Back at Home
As the first leg of my trip approached I tried to properly back everything I needed with as little redundancy as possible. Since I am flying low cost I will need to pack everything into a mid-sized backpack and carry everything else in my pockets. While the airline limits the size of the backpack, they do not limit the amount of pockets (mostly).
So, I am travelling with cargo pants and a traveller’s vest. I was considering also carrying a fanny pack, but I’m worried that my sister may call the fashion police (or as called in Europe, the fashion Interpol).
For my final bit of efficiency, I wear running shorts under my cargo pants. That way at the security in the airport, rather than emptying my pockets, I simply remove my pants and put it through the metal detector.
At the Airport
As many experienced backpackers will tell you, pack the heaviest stuff at the bottom. Well, as a novice air traveller, let me give you another tip. Pack the items that look the most like a weapon on the top.
I packed my bicycle pedals at the bottom of my bag, since they are quite heavy. During the metal detector screening the security agent took my bag aside and started to unpack everything until they reached my pedals at the bottom. After that I had to yet again carefully pack my backpack.
Then came the expected outcome of booking a low-cost airline. The flight got delayed (2 hours). Since I was originally supposed to land at 01:30, this didn’t take away for the touring that I planned to do, rather it took away from the rest that I planned to take.
When it finally came time to board I started to head towards my seat. At my row I saw an implementation of the theory of booking 2 seats. The idea goes like this, if you are flying with someone and can pick seats, pick a row and an aisle seat. If no one sits between you, great, you have a spare seat for more room. If someone does come to sit in the middle, offer to trade seats (anyone in the middle will be willing to switch for another seat) and then you can both sit together. So, as I approached a middle seat, I saw 2 people who were flying together but booked an aisle and row seat. They started to look at each other for some time. I was able to eavesdrop on their telepathic conversation. It went something like this: “Okay, this happened, now one of us should offer to trade our seat”, “So trade your seat and let’s sit together”, “I don’t want to sit in the middle, you trade seats”, “Well I don’t want to either”. So in the end I sat between them.
London
As the plane approached London there wasn’t much that I could see. The sun hadn’t yet risen and I didn’t have a window seat. However, I did notice something very British, the cars were driving on the wrong side of the road!
After landing, getting through passport control and exiting was easy. I then had to get to my host’s hotel. I took the train to as close as it went. At that point I was supposed to get on a bus, but something terrible happened; my GPS didn’t work. My theory is that since I didn’t have data, Google was angry that they couldn’t collect location data, so they disabled my GPS. Anyway, since I couldn’t find my bus stop (and there were no other people around at 04:30), I decided to use my boy scout skills and navigate with a map and a compass. After a half an hour I reached the hotel.
I got an extra key from the front desk and tried to sleep for as long as I could. In the morning (well, later morning) we got up, had breakfast (with British tea) and went to a conference regarding the D programming language. I left my backpack in the hotel room and embarked upon my London adventure.
Before leaving, my friend from the hotel gave me an unused prepaid sim and suggested I splurge by spending 5 GBP on 3 GB of data and many minutes of domestic and international calls. Now, I am not one to spend money when I can suffer and save instead. However, after trying it I will now always get a local sim, if such an amazing deal arises. It is so much more relaxing to not get lost in a foreign country.
Transportation
While not a common thing for tourists to talk about, the transportation leaves a large impression on how I like the city. In some places you absolutely need a car (USA). London is the opposite. Not only is the city extremely walkable, but they make it enjoyable as well. To prevent tourist from getting run over, at every intersection (in the center, or as they say in London, centre) tells you which way to look for cars (although I soon realised that simply looking both ways was good enough). Everything is aesthetically pleasing, even the bollard are nicely decorated.
They have street artwork everywhere, that is, if you count phone booths, which are no more than decoration nowadays.
While in London I took the train, double-decker bus, tube (and I even minded the gap), and bike. My only complaint was that the train is really expensive. I probably paid more to take the train in London than the plane to London. But I guess you get what you pay for (in a good way).
Hyde Park
Since it was still really early in the morning, I couldn’t go to stores or museums, so I went to Hyde Park. I heard about Speakers’ Corner as a place were people can share their interesting ideas. I don’t know what goes on nowadays, but early in the morning there was no one to hear my musings. In retrospect that was probably a good thing.
British Museum
After that I went to the British Museum and I saw the most British thing, a huge queue. Now, I was just in the airport, so I thought I knew what a line was, but this was a proper British queue that extended almost entirely around the museum. However, the line went so fast that it took almost as long to find the end as it did to reach the beginning. There I finally saw what I had wanted to see in person for a while, the Rosetta Stone.
It wasn’t just the Rosetta Stone, there was so much to see from all over the world. It felt like a mini world fair, except all the artefacts are historic, and they only came from places that the British conquered. But since I only had about an hour, there was more than enough for me to see. In fact the British Museum prepared a guide for what to see if you are only there for an hour.
I returned to the D conference for lunch, and then went to Covent Gardens. That was a disappointing tourist trap, so I walked to Buckingham Palace. Well that was an even more disappointing tourist trap. The guards simply looked like normal police.
Airport-bound
After a day of fun I had to start my commute to the airport. Apparently, if you pay for the train using a credit card at the gate, rather than buying a ticket to the airport, you get charged twice. There is supposedly some way to get a refund, but even the cost of the ticket once is quiet high. In the future if I can pay less than 40 GBP more to fly to Heathrow, I will do that. I am writing this as I am waiting for yet another delayed flight. Next stop, Berlin.