London: A Week in Europe's Frantic Capital

Flight and settling in at Hyde Park Hostel

I leave together with Stefania, who has already lived in London for two years and wants to go back to say hello to her dear friend Silvia, who stayed there to study. We take the bus from Cagliari to Alghero and travel on the Ryanair flight Alghero-Stansted (booked on the Internet at an ridiculously low fare, with one leg given away as a special offer). On the plane we buy the Stansted-Express train tickets to London, at a price clearly lower than the full price you pay directly at the station. The flight is right on time and at Stansted we immediately find the train, which runs frequently and in about 45 minutes arrives at Liverpool Street.

It's already dark and the impact is exciting: the station is a marvel and it feels like being in a Harry Potter film! We wisely decide to immediately get the weekly travelcard (we even brought the passport photo from home just for this!), which allows you to save considerably on transport: you can get it for the different zones of London and it's valid for both the tube and the bus. It's around 10:00 PM, we meet Silvia and go in search of the hostel (the Hyde Park Hostel, also booked on the Internet). We set off loaded with luggage to take the tube to Hyde Park, and after a short walk we finally find the hostel. It's in an excellent position, a stone's throw from the tube and the city center, right in front of the famous "Hyde Park" from which it takes its name, and even from the outside it looks nice, with the classic white marble façade and the columns typical of London buildings.

But inside it's a total disappointment! Badly organized, dirty and run-down are the first words that come to mind, better to leave out the rest... On the Internet it looked decidedly nicer, maybe I naively got used to Irish hostels, a whole other thing... This will turn out to be the only big huge flaw of this trip, although luckily the squalor of the hostel will make us even more eager to go back there as little as possible, that is, only and exclusively to sleep at night, while all day every day we'll be roaming around London (in Prague, on the other hand, it was so nice to come back to that little gem of a hotel, the Ariston!).

Setting aside the hostel "detail," where we only stayed because we pay before seeing the room, fooled by the external appearance, at a rate that for being in London is nothing short of special, precisely because it was booked on the Internet (imagine how much the full rate must be, since for us even this one is already expensive), we settle our things and fall asleep disheartened, tired from an entire day of travel.

Hyde Park; Kensighton Garden; Natural History; Victoria Albert; Big Ben

The first morning in London doesn't take long to make us understand that the weather won't be very merciful: it's all cloudy, it's raining and there's a fair bit of cold (after all, it's January!). We enter at the closest access point to Kensington Garden, arriving among playful fountain displays up to Kensington Palace, where huge ducks that look like ostriches stroll around calmly and swim in the pond, then continue into Hyde Park, noting that, as is well known, the English certainly don't lack green lawns... Right after, we head further south to visit the Natural History Museum, one of the largest and most famous among the many museums in London.

From the outside it's already an architectural work of art, but from the inside it appears to my eyes anything but a museum (obviously, thinking of the "narrow" conception of a museum typical of my area, where you go in, there are a series of things on display, and if you're not an interested expert you get bored after half an hour). The different sections into which the Natural History Museum is divided are spectacular, bordering on science fiction. The immense entrance hall with a dinosaur foreshadows its grandeur, impossible to think of seeing it properly in a single day. The only thing you can do as a tourist (as indeed we do), is wander around and choose the most interesting things you want to see.

We start with the dinosaur part, which is legendary, going around several rooms, then going up onto a raised walkway that shows the skeleton reconstructions from above and ending up in a dark room, where the spectacle of a large tyrannosaurus, excellently animated, devouring a smaller beast is performed! We continue into the part dedicated to the Earth, also unmissable. From a very large hall, divided into three floors, you access the escalators with various lighting effects and you pass "through the middle of the planet" as you go up, observing the simulated starry sky on the walls.

On the different floors there are exhibitions dedicated to the most varied natural phenomena, including disasters (there's even a room set up as a supermarket where an earthquake is simulated, the floor suddenly shakes and the walls and shelves move!), while on the top floor they talk about energy, from that produced by natural events to the alternative energy they try to harness (with examples to try out and operate manually). Going back down to the lower floor and thinking that nothing else could amaze me anymore, I immediately have to prove myself wrong in front of another section dedicated to nature that is nothing short of extraordinary: you enter a space-like corridor, all white, with overhead walkways connecting the right side with the left.

Once at the end of the corridor, a huge screen, which looks like the Earth through an accurate play of mirrors, shows a spectacle of lights and colors worthy of "2001 A Space Odyssey," and further on you enter the pavilions, whose task is to raise the visitor's awareness of environmental balance, showing with gigantic examples the interaction of plants with the environment and so on (you then pass from one side to the other via those overhead walkways seen earlier...). Finally, the immense section dedicated to animals, from insects to mammals and so on, cannot be missed. In short, it feels like being in an amusement park rather than a museum! It's now lunchtime and we sit on one of the many benches in the museum's corridors to eat our sandwiches, then completing the visit around 4:30 PM.

It's already late, considering that in this period in London everything closes at 6:00 PM! We walk until we reach the Victoria Albert Museum, having only the time to visit it briefly for a few rooms. Then we move a bit toward the center to Piccadilly and Leicester Square, and going back to the hostel for a moment to refresh ourselves. For dinner we go with Silvia to a Chinese restaurant in the Soho area, small and very spartan, eating very well (as is customary here, we pay a fixed price and take everything we want from the buffet, a real treat for lovers of this cuisine). Right after dinner we take the tube and, to walk it off, we complete the intense day with a nighttime stroll along the bank of the Thames.

The feeling when you come out of the tube station is phenomenal: Big Ben suddenly pops up, very tall and gloriously illuminated! We head toward the bridge and cross the Thames in a splendor of lights reflected on the river. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament behind us show themselves in all their grandeur while in front of us is the London Eye, the immense and famous Ferris wheel, right in front of the Aquarium. An exceptional spectacle and certainly one of the most fascinating spots of nighttime London! On this incredible and very full day spent in London the thought of the sad hostel has decidedly vanished, but now its shadow returns menacingly since we have to go back to sleep...

we throw ourselves straight into bed and manage to fall asleep despite the loud music from the pub below the hostel (which in theory, if it weren't for the fact that we sleep right next to it, should have been a point in the place's favor since those staying there don't pay anything to get in...).

London Dungeon; Tower of London; Tower Bridge; Oxford street

Up early, we resume walking exactly where we left off yesterday. We get off at Waterloo station by tube and walk along the Thames for a good stretch. Actually a pretty big stretch, maybe even too much, since it's pouring rain and there's a strong wind (so holding an umbrella becomes a nightmare too). We have to get to the infamous London Dungeon, London's most famous "horror" attraction, but we thought it was decidedly closer... in practice we cover half of London on the South Bank of the Thames from Waterloo to Tower Bridge, and what was supposed to be a stroll became a trek in the rain! The vast buildings (but not very tall) used as offices and public structures alternate with huge concrete squares (this is certainly not a green area but a very modern one), with sports enthusiasts jogging in the rain and kids training on rollerblades and skateboards.

All locals from London, the tourists are only us! We finally arrive at the Dungeon, and we stand in line under the light drizzle in a fair queue to enter (one of the few, to tell the truth, we've done so far, since there aren't many tourists in London due to the winter period and the events of September 11, with the attack on the Twin Towers in New York). We finally manage to enter, pay the rather expensive tickets and begin the horror adventure! The attraction is guaranteed, although to tell the truth we perhaps expected a little something more. At the entrance we immediately take a nice paid photo in a gloomy room, where Stefania happily holds an ax in her hand and I rest my head ready to be decapitated. We then enter the bowels of the earth in a dark and gloomy environment with strange smells of rot and death.

We go through various sections that recreate medieval tortures, we get imprisoned and judged by an old-style "Judge," we end up in hell on a little cart that navigates on water, we retrace the whole story of Jack the Ripper and we end the tour amid the fire of the Great Fire of London of 1666. In short, all very cheerful, considering that good actors are well paid to dress up as schizophrenic witches and scare you to death! Finished the London Dungeon, which lasted about an hour, we have a "packed" lunch in the tube station alongside, indoors, since it keeps raining constantly. To reinvigorate ourselves a bit and warm up we get a nice "large" cappuccino, very common here in London, which consists of a big cup as big as the large Coca-Cola one, with the difference that inside there's a good boiling hot cappuccino.

The caffeine effect is guaranteed for many hours given the size of the cup (almost half a liter, just to give you an idea)! Evidently we Italians like to have many coffees a little at a time while Londoners give themselves the blow once and for all and don't think about it anymore...) We continue on foot toward the nearby Tower of London and walk alongside it with a nice stroll, following the main road that leads to Tower Bridge. It's already almost dark but we think we'll still find it open (it's not even 5:00 PM); instead, to our great regret, the bridge road is closed for works and everything is shut. We insist on at least a panoramic tour admiring the external beauty of this exceptional monument, which lights up more and more as darkness falls.

Of course the backdrop of the Thames is no less, with all the blazing lights of the buildings and bridges reflecting on the river, a magnificent view! Past 6:00 PM now there's nothing left for us to do but take one last tour of the center to find something open, and so we take the tube again and walk along Oxford Street and Regent's Street, teeming with people, shops and countless buses. We go into Hamleys, an immense toy store (a 5-story building), with compartments of every kind: from stuffed animals, to toy trains, to remote-controlled cars, to giant LEGO constructions (including one of Darth Vader and the legendary Star Wars robot D2R2).

It's a real blast, you can find any type of toy ever created by man! For dinner we go to Silvia's, who lives in the Soho neighborhood in a very nice studio apartment, as is typical of very many worker-students here in London, Italians and non-Italians alike. It's a real joy to be able to make a nice plate of pasta the way it should be, since the food diet here is rather lacking... We watch a bit of English TV and comment on the usual attitude of the English in complaining about everything, especially in the field of shops and restaurants. The concept of the customer in England is very different from ours, here it's sacred and sovereign and this leads to a decidedly different organization.

In every commercial establishment there's the figure of the manager, always recognizable and present with a badge, who stands "above" the ordinary staff working in contact with the public (waiters or shop assistants, just to give an example). When someone has a problem, or is dissatisfied with a product, or simply wants to rant just to complain about anything he thinks isn't right in that place (from the organization, to the staff, even to the physical structure and the layout of the rooms or services), you utter the magic words: "I want to speak to the manager!", and you make a complaint. And the English are masters of this art, they complain about everything and any insignificant thing (sometimes really hard even for us Italians to conceive, so much so that here, with some examples I've heard, you'd bust a gut laughing!).

In any case, you have to consider the remunerative side, since for every accepted complaint (even for written letters sometimes and not just oral complaints) you receive a voucher, that is, a "discount coupon" for the next time you return, for example, to a restaurant, or a shop and so on... (and we're not talking about pocket change here!!!). For all customers who feel misunderstood, London is the right place to step into the spotlight!

Notting Hill; St.James Park; Buckingham Palace; Trafalgar Square; National Gallery; Trocadero Center

We start the day by taking the tube and getting off at Notting Hill, a quiet and famous neighborhood of London. The succession of white or pastel-colored houses gives this neighborhood a very homogeneous look; it really feels like walking the streets of the highly successful film with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, especially near the renowned Portobello Road market, when I recognize the Tattoo shop that Grant talks about at the beginning of the film. Contrary to expectations, however, the market is rather deserted, maybe because it's Sunday, maybe because it's drizzling, but the stalls are really sporadic and so are the people. We stroll for a couple of hours and by lunchtime we move by tube to the huge and modern Victoria Station, to grab some packaged sandwiches and the mega-cappuccino, much more functional than any tiramisu. A few more tube stops and we arrive near Buckingham Palace.

We cross a stretch of Green Park and stop in the tourist square in front of the palace for the obligatory photos. The fountain and the gardens around it are very beautiful, the royal palace all in all isn't particularly eye-catching as a whole but inside I presume the story changes considerably. The walk continues through St. James Park and becomes fun due to the presence of the local wildlife, as well as the beauty of the parks. The various species of ducks and geese combined with the birds can't even be counted, but the special feature is certainly the squirrels, fast and elusive, that come to take peanuts from your hands and climb at rocket speed up the trees. Very clever and suspicious, sometimes they let themselves go as far as climbing onto your shoulder, but never letting themselves be petted, and they dart from one side of the park to the other in a very funny way.

Unfortunately there's little light and it's hard to photograph them in decent poses with the zoom, but after several attempts (the advantage of having a digital camera!) I managed, with great satisfaction and without flash, to capture one in a very close-up shot eating nothing less than our Pringles (since we didn't buy peanuts and don't have anything else edible!). Who knows if the squirrel's stomach was happy with the chips; in any case, for at least the next ten minutes it's still alive and keeps following us for a while, perhaps pleased with the succulent culinary novelty... A short distance from the park is Trafalgar Square, another famous big square in London, and this one too duly decorated with large fountains and water displays. Opposite it is the National Gallery, absolutely unmissable for anyone with at least a minimum of taste for the art of painting.

For example, painting has never thrilled me, yet I can't help but be stunned in front of the beautiful halls decorated with thousands of masterpieces from every era. Particularly striking are some paintings by Van Gogh, and more than all the works of Canaletto, enormous paintings with that photographic precision of detail, absolutely sharp and incredible, with which he reproduced magnificent images of Venice... extraordinary! On leaving the National Gallery it's already dark, and we stop at a Coffee Republic (a very widespread chain in London), next to the Virgin Store, getting an obligatory warming, restorative cappuccino.

We keep walking toward the center among the lights of London, until we reach the Trocadero Center, a veritable palace of entertainment! At the entrance there are several excellent shops, full of every kind of London souvenir, as well as a very colorful and succulent candy store! Inside we go through a large hall, on one side you can go to the cinema, while with escalators colored with space lights you can go up to the upper floors, full of the latest generation video games. In the center of the structure, on the other hand, there's a scream of an attraction: a tube that starts from the ceiling down to the ground floor where seats are installed, which in turn suddenly drop from above, giving the poor souls sitting there the sensation of throwing themselves into the void for a few seconds...

There's music everywhere, you hear from time to time the screams of the unfortunate ones throwing themselves into the fun attraction, there are young people and not so young, in an environment more similar to a spaceship than a video game room. We buy some tokens and go up to the upper floors to play like children, having a great time despite not being at all regulars of this kind of attraction. Later we stop by Silvia's in Soho, who offers us a delicious slice of cake, and we return exhausted to the hostel.

Leads Castle (park, maze & Grotto, birds); Acquarium; London eye

Up early in the morning, we head to the station where at 9:00 AM the train for Leads Castle departs. We bought the tickets yesterday to avoid running into lines and long queues, and we realize we did exactly right. Besides, there's a combined train ticket + Leads Castle ticket (castle entry and park visit) that costs much less than buying the tickets separately. Leads Castle is heavily advertised all over London through brochures and the Internet, and has become a classic day trip for tourists in the South-East of England. It's about an hour by train from London, and allows you to appreciate the peace and quiet of the English countryside. The entrance to the park is striking: you follow a path that initially skirts the lake, catching sight of the ducks and some peacocks roaming freely, so calmly that you almost step on them without realizing it.

All around, as a backdrop, is a really relaxing intense green and some perfectly tended trees and flowers. The path then continues inward and after about half an hour a splendid glimpse of the castle finally appears in the distance. We go straight inside the walls, where the façade of the castle entrance appears perfectly intact and beautiful (it may also be because the sun is finally out and the colors are brighter than ever!). Inside, the visit is not to be missed: you go around the various rooms, the halls with a view of the lake, the bedrooms, the beautiful library: everything is perfectly intact and well kept. Finished the visit inside, we go back out into the main courtyard, where in a door on the left there's an exhibition on the history of the castle and its owner, along with a small souvenir shop (as if it could have been missing!).

We then take the path toward the interior of the park, first finding two strange specimens of birds similar to flamingos, but with a colored crest on their heads like punks that makes them really funny (I really couldn't say what they are), and we continue on a little road surrounded by strange cube shapes that are nothing but masterfully pruned hedges. Beyond the little road there's a very interesting exhibition of parrots, from all over the world.

Some hide, others look on curiously, and a single white parrot finally decides to speak, greeting with a very long and shrill: "heeellooo"! There are really very few tourists today, and it's normal to find ourselves alone with no one around, with the chance to fully enjoy all the peace and quiet of this fabulous place! We arrive at the end of the park where a legendary local attraction awaits us: the Maze & Grotto, that is, the hedge maze (a feature of many English gardens). Contrary to what I had always thought, the goal of the maze is to reach the center, where the Grotto is, and not the exit.

Also because the exit is right there! We enter curious and after several futile turns, the funniest part turns out to be that the center is always visible, because it sits higher than the hedge walls of the maze, and you can see the people who have made it to the Grotto trying to give advice to the poor souls like us attempting to get there. After trying for about an hour, we finally give up, overwhelmed by hunger, and exit through the entrance (with some difficulty!) to eat a sandwich on some bench further down, in front of a splendid landscape. But this failure gnaws at our guts: not having managed to solve this little puzzle is just not acceptable! Even more determined, then, right after lunch we seriously try again to find the Grotto inside the maze, this time more methodically.

After all, the labyrinth isn't very big, and after a few turns around the sides we guess its structure, but still can't understand the final mechanism and keep coming back to the same starting point. Finally, thanks to the gestures of a very funny Japanese man who had reached the Grotto before us, we succeed in our endeavor and it's truly worth it! From above you see the whole maze and the poor souls wandering around lost and confused just like we were a few minutes earlier: the satisfaction is immense! We take a few photos as a glorious memento of this victory, but the most interesting part is yet to come: via some stairs you go down underground to the Grotto, a sort of cave artistically decorated in a very particular way.

A huge rather terrifying monstrous "face" spits water everywhere, creating strange light reflections, and a tunnel passes right under the maze to come out at a little door near the main entrance... so that's where the exit is!! Finished the maze with great enthusiasm, we retrace the whole park leaving this fairy tale behind us, to take the little bus to the station and then the train to London. It's still early, around 4:00 PM, so we decide to take the tube to Westminster. Here, after crossing the river, we enter the Aquarium, in front of the Ferris wheel. The aquarium is certainly not among the main things to see in London, but it particularly inspires us to take an interesting walk in the underwater world. The structure has the shape of an immense cylinder where in the center there's a huge tank, and it's divided into zones according to the Oceans of our planet.

The Pacific is particularly striking, with a huge statue inside the tank shaped like those found on Easter Island, and lots of fish with a few little sharks swimming around. Then there are quite a few other secondary tanks, with playful rays, plants and tropical fish, and so on: in short, the classic attractions of an aquarium! On leaving the Aquarium we move alongside toward the London Eye, where you can buy tickets until 8:00 PM, allowing you to see nighttime London from above. The wheel is absolutely unmissable as an attraction here in London. It's about a hundred meters tall and when it's running it never stops, which means you have to hop on "on the fly" when the cabin passes. Nevertheless, it turns so slowly that getting on or off is certainly no problem; it takes a full 50 minutes to complete one rotation and, watching it from a distance, it indeed looks completely still.

Stefania decides not to come, having already seen it, and I go up without waiting a single second in line, since there's practically no one. After a few minutes the excitement already starts to rise along with the wheel's cabin. The panorama increases slowly with that huge flutter of thousands of lights that at the highest point become millions, a fantastic sensation! In the cabin with me there's only a couple of young guys and you can see the previous cabin lower down and the next one higher up, which are the only means and point of reference for understanding when you're going up, when you reach the top, and when you start going down. Beautiful!

Covent Garden; Madame Tussaud; Planetarium; British Museum

We choose Covent Garden as today's first destination, a famous neighborhood characteristic precisely for its structure set up as a market with shops of every kind. I'm immediately struck by a very talented artist wandering around an open-air hall singing operatic songs with an exceptional and powerful voice (without a microphone, only with the backing music underneath). We go around various little shops, lingering in the very interesting section of oriental items of various kinds, handicraft objects unique in the world that cost a fortune! (a collector would be spoiled for choice...).

We have lunch at a Pret a Manger, a famous Fast Food chain, which if we had discovered earlier would have spared us so many culinary sufferings! Here, in fact, you can choose from a wide range of sandwiches and rolls, absolutely fresh and made the same day, seasoned with succulent fillings, at the same price as the packaged goods from the market, and get the classic soft drink or the mega-cappuccino to drink. So, having finished the usual strong dose of caffeine, we visit another unmissable attraction of London: Madame Tussauds and the Planetarium, that is, the wax museum and the planetarium. We opt for a single ticket for both that saves something, and it's still the most expensive thing we pay here in London, although it's truly worth it. We start with the Planetarium, entering a sort of environment that recreates a spaceship like in Star Trek.

You arrive in a waiting room that simulates the launch of the shuttle, complete with a relaxing female voice that informs about the time remaining and so on, but which in the end is nothing more than a way to pass the wait for the next planetarium show. In the meantime, there's certainly no lack of attractions: there's a space kiosk, giant models of the planets (Jupiter is about 2 meters tall, just to give an idea) and the whole description of our solar system with its characteristics. A bit of a crowd gathers and the "boarding" signal finally arrives; we go along a circular corridor that climbs one side of the enormous dome where the planetarium is reproduced. The room is big, there are many seats and the best ones are at the back, right where we're sitting. You have to keep your head turned completely upward, you get a bit of a stiff neck, but the show is quite...

"spacey"! You set off aboard a spaceship, and travel to the various planets of the solar system, then also go out a bit of the galaxy and take a look around the universe. The whole thing is projected gigantically in the enormous dome and lasts a little over half an hour, proving particularly interesting for an astronomy enthusiast like me. Finished the space journey, we enter Madame Tussauds, the more than famous wax museum of London. At the entrance, the first perfect wax figure, Pierce Brosnan in the role of James Bond, the legendary agent 007, waits to take a photo (for a fee) with tourists. Then you pass into a hall with actors and famous people of every kind, from Sean Connery, to Nicolas Cage, to Anthony Hopkins, to Steven Spielberg, to the legendary Schwarzy, to the legendary Marilyn.

Incredible is the scene where we wait to take a photo with Schwarzy, convinced that a fake photographer is photographing him before us; after a few minutes we realize that she's a statue like the others, an ordinary girl, placed there on purpose to fool tourists! She's made superbly, absolutely perfect like many other characters (not all but most), although unfortunately the photos we take don't come out well because the flash reflects off the wax, showing the "fakeness" of the character. Another hall shows very famous sports figures, and then we visit another very large hall, dedicated to more distant times. At the entrance of this last one, it's striking that among all the people in such a large space you can't distinguish the real tourist from the statue pretending to talk with another.

Surely the lights also contribute to deceiving the eye, but it's really funny! In the hall there are many famous historical figures, artists and politicians, from all eras up to the present day, including Madame Tussaud herself. And at the end of the room, obviously, the English royal family couldn't be missing, placed on a special stage. Another near embarrassment was narrowly avoided in front of an ordinary little table in the dining area, where Gerard Depardieu sits calmly to "talk" with tourists... they really think of everything! Continuing on, you pass to the torture room, since Madame Tussaud had been commissioned, in her time, to reproduce some famous victims to be executed.

Frankly, this part makes a much stronger and scarier impression than the London Dungeon, although of course it's much shorter, since the reproduced statues are almost human and the tortures are certainly no joke. Here too the lights and the unpleasant smell contribute heavily to "feeling" a gloomy atmosphere and a tremendous air of death. Finished the horror, you arrive at a corridor where the wax-making process is shown, with examples of the design and creation of various models. In particular, the stages of Ellen McPherson, the famous model nicknamed The Body, are represented, from beginning to end, who turns out to be incredibly perfect (even in wax!).

Last attraction, and perhaps also the most beautiful, a fun and entertaining ride on a little cart that shows the glory of London and the English with a pinch of rabid nationalism, in a whirlwind of colors, music and cheerfulness that really left us in a good mood. To complete the tour, you finally enter the usual souvenir shop, this one also characterized by a beautiful wax figure of Sleeping Beauty, who even, through special mechanisms, actually breathes like a human being! Having left Madame Tussauds we're still in time to visit another unmissable stop of London: the British Museum. We arrive past 4:00 PM and only manage to take a quick look at this gigantic museum, which requires weeks to be seen in depth. The classic historic entrance with a colonnade and a huge statue outside depicting a face is set against a completely new structure inside, just renovated.

It feels like entering a gigantic square, where in the center there's the beautiful and spectacular library and at the sides a huge circular corridor that leads to the various sections of the British, from the Greco-Roman one, to the Egyptian one, to the Oriental one, and so on. Particularly striking is the enormous very tall light blue "roof" that covers the whole structure. Having very little time to visit this pillar of history, we dedicate our precious minutes mainly to the Egyptian section, then quickly moving on to take a look at the Roman and the Oriental ones. Everything is meticulously displayed with care and with relevant descriptions, although the impact is more typically "museum" and not as spectacular and alternative as that of the Natural History.

Finished the visit to the British, we walk through the crowded and illuminated streets of London, returning to the hostel very tired. By now we're almost used to this sort of storage-room that was foisted on us, with a nice broken TV and a dusty little ceiling, where at least we can manage to sleep even if badly and squeezed into those small bunk beds. But misfortune, to be such, must be complete, and so, in the middle of the night, we're suddenly woken at five in the morning by a very loud siren, some sort of fire alarm set off by mistake, as we were told the next morning, by some drunk who came back late... what a terrible idea to stay in a hostel in London!!

Camden Town; Regent's Park; Sir Jhon Soanes Museum; exhibition "Wild photographer 2001"; Harrods

To complete the panorama of visits to London's most renowned markets after Portobello Road and Covent Garden, today we choose to visit Camden Town. It's a neighborhood a bit farther from the city center, to the North, completely different from all the others seen so far. This is the beauty of metropolises: it happens that you get off at any tube stop and it feels like being in another city! The streets and blocks are really particular in Camden, a succession of shops one after another, each more unique than the last, specializing only in certain items: from the metalhead shop, to the jeans one, the piercing one, the strange clothes one or the latest fashion trends and particular objects from every part of the world. There are in particular quite a few shops of camera items, with antiques of every kind, a real treat for a photography connoisseur.

And many shops, beyond the classic sign, have on the façade of their building a gigantic "object" that makes its type clear: for example, a huge skull, a plane standing vertically, a model with huge jeans, and so on, which make taking photos fun too. The oriental influence is very strong, considering the continuous frequency of little Chinese and Indian restaurants, present anyway throughout London, but here in Camden Town in an obsessive way.

The atmosphere itself is really striking and it feels like being in one of those films that portray the most remote corners of cities, with street vendors hidden even in the dark and gloomy alleys where you have no idea where they lead, with that strong grayness due to the black of smoke, pollution, the neglect of the streets and the residences on the edge of decay and squalor, with the picturesque colorful graffiti etched into the walls by strange people dressed in a sloppy way. We spend the morning strolling around Camden Town and then take the tube to go eat at a Pret a Manger, after which we enter one of London's largest parks: Regent's Park. This is the most beautiful park I see, vast in its very long and straight paths surrounded by the

Return

The only joy of the conclusion of this trip is finally leaving the squalid hostel to go to the station and take the Stansted Express to the airport, where the Ryanair flight to Alghero awaits us. It has been a truly intense week but, superfluous to say, absolutely insufficient for a metropolis like London, which requires no less than two weeks to properly visit the main things and at least a bit of the surroundings that surely deserve a mention like Hampton Court, Kew Gardens and more. I leave this fascinating city anyway satisfied, in the conviction of having sustained a truly frenzied pace in committing myself to absorb and learn as much as possible and in the hope that one day I will return to delve better into the things not seen!

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