The Princess Di Memorial

Today, our last day in London, we headed out to explore Hyde Park and find the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain.  We had asked a couple of police officers about how to find it on our first day in London with Calvin, but it was quite far from Buckingham Palace, where we were, and they told us it wasn’t worth going to, which we thought was an odd thing to say.  As we wandered around Hyde Park asking people for directions everyone we talked to said the same thing, and when we finally found the fountain we, unfortunately, couldn’t help but agree…

We started our day in the Notting Hill area, grabbing lunch at an Italian restaurant called Zizzi because they had a special of spaghetti Bolognese with a glass of wine for just ₤7.50.   We then stopped by an Orange shop (a cell phone company in Europe) to get a SIM card for my Blackberry.  Everywhere we’ve been in Europe so far, the person calling a cell phone is responsible for the charges (whether you’re calling from a land line or another cell phone), and it’s free for the cell phone receiving calls (unlike in North America where we get charged for incoming minutes as well).  This means that by plugging an Orange SIM card into my cell phone, Paul can forward his office number to it and just pay a premium on his office line’s long distance charges, instead of paying crazy roaming charges when calls come through on his North American cell phone.  And the SIM card works throughout the country you buy it in without roaming charges, so this card will last us the next two months while we’re in the United Kingdom.  If you’re in a European country for an extended period of time and want to stay in touch with people back home, it’s definitely worth looking into getting a SIM card so you can receive calls.

Once we got our cell phone working, we headed to Kensington Gardens, a 111 hectare park which is home to Kensington Palace and right next to Hyde Park.  We wandered around looking for Kensington Palace until we found an unimpressive red brick building with a statue of William III in front of it.  I recognized the statue from a picture I had seen online, but Paul wouldn’t believe me when I said this is the palace until an old man who was walking by heard our conversation and jumped in saying “yes, this is the palace; quite unimpressive isn’t it?”  Yes, it is amazingly unimpressive – it doesn’t even look like a mansion never mind a palace!

We asked the old man for directions to the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain and he laughed saying it’s “even more unimpressive than the Palace, but you should judge for yourself” and pointed us in the right direction.  We made the trek over to Hyde Park, where the fountain was, stopping to check out the Albert Memorial which was commissioned by Queen Victoria in memory of her beloved husband, Prince Albert, after his death in 1861.  Unlike everything else we saw, the huge statue of Albert ceremonially seated under an elaborate canopy and surrounded by marble figures representing Europe, Asia, Africa and America, was quite impressive 

When we finally found the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, we understood why all the locals we had talked to said it was hugely unimpressive – it’s just a large oval shaped stream of water surrounding a grassy field!  As the old man put it, “it resembles a drain pipe.”  For ₤3.6 million, they could have done something much more impressive for “the people’s princess”!