Rats in the Tunnel?

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The hotel receptionist asks us where we're going, and we respond that we're travelling to London on the train. He says that St Pancras station where it terminates is very nice, but then quickly adds that most Parisians think that Gare du Nord, where we'll be getting on, is very dangerous. I don't ask him for any more details. I'm not sure I want to know. I hope he means that it's full of pickpockets and other sleazy characters, because about the only alternative I can come up with is that there's something wrong with the trains. I think we've probably got some hope of protecting ourselves against undesirables, but I'm not sure there'd be too much we could do if we went round a corner a bit too quickly and our carriage went flying.

Checking in at Gare du Nord is like checking in at the airport. We need to through immigration, and have our luggage screened. I s'pose this is a good thing. I'm not sure we'd feel at that well if a bomb went off while we were in the Chunnel.

We seem to have scored the only seats on the train from which you can't see out the windows; all we've got next to us is a sheet of metal. This mightn't be an entirely bad thing. The countryside looks a bit flat and uninteresting and seems to lack the attractive rolling hills we went through between Lyon and Paris a few days ago. We slow down a bit as we approach the tunnel, but there are no announcements or other fanfare. Maybe it's because we're Australian that we think it's such a big deal to cross an international border in something other than a plane. I wonder what's stopping vermin using the tunnel to bring rabies and bubonic plague into England. I hope they've installed a rat trap somewhere along the way, or at least a few piles of RatSak.

We emerge from the tunnel and make our only stop on the trip at a place called Ebbsfleet. The train must have close to a thousand passengers on board, but as far as we can see only two of them get off. We've never heard of Ebbsfleet, and there doesn't seem to be anything here except a station, which leaves us wondering why we've stopped here and only here. All we can come up with is that perhaps some of the driver's relatives live nearby.

We'd heard that London is very expensive, so we have a bet to see who can get the closest to guessing how much the hotel charges to wash a handkerchief. It was $5 in Paris, and we thought that was outrageous. I guess $5 and Issy guesses $6. She wins. It's a bit over $7, and a bit over $8 if you want it done quickly. Seven dollars to wash a handkerchief. Really?

We go out for a wander. The weather looks to be typical of what we'd often heard said about London - grey, raining, and not very warm - so we don some clothes that haven't seen the light of day since we left home. The weather forecast suggests it's going to be like this for most of the time we're here, so I think that we might need to plan some indoor activities.

We stroll along the south bank of the Thames. We can see St Paul's Cathedral in the distance. Issy says it doesn't look very big, which is a bit at odds with what we were told in Italy about it being the second largest church in the world after St Peter's in the Vatican. I'm sure the Italians wouldn't have misled us about something so important, so we assume it must look a bit bigger from closer up. We pass the replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, Tate Modern Gallery and long queues to board the London Eye in defiance of the weather. There's no shortage of buskers, which seems like a good thing at first, until we realise that they're all too close together so we can't hear any of them properly. Some better planning required there I think. We cross the river and pass the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. Issy doesn't look happy. I think she wishes we were back in Paris where it wasn't so grey, rainy and cold.

We choose a French restaurant for dinner, which seems a bit ironic given where we've come from today. The waitresses are all French, and the menu's all in French with English subtitles. We elect to sit outside under a canopy, but quickly change our minds when we realise it's too dark to read the menu. We forget that we're in England and try to use our limited French vocabulary to converse with the waitress. We had a similar difficulties getting out of the habit of saying "grazi" and "bonjourno" when we first arrived in France from Italy. The French food's excellent, but not quite the same as the genuine article we've become accustomed to over the past week or so.

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