Thursday we took another marathon walk through a remarkably sunny London. This time we started with Kings Road in Chelsea, which is one of my favorite areas of London (despite a general lack of historic buildings). We did some good window shopping at wonderful stores like Muji and Molton Brown.
Then we looked for a place to have a late breakfast since it wasn't included at our posh hotel. We ended up with fresh croissants from a French bakery chain called Paul's. All the people behind the counter were French and the croissants were some of the best we've had in the UK.
Continuing on our walk through Chelsea, we made a very wonderful discovery. It was a large grocery store called Partridge's, which specializes in various gourmet and international food. We wandered in because it looked interesting, and found it had an entire area of American food! It was thrilling, especially as it was Thanksgiving.
There were cans of pumpkin pie filling and sweet potatoes, big bags of Jet-Puf marshmallows, Jif and Skippy peanut butter, Stove Top stuffing, Honey Maid graham crackers, Zattarain's beans and rice, Bisquick, Aunt Jemima maple syrup, Hidden Valley Ranch dressing, Macaroni & Cheese, Froot Loops...
If only we'd known about this place before, we would have made pilgrimages! We didn't even care that a small bottle of Ranch Dressing was the equivalent of $8. But as it was, we had no kitchen and a car already stuffed full, so we made do with a couple candy bars. We may well try to return while in London for the concert in December.
After we reached the river, we had quite a long walk along Chelsea Embankment back to the main center of London.
It was mostly an industrial area and there weren't too many sights along the river at first, but one notable exception was the Battersea Power Station, which is no longer in use.
And eventually we came to a sight we very much wanted to check out - the headquarters of MI6! It is on the banks of the Thames, about a mile downriver from Parliament. It is in a beautiful modern building constructed in 1995.
On the internet that evening, we learned that MI6 is short for "Military Intelligence, Section 6" (all the sections are listed here) and is the unofficial name of the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS. It does foreign intelligence, while MI5 takes care of the domestic and Secret Service stuff.
The first Bond movie that featured the building was
We were able to walk very close to all sides of the building, but the security measures were clearly very heavy-duty. The fences were formidable and double-layered and there were cameras everywhere.
There is also not a single sign indicating what the building is, or even that it is a government building, and is definitely kept off the tourist circuit. We knew we had to be watched closely, being the only ones paying any attention to the building and taking lots of pictures with big cameras. We wondered if they had super-powered microphones that could hear us talking and I dared to hope they might bring us in to ask us a few questions and examine our cameras.
Sadly, this did not happen. But we definitely got the eye by the heavily-armed guard at the main entrance. I have never seen a bulletproof jacket that thick! I wish we had a picture of him, but we weren't quite that brave. As we passed by, he walked a little towards us but was casual and non-threatening about it. I decided to explain ourselves and said to him, "We're just dorky James Bond fans." That made him smile and he walked the rest of the way over to us.
He said he couldn't prevent us from taking pictures (although it seems to us they could!), but they would prefer that we would stick to the building itself and not take any pictures of people's faces near the building because "you never know who might be here and they are very sensitive about being seen." Awesome.
That was the highlight of the day for both of us. But we did see a few more things before resting our very weary legs. We had tentatively planned on a Thames River cruise, but being the off-season it was difficult to find one that was sailing at a convenient time. So we ended up hoofing it for the rest of the day.
Then we had an early-ish dinner at Wagamama in Leicester Square, which was yummy as ever, and somehow manage to walk all the way back to the hotel from there. Our feet were killing us, but we still had a great time checking out the night scenes.
