Memories of My Grand Tour, 1976 - Part 2

This post continues the travel saga that I began two weeks ago.  Unfortunately, my old passport photo hasn't turned up yet.  But here's a picture of me a few months later, with the same hair and stache that I had when I toured London and Paris in August of 1976.  

By the way, I was still closeted at the time; I knew very well that I was gay, but coming out was several years in the future.

Your Head Trucker was strictly au courant on this occasion with the big plaid, wide lapels, platform shoes, and polarized indoor/outdoor sunglasses.

This photo was taken early in 1977 at a country-club get-together thrown by the Business Department of the university I transferred to after I finished junior college.  That was a practical choice, but it wasn't right for me; eventually I went to another university and felt very much at home in the humanities.

Back to the travel story:  I won't bore my readers with details of all the famous places I visited in England and France, which every tourist could tell you about.  Sure, it was thrilling to finally see in person the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace (the Queen wasn't at home, alas!  Gone to Scotland for her summer vacation).  And there was Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben (sadly silent - they were working on the bell mechanism); also, feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, wandering through Windsor Castle (and enjoying a delicious afternoon tea at the hotel across the street), and Hampton Court Palace, and Kensington Palace, and walking the length and breadth of Hyde Park.

Unfortunately, Europe was having its worst drought in 300 years - nowadays, the British press refers to it as the heatwave of 1976, but at the time they spoke of the drought.  No fountains were running anywhere, and Hyde Park was one big carpet of dead grass, brown as toast - all except along the banks of the Serpentine, a lake that curves through the southern part, where the grass was thick and deep green.

I was there on a Sunday afternoon, when a military band played marches and popular tunes on a gazebo near the southeast gate, and you could rent a folding chair for, oh, maybe 25 pence or so.  It was lovely to sit under a shade tree and listen to the pretty music.  After the band finished up, around 4 p.m., I wandered over to a row of trees on a rise of ground paralleling the Serpentine and sat down on the cushiony grass.  There was a level field of the same grass about a hundred feet wide between the bank of the stream and where  I was sitting, and two teams of amateurs were having a jolly good time playing soccer - which the English insist on calling football.

It was a friendly, good-natured game that was pleasant to watch.  Those were the days when most young men sported long hair, moustaches, and beards, and I admired the hairy, sweaty guys as they ran to and fro, shouting and laughing, jumping up and falling down.  It made me a little sad, too.  Unathletic me doesn't give a damn about sports, but I would have liked to join in the game - to be one of the guys, for a change.  A wistful thought.  

A view across the Serpentine in Hyde Park, June 2007, via Wikipedia.

Most of those guys had very dark hair.  It seemed odd to me that there were few English people to be seen on the streets of London.  A great many Italians were working in small shops or cafes; the rest of the pedestrians were largely Indian ladies in their colorful saris or tall Africans in what we Americans called dashikis.  At least, that's how it seemed in the parts of the town I visited.

There was an Indian restaurant down the street from my hotel that I often passed on my way to the tube station (American:  the subway).  One day I stopped there for lunch - I had no idea of what Indian food was like, but in my naivete, I imagined that dishes from the exotic East must be something wonderful, like ambrosia of the gods, maybe.  The lunchtime crowd having departed, the nearly empty cafe was staffed by at least half a dozen young Indian men with thick accents, and it seemed half a dozen more were squeezed into the narrow kitchen, cooking food and washing dishes. 

The waiter brought me a menu, at which I gazed perplexedly.  I didn't recognize any of the items listed.  But hey, it's an adventure, right?  So I ordered Mulligatawny soup for the first course - that sounded vaguely Irish to me.  Then a main dish with chicken in it, and maybe some kind of vegetable.  What could go wrong?

I soon found out.  The soup was hot as blazes - both in temperature and spices.  The main dish was even hotter!  To my way of thinking, Indian food is very like Mexican food, nothing fancy but much hotter.  I didn't enjoy any of it, but I was too embarrassed by my stupidity to ask for something else, so I soldiered on through the meal, ordering Coke after Coke.  They had only the small bottles of Coke that we in America had long since abandoned for the king-size bottles.  They weren't cold, but even so, they gave relief to my five-alarm tongue.  I must have drunk six or seven bottles.

The waiters stood in the kitchen doorway, chattering excitedly and shooting glances at the crazy American who was drinking up their Coke supply.  I felt very conspicuous and foolish.  Somehow, I managed to down a respectable portion of what was served to me, paid my check, and left, faking aplomb outwardly, but inwardly vowing never again to order anything anywhere if I didn't know what it was.  

I tried a couple of other cafes in London, but the food wasn't to my taste, and the prices were higher than I wanted to pay, keeping a careful eye on my spending money, which had to last two weeks.  Fortunately, the answer to my food problem was near the tube station, under a pair of golden arches.  Who knew they had McDonald's in London, England?  Nowadays, it is common knowledge that American fast-food joints of all kinds have spread around the world, but it was a welcome revelation to me then.  

McDonald's was not my favorite burger joint - I was a Burger King man - but they kept me well-fed and happy, twice a day.  The amazing thing was that the burgers and fries tasted exactly as they did at home.  Only the drinks were a little off - I suppose due to the local water - but they were quite drinkable and icy-cold.  And the prices were cheap.  A tasty and most helpful discovery for this hungry young American.

To be continued . . .

-----