Day five - in London

I've been spending this day mostly inside at the Piccadilly Backpackers Hostel on Sherwood Street in London (Facebook).  Directly across the narrow street there's a construction project
underway, a modern 10-story hotel that will be done in 2011.  The site is basically a hole in the ground right now, still being excavated, with dump trucks taking away load after load of earth.

I'm chatting with the traffic marshall whose job it is to stand on the street edge and stop cars and trucks when the crane swivels to deliver materials to various places at the site.  He came here from Ethiopia three years ago with his wife and child and earns minimum wage, about five and a half pounds sterling ($9.00 USD) per hour.  We talked about the economy and the social schemes of England and the U.S., and about the job he's on.  He's been in the rain all day, as have the workers on the site.

Sherwood street is a very small one, only a couple of blocks long.  It's partially blocked by the construction equipment at the site.  It seems to be thoroughfare in the morning and in the evening for people arriving on the Piccadilly Underground line and spreading out to head for their jobs.

There's a homeless man who lives on the sidewalk just outside the theater next door with his pit bull dog.  I watched today as the sanitation department picked up and disposed of the man's bed, a cardboard box.  No doubt he'll find another and curl up in his sleeping bag when darkness comes around again.

We're in the area known as West End.  There are many theatres in the area.  The one next door to the hostel is playing Grease right now.  There's a sign outside offering a limited number of same day tickets for 15 pounds ($25).  Cam and I were thinking about going to see Wicked, the story of the witches of Oz, if we could find cheap tickets, but the best price we could find was 45 pounds ($75).

With the rain continuing, we don't know what to do other than stay in and make plans for our continuing journey that will put us in Amsterdam on Thursday morning.

To finish up this post that began four hours ago, we went out in the rain and ate at a place called Soho Pizzeria in -- guess where -- Soho, an interesting part of London with many places to eat, drink and party, as it was fifty years ago when I was first here.  Changed, of course, but still a place for entertainment.  When I was there in 1959, I and some Navy shipmates discovered a place called Les Enfants Terrible, a disco of sorts, music, dancing, young people.  It was also near Carnaby Street:

1958 saw the first boutique, His Clothes, opened in Carnaby Street by John Stephen (after his shop in Beak Street burned down)^[1] and was soon followed by I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, Mr. Fish and Cecil Gee (both of whom owned bespoke tailor’s shops), Kleptomania, Mates, Ravel, and others.

By the 1960s, Carnaby Street proved popular for followers of both the Mod and hippie styles. Many independent fashion boutiques, and designers such as Mary Quant, Marion Foale / Sally Tuffin,^[2] Lord John, Take Six, and Irvine Sellars were located in Carnaby Street as well as various underground music bars such as the Roaring Twenties in the surrounding streets. With bands such as The Beatles, Small Faces,The Who, and Rolling Stones appearing in the area to work (with the legendary Marquee Club located round the corner in Wardour Street), shop, and socialize, it became one of Swinging London's coolest destination associated with the Swinging Sixties.

Anyway, Soho Pizzeria is in a very nice space, good food decently priced, top notch service, a woman singing and playing jazz tunes.  I asked our waiter about it.  He said it was started by the founder of another company -- the name escapes me -- with other partners after he sold out his original business.  A place like it would, I think, do well in Key West were it to establish a branch there, or in many other places, in fact.  Can you say franchise opportunity?

We're back at the hostel now.  As we arrived here we saw people streaming out of the entrance.  At first I thought they must be gathering for the hostel party which is scheduled to leave at 10:30 PM, but it was instead an evacuation brought on when the fire alarms went off.  A single fire truck soon pulled up in front, a fireman went in and declared it safe to re-enter, and several hundred folks trooped back in.  The hostel -- did I mention this already?  has 800 beds and though there weren't that many on the sidewalk, there were at least a couple of hundred.