A wet weekend in the "Smoke"

Forecasters doomed Cardiff to a weekend of rain on Friday, so I decided to escape to London... where the weather was just as bad.

Three Americans hit the ground running at 10:30 a.m., pretending to know what to do and where to go. We struggled trying to get to New Cross, where our £16-a-night hostel was.

The bus system was completely unreliable. At the station, the first bus swung around the corner and passed us without stopping, the second bus- 15 minutes later- did the same thing. For a system promising bus service every 7 to 10 minutes, these snubs were unacceptable. And common.

After depositing our backpacks at our hole-in-the-wall hostel in an immigrant-rich neighborhood, we got on a bus to Trafalgar Square, where my roommate wanted to check out a child poverty awareness event.

On this bus, I noticed a young man wearing a scarf with Wales' red dragon. I asked him if he was from Wales (he was, from Swansea), introduced him to the other Americans, and we talked until we got to the Square and went our separate ways.

By the time we arrived, the event was dispersing, so we went to the National Gallery.
After seeing MNAC in Barcelona and the gallery in Scotland, I wasn't impressed with the brightly-painted rooms stuffed with centuries of art; to begin with, the building was a maze and the paintings seemed ill-fitted for their neighbors' company. I felt as if I were looking at a collage gone horribly wrong.

Outside, the wind had picked up and gray clouds spittled.

We saw Big Ben, the Parliament building, Piccadilly Circus (with the same protesters I noticed five years ago) and Westminster Cathedral.

We crossed bridges and traipsed through parks. We passed the MI5 and MI6 buildings.

It rained, cold and hard, leaking into our spirits.

We struggled to find cheap food, which is almost impossible in London, it seems, then decided to catch a bus home.

Who should be on the bus but the Wales-scarf guy from before! We asked him out for drinks, which turned out to be very smart, because the bus 'terminated' its route long before we arrived at New Cross.

Good ol' scarf guy walked us to New Cross and introduced us to Hobgoblins, a pub with a wide gamut of people, from scenesters to goths to glamorous gals to jeans-'n''-T-shirt types. We talked to scarf guy about movies and TV shows, accents and style and humor: a delightful end to a drizzly day.
Rain greeted us Sunday morning, and it took a delicious cheap breakfast at a more personal, Denny's-like restaurant called Jenny's to cheer us up.

We spent the day sight-seeing: the London Bridge, Tower of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, Roman wall and the Imperial War Museum before heading home.

In the subway, I heard a frustrated young woman bark, "Oh, I feel like we're in a rabbit warren!"

All of London felt a bit like that, tunnels and turns and secrets, a surprise around every corner.