“IF you ever have a chance to go abroad, what country would you choose first, Britain or America?” a photographer for the British Oversea Airways Corp. (BOAC) asked me while visiting the Philippines in the 1970s to check if a town called Boac, Marinduque, really existed.
“America,” I replied in earnest.
He took a bite of his toast, downed his beer and said; “No. Come to the United Kingdom first. You’ll never regret it.”
I was in high school in Marinduque and served as the photographer’s guide. It seems that BOAC, the first airline to fly a passenger jet, was intrigued that somewhere on the planet, a place existed that bears the same name as the airline company. They sent this photographer to verity.
The photographer, whose name I have forgotten, was having San Miguel beer, fried eggs and toast in a hotel in Boac, the capital town of Marinduque.
After meal, we piled ourselves in a jeep along with his gear and went up a winding road toward the port of Balanacan. We stopped at a spot where a tall metal pole stands along the highway designating the boundaries between towns. Marinduque has seven of those signs all over the province, delineating the boundaries between towns.
The photographer went down the jeep and looked up at the sign that reads Boac on one side and Mogpog on the other. He took a close-up shot of the Boac sign, and then the other side, then some more shots from several angles. Mission accomplished.
A series of crashes by BOAC’s “Comet,” the airplane that introduced passengers to the jet age (hence we became jetsetters), whizzing near the speed of sound, put an end to the UK carrier.
BOAC and British European Airways (BEA) were merged to become today’s British Airways.
After graduation, I was employed at the Civil Aviation Administration, today’s Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) as air-traffic controller. Seven years on, I was senior enough to be invited, along with another colleague, for a six-month study on radar at the College of Air Traffic Control in Bournemouth, UK, courtesy of the Colombo Plan.
This was my first foreign foray. From the Manila International Airport (MIA) then, we flew to Bangkok, had connecting flight to Heathrow Airport aboard a Qantas Airways Boeing 707. We were served the classic English breakfast of cereal, sausages, eggs and toast, and a choice of coffee or tea.
For someone who grew up on dried fish and sinangag, that was a royal treat. To show my familiarity with everything Western, since my seatmates were whites, (this was a time when “OFW” had yet to enter our lexicon), I immediately downed my milk, the same way I did when liquid Klim was given to us every morning at the Buenavista Elementary School.
From the corner of my eye, my young seatmate, most probably an Australian lad of 13 or 15 years, coolly poured the milk on his cornflake cereal before proceeding to consume it! I spent the next few minutes munching on my cornflakes to show him how we love to munch crispy kropek back home.
Travel broadens the horizon, says the old saw, and from that time on, the rest of my life became a lesson on survival through life’s vicissitudes, pitfalls and embarrassments. The British photographer was entirely right. London is not only breathtaking, it is awe inspiring. It is one place that you must visit before you die. But an entire month in London would not be enough on a tourist’s budget so you must get the most bang for the buck.
I am back in London for the fifth time this autumn (courtesy of Philippine Airlines (PAL), like the previous visit, during PAL’s first inaugural fight to London in the 1980s) and learned some tricks to wholly enjoy one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Where should one start? It depends. The places to go could be accessed through the Internet to familiarize yourself in order to save time. Before leaving the Philippines, one may access London and its varied iconic spots in three dimension! You’ll be able to view the spots, landmarks and places you want to see from street level. Walk the virtual path and get accustomed with its surroundings. By the time you reach London, the City that the Romans and successive invaders built over the last 2,000 years is no longer as strange.
Booking hotels through the Internet is also the way to go these days. The choices of places to visit are: the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism, and transport, among many others.
The old London are Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge, Tower of London, Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Street, Houses of Parliament, Kensington Palace, Maddam Tussaud. Also Borough Markets, Trafalgar Square, Saint Paul Cathedral, Marble Arch, Big Ben, Shakespeare Globe, Tate Britain, Portobello Road Market.
Shakespeare’s birthplace, is a restored 16th-century half-timbered house on Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. It is reachable by the Tube, For shopping: Camden Market, Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Oxford Street, Selfridges and Portobello Market Road.
The new attractions include; Platfrom 9¾, London Eye, Millenial Bridge, The Shard, London Sea Life, Abbey Road, etc.
Tips: always carry a map of London, one that shows all the tourist spots and shopping malls. Familiarize yourself with GPS in your cellphone. Always carry coins in several denominations because many places have toll toilets.
All museums are free, but not Saint Paul’s. It is also advisable to purchase an oyster card, similar to the octopus card in Hong Kong. It easier and cheaper for you to take the Tube, London’s Metro Rail Transit System. Excess payments are refundable.
Your visit to the home of Shakespeare will not be complete without seeing live performances from the varieties talents from across the planet. Remember Lea Salonga cut her teeth in the international stage here for Miss Saigon.
The current smash hit is The Book of Mormons. After the show, I had a selfie with the lead players, KJ Hippensteel and Brian Sears. London’s West End is the entertainment venue, along with major tourist attractions, shops, businesses and government buildings.
Take a stroll on what used to be the royals’ hunting ground, Hyde Park. There are many other parks that dot London. The trees are awash in color this time of the year. There are 250 varieties of trees in this thousand acre site, and the oaks, beech, horse chestnuts and sweet chestnuts (castañas), are shedding their autumn leaves. Young children throw sticks at the bunch of castañas and eat the nuts on the spot, just like we do back home, when illegally picking someone else’s green mangoes. They are the biggest and oldest plants in the Royal Parks. The first time I set foot in London in 1973, we went around town looking for a cheap place to eat. There were no McDonalds’ then or any of the fast foods that would have engulfed the world decades later. We were ogled at whenever we enter an establishment. “Are you Japanese?” was the usual query.
Since we were surviving on a limited budget, I got hooked on fish-and-chips and, later, Indian curry and its limitless permutations in lamb, fish, beef, chicken.
Today, walking Oxford Street, there are more people of color than whites and an endless numbers of food to choose from. Fish-and-chips are for foreign visitors, the locals have now a fondness for chicken tikka masala.
For first-time visitors, it helps greatly if you have viewed the movies, My Fair Lady, James Bond, Marry Poppins, Harry Potter and many others films on London because of the sheer joy of vicarious experience.
“How are your people down at Chelsea?” asked Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), to an amazed fellow, commenting on his leather boots at the opening scene at Covent Garden; “How do you come to be up so far east?” inquired Higgins of the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), “You were born at Lisson Grove.”
“So far east of Covent Garden” is logical query at the time when horse carriages and horse-driven taxis were the means of transport in the Edwardian age. Today Lisson Grove and many places in Metropolitan London are within minutes through the “tube,” London’s underground train. Covent Garden, once a market place, had morphed into a gleaming tourist trap of cafés, restaurants and shopping malls.
James Bond’s followers, on the other hand would be familiar with the Edwardian building, seen in Skyfall. This used to be Winston
Churchill’s office visited by 007 to see M. Now I read in the papers (The Evening Standard is given away free at train stations), was sold to be turned into a £1-billion hotel and apartment complex.
Covent Garden, Hoxton, Lisson Grove and Hampton Court could be added to today’s Abbey Road, Madam Tussaud, Sherlock Holmes, The Shard and plenty more icons that have arisen since Henry Higgins’s time.
But the younger generation would surely head for Platform 9¾ at Saint Pancras, the way to Hogwarts, the school for witchcraft and wizardry. This fictional British school of magic for students is the primary setting for the first six books in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.
Platform 9¾ is the pseudo-fictional location at Kings Cross train station is where the Hogwarts Express begins its long journey to Hogwarts School. To find the “platform” take the tube or train to King’s Cross station and find Platform 8, (this is an open platform so no tickets are required.) Once at Platform 8, follow it all the way to the end, turn left toward Platforms 9 and it’s about 10 yards along to your left. Once there you’ll find a sign for “Platform 9¾” as well as a luggage trolley half embedded into the wall—the perfect photo opportunity.
Old London is a museum in itself. The city boasts 27 museums visited by some 42 million visitors yearly. I managed to sneak in at the British Museum and got an eyeful of Egypt’s Pharaonic past. It is here where the Rosetta Stone could be found. Nearby are the remnants of Greece’s once glorious past, carved in marble. Pieces of the Parthenon, called the Elgin marbles, occupy top spot. Take out the Elgin marbles and you’ll have nothing but an empty room. There is an ongoing debate whether to return this priceless ruins to the Greeks or allow it to remain in London for all the world to see.
But The Reading Room is adjacent, once hailed as one of the great sights of London and became a world famous center of learning.
London is full of statues, memorials, arches, columns, all reminders of Great Britain’s glorious past. Winston Churchill’s statue faces The Parliament Square across the street, along with Big Ben. The bulldog in bronze, a little bent, one hand resting on a cane, looks defiant and pugnacious, the same spirit that binds the Brits and won the war over Hitler in WWII.
Strewn across the Square are taller-than-life statues of past long dead prime ministers, generals, admirals and viscounts of the British Empire, when Britannia rules the waves and the sun never sets on England’s worldwide empire.
Image credits: AP/Alastair Grant, AP/Frank Augstein