Hard to sleep on the plane, so arrived feeling more than a bit tired. Best way to avoid jet lag is to keep going until nightfall, though, so after showering and changing, we went back out again.

Sadly, our hotel doesn't have wireless, though there are Internet cafes about. The voltage converter I bought doesn't have the right kind of prongs, so I'll have to see if I can find one. There's an ironmonger's near our hotel that looks like a likely candidate.

We had lunch at a pub near Leicester Station: fish and chips. The fish was entirely unfishy; even the best English pub in the States that I've been in couldn't hold a candle to this place.

Then we visited the National Portrait Gallery. As we headed into the Tudor Room, we were followed by a throng of schoolchildren led by a guide. Naturally, they planted themselves right in front of the big portraits we wanted to see. Nevertheless, we eventually got to see everything.

The portrait of Sir Thomas More with his family is enormous; one of Henry VIII's head and torso, not so much. It was very instructive to see some of those famous portraits up close; executed at a much larger scale than you see them represented in books, the intricate detail is frequently very rough up close. This was not the case with some of the portrait miniatures, which had lace so tiny it was hard to believe a human hand had painted it.

On the way back from the Gallery, Karen asked if we could emigrate to England. I asked why in particular; she said she could really get used to taking the Tube everywhere, and not having to worry about parking or driving anywhere. I must admit, it's kind of nice. Also, she loves that there's no sunshine.

Apropos of nothing, they really love their iPods in England. And Indian restaurants. I can get behind that.

We took a brief nap after the Gallery; when we woke up, my hand felt nearly frostbitten. We found an air-conditioning control unit on the wall, but nothing about heat. (It turned out, after asking the front desk, that it did in fact also control the heat; if you moved the slider all the way down, to 7, it would start to blow hot air "in about twenty minutes", according to the woman at the desk.) We turned it on and went to dinner.

We ate at a place called "Masala Zone". They pronounce the dishes differently than at the restaurants at home, but they were still quite tasty. The dum ka murg I ordered was fairly bland and inoffensive, but Karen's butter chicken was nice and zesty.

We stopped at a cybercafe on the way back, to check our mail, but as they didn't have wireless, I couldn't upload this.