An Experience

Yesterday, I met the man who invented the flush toilet, Thomas Crapper.  I'll get back to that.

We did the first day of the tourist sweep in London and saw all of the usual sights.  While we enjoyed the place, it doesn't impress me quite the way that Paris did.  London is just a big city like big cities all over the world.  It has interesting sights, choking traffic and a hodge podge of buildings that seems like one architect trying to out do the others.  Probably due to the war and buildings destroyed by bombings, each block can have a variety of styles and vintages.

Paris on the other hand has a more unified theme.  When you are there, you realize that you are someplace foreign, not simply someplace big.  The city has character not merely millions of people.

We did step off the beaten path (sort of) when we went to the London Bridge experience.  Was it ever an experience!  I am not sure how to describe the place.  We were greeted in the line by a man in character with a shredded white shirt which had fake blood all over and a contact lens that distorted one of his eyes.

We entered into one of the piers of the London Bridge and began walking around with our group through historical reconstructions of periods in London history.  There were actors portraying different characters to discuss each scene.  They played their roles with a sly wink to the audience and humor as they explained what we were surrounded by.  There wasn't really  a story per se, it was more like individual historical vignettes all at least loosely connected to the history of the London bridge.

A Viking greeted us first as we helped to pull down  the first London bridge to get at the Danes.  Then it was to the torture chamber where a executioner explained the process of being drawn and quartered (not a process for the squeamish).  On to a chapel where a half-crazed woman described the three fires that shaped London and fleeing behind her through the scene of burning streets.

Then we met the imminent Crapper.  What he had to do with the bridge, I have no idea.  I suppose it may have been because the sewage his invention created was going to be dumped in the river.  Finally we met the ghost of an American, a Mr. Mcullough, who bought the bridge and took it apart, shipped it, and rebuilt it Arizona (strange but true).

And then . . . And then .  .  . they led us through The Tombs of London--which was basically a haunted house.

A little (and the emphasis on little) history and a whole lot of experience.  It was light fun, but it reminded me that entertainment for the sake of entertainment can sometimes be so powerful that it overcomes any sort of story that it is trying to tell.