We arrived in London, and after taking the picture-perfect gated lift to our flat (ok, I took it with our bags, that’s all that fit!) settled in to our London ‘home’.    I’ll do an apartment post later – those photos are still on Scott’s laptop, and I can only transfer the photos one at a time by pulling them off my camera onto his laptop, then emailing them to myself, saving them to my iPad, and then I can pull them into a post here.  A little ridiculous, if you ask me.

Anyway.  So here we are in London, TIRED, but also very much wanting food, and feeling a bit of a need to stretch our legs after so long on airplanes.  So, we actually did one of the things on my list right away, we found Cafe in the Crypt.  This cafe is located – you guessed it! – in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, right off Trafalgar Square.  That is just too weird, we had to do it.

There has been a church on the site of St. Martin-in-the-Fields since the 13th century, with the current one built in 1726.  It served as a bomb shelter during WWII, and is now a brass-rubbing center.  I didn’t even know there were brass-rubbing centers.  It has a very interesting history.

The crypt itself is actually a very warm, cozy, and beautiful setting, if I can say that about a crypt without being too creepy.  The walls are a warm light-colored brick, and curve up into a high arched ceiling.  The lighting is done really well to make it look dramatic.  Underfoot are, well, headstones, set into the floor.  When you walk down the aisle finding a table, you are walking over the headstones, most too worn to be read any longer.  It’s quite bizarre.

As we sat there, I couldn’t help wondering what those whose final resting place I was using to sip cream of carrot & spinach soup would think of my meal and it’s location. Would it bother me to know the place I had chosen to be buried, and have my 3 foot engraved tombstone, was now stumbled down in search of extra napkins?  Or likely countless tiny unstable coke bottles had leapt to their demise, leaving a sticky, fizzy residue?  It’s just is a bit odd, and I can’t help but feel a bit disrespectful.  Or like we should at least be reading the tombstones.  Having a moment’s silence for them.  Something to acknowledge we are not just in a cafe, but a crypt. But the other patrons seem unaffected by this, chatting as they munch an egg & cucumber sandwich, which according to Lydia was ‘surprisingly good’.

So maybe it’s just me.

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