London misc

We ate lunch a the Borough Market, a popular artisan-food farmers market held fridays and saturdays... a great way to spend an afternoon.





Also did the obligatory Tower of London visit and said hi to the ravens. We learned the origin of the famed British "V" flip off. It's an old threat-- simply a display of your bow fingers... who knew?

Keep left

Most of the streets here have explicit directions written on the curb. Cities don't spend time and resources on that sort of thing "just to be nice"-- I'm sure there have been many many pedestrian accidents.

Crossing streets in London is completely couterintuitive, and each time I do it I look the wrong way despite the written directions. I end up looking wildly everywhere-- right, left, up in the sky, down to the pavement-- expecting danger from all directions. I think some of this is exacerbated by the nature of the streets here too; there are very few straightforward intersections. Most streets merge, curve, peel off, join again, change from one-way to two-way and back again. It's possible even Londoners get disoriented once in a while. I'd never try to drive a car here.

The Amazing Race

London. First off, let me say we feel relaxed and right at home amongst so many pale doughy people.

So, about a month ago I skimmed an Economist article ("The Hell That is Heathrow") about all the various logistical and customer-service problems plaguing both Heathrow and British Airways. I assumed it was mostly hyperbole, so we were a little unprepared for the hot, crowded 2-hour wait to shuffle through customs & passport control. As we eventualy made our way closer in line, we noticed a "Disease Control" section where various passengers had been pulled aside. Feeling a bit paranoid after an hour in the bleak Orwellian queue, we half-wondered if maybe Jacqueline's coughing would get us quarantined. We figured I would do all the talking to customs so as to not blow Jacqueline's "cover" (Jacqueline ended up doing a lot of the talking anyway, and of course her cold didn't matter at all).

From Heathrow, we took the underground straight to Kensington for the US embassy. The prerecorded female voice in the train announced, in a perfectly formal crisp British accent: "this is the Piccadilly line, service to Cockfosters" ...this was after each stop, so she must have said it at least eight times, and every time she said it I started laughing (okay, okay, "cockfosters" probably sounds funnier than it reads). I may be turning forty, but my juvenile sense of humor keeps me young.

We had a narrow window of opportunity to get extra pages for our passports. The embassy only takes walk-ins until noon; this was our only chance to get it done before flying to Cairo on the 9th. Because our plane was delayed an hour, and because customs took so long, we had barely 20 minutes to find the embassy once we got off the train near Hyde Park. We scrambled to find a cab.

When I try to visualize myself visiting a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city like London, I like to imagine myself relaxed, strolling confidently, wearing tailored clothes and a worldly smirk... the reality of it is, we perfectly re-enacted a scene from "The Amazing Race", sweating and fleece-clad, lumbering awkwardly from the weight of the backpacks & rolling luggage, waving down cabs... "We need to get to the US embassy!! Now!", "Will you take the fare or not?", "Can you get us to the embassy? Please, we're in a hurry!"

Long story short, we got to the embassy just in time, got our pages, and then took a cab over to our hotel. We celebrated with a steak sandwich and a bottle of wine, mmmmmmm... more London posts (and some London pics) coming later...

-k

The fun's just starting

On the second leg of our SF -> London flight, barely 15 minutes out of Chicago, a 60-something Indian gentleman seated near us got up to use the lavatory. Jacqueline followed; she was next to enter the lavatory after him, and she was taken aback by the disturbingly large amounts of spittle and stomach bile spattered over the sink, mirror and toilet seat. We're not exactly sure what happened in there, but the gentleman seemed otherwise very happy and healthy the rest of the flight.

We're treating this as the first of many great bathroom anecdotes we'll accumulate on the trip-!