallery, the vast modern art gallery opened by the Queen in 2000, we looked at all sorts of works. Maja liked it very much, and throughout my visit I had the overwhelming feeling that I could have made, assembled, painted or knitted every single one of the works I saw there, only better.

A trip to the coast in search of a brown crab dish ended in failure. We had to settle for breaded salmon, and the port city of Southampton, from which the Titanic set sail on its maiden voyage, is not something we would recommend.
At the magnificent Windsor Castle - £30 entry - we paid our respects to the longest reigning British Queen, having queued for entry. Seeing this 1,000-room royal residence was a real treat for me, a fan of The Crown.
Our greatest delight was the city of dreamy towers, also known as Oxford. Walking around the city feels like you're in another Harry Potter episode, and a visit to the almost thousand-year-old, oldest English-speaking university in the world is breathtaking. Pubs and hairdressers here charge two prices - tourist and student, and most institutions fly rainbow flags expressing support for LGBT.

When in London, you can't miss Westminster Abbey - entry fee £30, where all the kings of England, and later Great Britain, have been crowned since William the Conqueror in 1066. In addition to the kings, many British celebrities are buried here, including Shakespeare, Newton, Darwin and Hawking.

We visited several towns near London and, not surprisingly, there is an English feel to each of them. If you were taken blindfolded into the market square of any of these towns and told to tell which country you were in by removing your blindfold, you would have no doubt that you were in England. In one such town we had an English - meaning with milk - tea for £3.90 and an apple pie for £3.50.

In Harrods, the luxury department store bought in 1985 by the father of Dodi Al-Fayed, Lady Diana's lover, we looked at the elegant tableware and kitchen machines that we would have to buy someday.

We took a long walk around Hyde Park, looking at the swans and the daffodils blooming surprisingly early.

And finally, a little about food, which for me is the greatest meaning and goal of every trip.

We sampled a few classics from the uninteresting British cuisine, including an English breakfast with the obligatory baked beans, fried mushrooms, fried potatoes, fried bacon, fried sausages, toast and scrambled eggs for £9, and fish and chips with mashed peas and tartar sauce for £15.

Fortunately, the British have welcomed many foreign nations with open arms, and with them cuisines from around the world, and today British cuisine is a world cuisine.

Everything I ate here tasted delicious. In a small restaurant in Kingston we had Vietnamese pho soup for £14. In the heart of Chinatown we had sweet and sour duck, broccoli, dim sum with shrimp and wontons with pork. The whole collection cost £65. We usually ate lunch in one of the Asian chain restaurants, where for £7-9 you can get ramen, curry or sushi sitting shoulder to shoulder with white collars from the City of London. For dinner in a good Italian restaurant in Soho we paid £70. I ate grilled sardines and linguini vongole washed down with house wine, and Maja had bruschetta and pizza Margarita. In Windsor we visited a vegetarian Indian - a set of delicacies for £15, and we had lunch in Soho in a fantastic Japanese restaurant. There was ramen, sashimi, gioza and tempura noodle for a total of £80.

In the evenings I would sit, usually without my daughter's company, in pubs and enjoy a beer. The English pub is the best thing the English have given to the world.
I have been English for the past week and I strongly encourage you, dear reader, to try it too.