We're off! (Or, the effects of a 10hr plane ride)
Trip Start
May 16, 2006
1
2
33
Trip End
Jun 13, 2006
London,
United Kingdom
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Anyway, the airport process went smooth as clockwork and Sarah and I ended up on a plane to London Heathrow. British Airways even let me carry on my bag, which shocked me as it weighed three pounds over their limit and they are rumored to be fussy about that sort of thing. We get settled in, served dinner (surprisingly eatable, though with a wealth of peppers in every dish), and I notice the miniscule amount of leg-room when the fellow in front of me inclines to about an inch from my knee and stays there the whole trip. I am five feet tall. There should be nothing around my kneespace. I pity all those unfortunate tall people. Quickly distracting me from that, the flight attendant announced that because "Since we're flying east, it will be light in approximately two hours." and everybody needed to close their windows Immediately, for it was now Nap Time. Around that point, they also turned off the lights, and anybody who turned on their reading light seemed to be gently dissuaded from letting it remain that way. So then I pretty much had six solid hours of staring at the map on the screen and charting our progress, with intermittent cat-naps.
A bit of bumpiness over Newfoundland but quite smooth. Since we had to circle a bit over London and wait on the tarmac, our arrival was about an hour late. Sarah and I hurried to find Immigration, only to take up places at the end of the line of about fifty people. Little did we know shortly how glad we'd be for that, for a deluge of people washed up behind us, about five hundred deep. Two (or more) 747s had landed at the same time. Slow, but tolerable. As usual.
We made a stab at figuring out the Tube-riding procedure from here - we accomplished the first two jaunts okay - Terminal 4 to Terminal 1,2,3 and then from there the Picadilly Line into London, but when it came time to switch trains, we couldn't find any more ticket machines. So when the train pulled up, the conversation went about like this, Me: (glancing furtively around) Should we just get on?" Sarah: (Noting the door about to close and shifting her pack) "Yeah." So we hitched a ride on the District Line to Victoria station, and when it came time to insert our tickets into the machine on the way out, we went through the aisle with no turnstile, waved our old tickets vaguely at a card scanner and wandered off in a confused manner, just in case anybody happened to notice the people waving decidedly non-magnetized tickets at a card scanner. If anyone did, they did not feel it necessary to mention it.
It was at this point that things went a bit downhill. We emerge from the underground into a light rain and start walking to the right, as the directions advise. We keep walking. No street signs. No four way stops. Many, many cars, busses, and tour guides. We keep walking. Eventually, we realize we've walked all the way around the station and are part of the way through a second go. The rain is not making this any more pleasant, and my sweater has taken on a faint odor of beef. I don't know what kind of wool does *that.* So we duck into a pub and a businessman at the bar drags these tiny tattered maps out of his pocket for us to decipher, occasionally making a jab in the part of town we're trying to get find.
Back out into the rain, we manage to find the hotel, about 30 minutes later. Eaton Hotel gives us a basement room next door, at the Rosedene Hotel, which is huge, shabby, and no view to speak of, unless you've always wanted to see the kitchen stairs from the under side. But we have five beds! We each snag a bed to sleep on and a bed to use as the Packing Staging Area, and go back out into the drizzle to find food. Hopefully, a pub (not the posh business kind). We wander for ages trying to get to the internet cafe the hotel mentioned, ending up almost in Pimlico. Giving it up as a lost cause, we adopt our new method of navigating London - pick a tower of some sort and head towards it. We end up first at St. Stephen's, then at Westminster Cathedral. Sarah stops to buy better walking shoes, which turns out to be no help as there are no socks to be found.
To the Willow House for supper, where I pick out a plate of chips and hot cocoa, she picks out shepherd's pie, and we sit and wait for the waiter. And we wait. Finally, we realize there is no waiter and start observing the other patrons. Turns out, you're supposed to order at the bar, give them your table number, pay, and sit back down. While Sarah's doing this, I start dozing off at the table and a passing businessman stops to ask if I'm okay, for, in his words, I looked "Very woebegone." I love Britishisms.
Chips? Exactly like thick french fries. Unless we got a bad batch, they are precisely like restaurant fries. I don't know why they're supposed to be so much better. But I did learn about the wonders of brown sauce (sugar, apples, tomatoes, vinegar).
To top it off, we found an internet place on the way back to the hotel, fairly close, and in a completely location than the reception fellow described. Ha. We like London.
