Day 1 in London
(This is a part of a 7-day series about my trip to London.)
Date: February 11, 2008
Well, Day 1 was pretty crazy -- it really just felt like a very very VERY long day.
I didn't sleep much on the plane, and instead watched two movies and worked a bit on my talk.
When I got in to London, it was around 2pm, and so I was wandering around in a daze trying to find my hotel. The thing about London is that there is very very poor street signage. Thus, it's hard to findout what street and intersection you're at. I did figure out a trick though -- most of the big buildings have an entire street address on a sign (e.g. 1010 Buckingham Palace Rd.) instead of just a number. That helped a bit, but I still twirled around for a while before finding this place.
London is a very busy place... always people walking around and going somewhere, always someone who's busy. Everywhere you look, it's people people people. It's also not very homogeneous -- everyone is SO different from the next. It's kind of hard to describe, but even
their clothes are different from one another. Everyone has their own sense of style and sort of goes about their business on their own.
That's one thing that's pretty interesting. In Canada we pride ourselves on multiculturalism, but it's peanuts compared to the number of different kinds of people there are here. For instance, when was the last time you saw a black person in Vancouver?! It's orders of magnitude different.
Another interesting thing I noticed was that they just put their garbage on the street. It stinks! I never noticed how useful those garbage bins we have are until now. It's interesting they put it on the streets -- they're not afraid of wild animals. I guess there aren't any wild animals maybe? I also haven't seen any pets now that I think about it. I guess the houses are too small? I will have to enquire about this.
Back to my day, so I got to the hotel around 4pm -- about 1hr after getting off the plane and out of the airport. I then fell asleep for 2 hours, and then it was off to dinner. We went to a pretty neat place -- Turkish food. This is a good choice if you are both lactose and gluten (wheat) intolerant, it turns out. We had a person in our party who was like that -- tragic, really. Anyway, the food was okay -- apparently, Turkish is synonymous with "lamb", so I had that. Not bad, but frankly, not enough for what we paid! For a group of 5 of us, it cost £120, which is around $240. Divided by 5, I guess that's like $60. At Hons, that could feed a family of four at least two times, if not three times. Heheh
After dinner, I came home, and it was around 11pm, and I worked on my talk until about 1am. I slept for a few hours, but got up a 6am because I couldn't sleep any more... Talk is today.
Hopefully goes well, then I can relax a bit in London here!
Cheers
--tony
Date: February 11, 2008
Well, Day 1 was pretty crazy -- it really just felt like a very very VERY long day.
I didn't sleep much on the plane, and instead watched two movies and worked a bit on my talk.
When I got in to London, it was around 2pm, and so I was wandering around in a daze trying to find my hotel. The thing about London is that there is very very poor street signage. Thus, it's hard to findout what street and intersection you're at. I did figure out a trick though -- most of the big buildings have an entire street address on a sign (e.g. 1010 Buckingham Palace Rd.) instead of just a number. That helped a bit, but I still twirled around for a while before finding this place.
London is a very busy place... always people walking around and going somewhere, always someone who's busy. Everywhere you look, it's people people people. It's also not very homogeneous -- everyone is SO different from the next. It's kind of hard to describe, but even
their clothes are different from one another. Everyone has their own sense of style and sort of goes about their business on their own.
That's one thing that's pretty interesting. In Canada we pride ourselves on multiculturalism, but it's peanuts compared to the number of different kinds of people there are here. For instance, when was the last time you saw a black person in Vancouver?! It's orders of magnitude different.
Another interesting thing I noticed was that they just put their garbage on the street. It stinks! I never noticed how useful those garbage bins we have are until now. It's interesting they put it on the streets -- they're not afraid of wild animals. I guess there aren't any wild animals maybe? I also haven't seen any pets now that I think about it. I guess the houses are too small? I will have to enquire about this.
Back to my day, so I got to the hotel around 4pm -- about 1hr after getting off the plane and out of the airport. I then fell asleep for 2 hours, and then it was off to dinner. We went to a pretty neat place -- Turkish food. This is a good choice if you are both lactose and gluten (wheat) intolerant, it turns out. We had a person in our party who was like that -- tragic, really. Anyway, the food was okay -- apparently, Turkish is synonymous with "lamb", so I had that. Not bad, but frankly, not enough for what we paid! For a group of 5 of us, it cost £120, which is around $240. Divided by 5, I guess that's like $60. At Hons, that could feed a family of four at least two times, if not three times. Heheh
After dinner, I came home, and it was around 11pm, and I worked on my talk until about 1am. I slept for a few hours, but got up a 6am because I couldn't sleep any more... Talk is today.
Hopefully goes well, then I can relax a bit in London here!
Cheers
--tony
posted by tangaroo at 11:17 a.m.
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