Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois Read Online Free PDF Page B

footsteps we can hear clomping around over our heads from time to time. I have roast duck with red cabbage, Susan has chicken paprikas. Two out of the three paintings on the wall behind Susan are clearly a matched set, scenes from Little Red Riding Hood, but the picture in the middle is of a maddened gorilla attacking a party of armed men, which makes a curious addition to the story of Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood meets Congo, perhaps? All the pictures up here appear to be old magazine illustrations. Always forget how tiny the Gay Hussar is until I eat here again. It’s not much bigger than a Trinity house back in Philly.
    Walk back to the Russell by way of Oxford Street to Great Russell Street, past the sleeping Museum, to Southampton Row. Stop at a Garfunkel’s on Southhampton Row for some tea and some peculiar-tasting vanilla ice-cream, then back to the hotel. The room is stiflingly hot, as it has been every night so far this trip, with not a breath of air coming in, even though the night outside is relatively cool by now; our windows look out on the internal courtyard of the hotel, and no breeze ever comes in, although we have every window wide open. As we try to get to sleep, snap briefly around the dial on the TV. British TV has become much more like American TV than it used to be, which, from my perspective as a tourist, is too bad, another piece of local color lost. Soon London will be just like New York City—and then, why bother to go? When I finally fall asleep in the smothering heat, Susan is sitting up on her bed, still industriously filling out postcards.

    Thursday, August 10th— London & Train to Cornwall
    Up early, pack. While Susan finishes getting ready, I go downstairs and consult with the concierge about the feasibility of getting to Highgate Cemetery (where Lizzy Siddal is buried), which, without a car, doesn’t look to be very feasible. We have breakfast, buy theater tickets for Crazy For You, and check out, leaving our bags stored with the concierge. We give up on Highgate Cemetery, and instead take a cab to Chayne Walk in Chelsea, where we look at the house where Rossetti used to live, and where he kept a wombat in the front yard until, not surprisingly, it sickened and died. Walk around the neighborhood for a while, then catch a cab to Little Venice, where the Jason’s Trip canal boat tour starts from. Sit by the canalside and have tea while waiting for the canal boat to arrive, then get on the canal boat for a pleasant ride down the Regent’s Canal, past the zoo, past banks lined with moored canal boats, past the two-story floating Chinese restaurant, to Camden Locks. Get off at Camden Locks, walk around and look at the little craft shops, and then take the waterbus back to London Zoo. We are really a little too hot and tired to really appreciate the zoo by this point, but we trudge around anyway, dutifully looking at elephants and white pelicans and marmosets, and stumble unexpectedly on a demonstration of falconry that freezes us in our tracks, the great bird swooping overhead, huge wings beating, seeming to almost brush the tops of our heads as he sweeps past to get his piece of dead rat from his handler.
    Take a cab to Leicester Square, which is totally jammed with tourists, students, buskers, street bands, mimes, jugglers, to a degree that makes Times Square look nearly deserted by comparison. Watch the plastic glockenspiel at the Swiss Center, then walk around looking for a restaurant, gradually realizing that we are on the edge of London’s Chinatown, and we basically have a choice of Chinese food or American fast-food places such as Pizza Hut and Burger King and the ubiquitous McDonalds. Finally settle on a restaurant called Poons, which I recognize from the Michelin Red Guide, not without some trepidation on my part, since, although I love Chinese food, I have never had a good meal in a Chinese restaurant in England . . . and some of them have been memorably awful, like