The Euroblog, Take 1 - London

So we all decide to meet up in London, with only myself having a phone. You might think that's asking for trouble, and you are right. As it turned, Steve spent over 35 straight hours in airports getting continuously bumped. I told him that was the price he paid for getting an essentially free pass over (the paying passengers got preference). Poor Carly was the first to get to London and expected to meet up with Steve, who was obviously nowhere to be found. I didn't get in til later, and so she was left wondering if she had been stranded in a foreign city halfway across the world.

Steve, when he finally got on, didn't realize he had a business class pass. He was eventually guided to his seat, where this conversation ensued with the person next to him:

Steve: Hi, I'm Steve.
Person: I'm Sir Douglas MacArthur III. [Scottish accent, pronounced "dooglas"]
Steve: Oh, hi Doug. [pronounced "dug"]
Sir Douglas MacArthur III: Doug? ["dug"]
Steve: Doug? ["doog"]

As it turned out, Sir Douglas MacArthur III was a monarch of some sort from Scotland. He was quite put out that he had been bumped down from first class, and proceeded to pound free alcoholic beverages the entire trip. Steve fell asleep and snored, which combined with his disgraceful bumping to business class and the butchering of his name probably pushed Sir Douglas MacArthur III to the edge of an emotional breakdown. If you've seen The Last Samurai you know that when Samurai are beaten they request to have their head cut off because their shame is too great for them to bear. I wonder if this is the same level of shame that Sir Douglas MacArthur III felt sitting in business class.

Apparently, London was more of an international city than I expected. After I landed, I went to buy a subway ticket. The ticket window was initially empty, then in stepped an Arabian with a full curly black beard and a turban. For a split second it felt like a bad dream in which I had been transported back to the Middle East. I essentially had the subway to myself until a load of oriental children all speaking Japanese or Chinese or something all boarded the train. All were equally fit with ipods and squarish black-rimmed glasses. At this point I was wondering if there were any native English people left to be found. In the area around out hotel, the only qualifications to get a job seemed to be:
- Indian nationality
- poor at speaking English
- not know where anything is.
Maybe Westminster is the Indian quarter or London. A good amount of the recommended restaurants in the area were in fact Indian.

As luck would have it, while on the subway I became distracted by a pretty English girl and missed my stop, so I rode all the way to the end of the line before changing to a subway going back to my original stop. On this subway it was just me and a random black guy who looked semi-stoned. He ended up trying to no avail to pull the automatic doors open when he reached his stop, before they eventually opened of their own accord.

Whenever the subway came up for air, I noticed that the countryside was covered with suburbs full of houses that all could have been possible locations of Mary Poppins' house, depending up which view you hold to of 19th century London architecture. In downtown London - which stretched for miles - there were literally no buildings less than four stories - many seven or eight. If you tried to built a two-story store in downtown London they would run you out on a rail. Another thing I noticed was that there were no bridges, except across the Thames river. There was nothing like the freeway spider webs you see everywhere in the U.S. - everything ran on one level. And I never really got used to the opposite side of the road thing. All the time I kept getting this urge to yell at the drivers, "What are you doing, you morons!?"

Good food wasn't that hard to find. That may seem obvious, but try visiting a foreign city after traveling around Egypt for a week, which was one of the last foreign places I visited. In Egypt you are hard-pressed to find anything besides peta, shawarmas, and falafels, and so a pizza joint is the best thing this side of heaven. Still in that mindset, when we went out looking a place to eat, my first instinct was to run into the first Pizza Hut I saw.

We all had slightly different agendas. I wanted to see as many legit sites as possible. Steve just wanted to get on a double-decker bus and ride around and take pictures with his new camera. Carly wanted to go see Notting Hill because it coincided with that chick flick starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. That and she wanted to find the steps on which Mary Poppins fed the birds. As it turned out, they were the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral. But all things considered we had a pretty good time and I think everyone got at least a little of what they wanted.

Humorous quotes:

Me: I think we'll go visit the Tower of London.
Carly: What's that?
Me: It's where they kept all the legit prisoners for hundreds of years.
Carly: Are there still any prisoners there now?

Steve (as we're looking at all the world famous paintings in the National Gallery): What's after this?
Me: The Tower of London.
Steve: Where can we do laundry?

Carly: (because I wanted her to get the angle right): You're a camera Nazi.

As I write this I'm currently under the English Channel heading for Paris. We'll see what happens next...