Greetings From London

We made it.

The flights went well, and other than 30 minutes of holding with a dozen other planes above England, we got here on time. I don't really like long flights, and I wasn't really able to sleep. The good news is that my back, which has been giving me some problems recently, handled the trip just fine.

We had humble goals for our first day. 1. Get Oriented 2. Stay Awake. Missions accomplished. We secured 7-day tube passes and found our way to our apartment in the Bayswater neighborhood. The apartment is as advertised. It's cozy, conveniently located, and not too much more. It has a very lived-in feel, which is just fine by us.

The view up the street from our apartment

The weather in London is exactly what you would expect: dreary, cool, and humid (but not raining much). We spent a lot of time walking around the neighborhood trying to get our bearings. We're very close to Hyde Park, so we spent a lot of time walking around there. We also did a quick tour of the Natural History Museum, which is just south of the park.

Stephanie in Hyde Park

From there, we made our way over to a pub near Victoria Station. It was quite nice, and we sat next to a very exuberant and increasingly drunk table of German men. The yelled a lot of stuff in German and seemed to be having a great time. About that time, we began to feel extremely tired, but it was only about 4:30. As a sign of how tired we were, there was a nice window in a corner of the table we sat at. No matter how many times I convinced myself otherwise, and despite the fact that I could see through it, I remained convinced that it was a mirror.

In order to stave off sleep a while longer, we went down near the City of London along the Thames and strolled around. We had considered doing a walking tour along the river, but decided against it. I had done the tour when I was here five years ago with my family, so Stephanie got an extremely abbreviated version. Basically I pointed out the buildings I could remember and nothing else. We saw St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tate Modern art museum  and the (replica) Globe Theatre.

We shared a train home with many Londoners just finishing up work for the week. We found a (not very good) pub and quickly ate. I think there was a huge group of I gathered to be French high school students, but again, I was very tired. At home, we succumbed to our fatigue and slept for 12 hours.

Now we're off to start day 2 a little later than we may have wanted, but also fully rested.

Until next time