Wow, I slept nine and a half hours last night. By the time I'd showered, shaved consumed a big mug of coffee at Aroma ($2.70!), and read the Guardian ("Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo" is the 4th most popular movie in England right now, I'm ashamed to say), I felt full of vigor, and ready for my first full day as a tourist.

I took the Underground to Marble Arch for a bit of pomp and circumstance. You see, today was Coronation Day, and I'd read that at noon there'd be a royal 41-gun salute in Hyde Park, fired by the Kings Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery. I lived in London for three years, and never did any of this stuff.

Green and beautiful, Hyde Park

Waiting for it all to get going. See the guy in the bowler hat?

Things got moving with a military marching band, striking up a joyous sound as they played something American, strangely enough - something extremely familiar, but I couldn't remember what it was called.

It was worth waiting for - it was pure exhilaration to watch five beautiful troops of mounted horses come galloping past trailing the big guns.

Within minutes, the horses had galloped off again, leaving seven guns side by side on the lawn, with four soldiers per gun. The first shocking bang of the salute sent the birds fleeing, and set nearbye car alarms off.

As the guns nearest us fired, the smell of gunpowder filled our nostrils, and the smoke fanned over us. It was a great experience!

Afterwards, I took the new Jubilee-line extension over to Southwark, with the intent of visiting the brand new Tate Modern. All the new stations on the extension are archicturally unique, each designed by different architects, and far different from the run-of-the-mill stations elsewhere in London.

The new museum is colossal, but unfortunately, so were the lines to get in - they must have been almost a mile in length, and I'm not the most patient of tourists. Besides, I was getting hungry. So I ditched that idea, and wandered around some of the funky, new cultural developments in the neighborhood. I had my first experience with "cottaging" when I naively tried to use a public toilet on the Bankside, near the Tate - all the cubicles were in use, and I waited until one opened and a guy came out. Then a second guy came out of the same cubicle, buttoning his flies!

I had crepes for lunch - it's proving VERY difficult to find chicken-caesar salads! - in a courtyard full of galleries and restaurants. It really is a great, up-and-coming neighborhood.

I spent the rest of a long, happy afternoon wandering with no fixed purpose, choosing my path freshly at each crossroads. Everything was both familiar and yet changed - it's about fourteen years since I lived here. Certainly, things are far richer and ritzier than they were.

A tug towing a barge on the working River Thames

Statue of Captain James Cook underneath Admiralty Arch

Big Ben and Big Keith

Beautiful flower market near Covent Garden

"We sell umbrellas ... just ...umbrellas"

Resting my tired feed in the archetypal Bloomsbury Square, Bedford Square

My alma mater, University College London, where I got my BSc in Physics & Astronomy, in 1986

I sat at Caffe Nero for a long cup of coffee. It was in an area which is, I think, called Seven Dials - the intersection of seven narrow streets, each full of little boutiquey restaurants, and clothes stores. There was a truly vibrant, idiosyncratic street-life, mixed straight and gay, relatively untouristy, lots of pretty London boys with skinny arms, angelic cheekbones and long seductive eyelashes - in short, the best kind of people watching. It wasn't even spoiled by the vehicles whizzing through the narrow streets; vehicles whose speed was wholly unhampered by the obstacles posed by heedless pedestrians, and tiny traffic roundabouts.

At Caffe Nero

I suddenly remembered my first few weeks in London as an eighteen-year-old student. I was deer-in-headlights shy, and very lonely for the first few weeks, before I started to pick up a coterie of friends. During those first miserable weeks, I spent my evenings exploring the West End - these same streets - and I'd look at the chattering life passing me by and wish that someone would say hello to me.

Looking back on that paragraph, I suppose you'd expect the subtext to be that I'm feeling similarly lonely now. Well it ain't so. I'm, thus far, happy and content - not that a little company now and then won't come in nice now and then later on down the line :) But I have found myself imagining how it would be to actually live here, what kind of friendships I'd have here - it's something I've wondered on and off for years now, and part of the reason I came for such a long trip - to see how I fit here.

Not only was I completely over my jetlag today, but I had more energy than I usually have back home. After a day trooping around London, I got back to my hotel and went right out again, for a surprisingly effortless run in Russel Square. And then came back to the hotel again for a work-out, making do with the tiny section of floor between the sink and my bed.

I have a theory - if you look at the bodies of young Hollywood male actors in the nineteen-forties, they have different bodies than today - it was as if the concept of manly beauty was different back then. My theory is that their bodies were that way because they didn't work out in gyms, but just did push-ups and crunches. So we'll see if I look like Errol Flynn at the end of this trip :)

Now to bed. I have to get up way too early tomorrow, to catch my flight to Rome - first time visit to Italy - woohoo!