Roseyland

Click here to read all of my London & Paris trip posts in proper order.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Roseyland organization has gone international. About two years ago, I decided to get a passport. I didn’t really have any reason to get a passport, but it seemed like a good idea. I mean you never know when you are going to need to flee the country on short notice. Fast forward a couple years, and my Aunt and I decided to take a trip to London and Paris. It’s a long complicated story, but my Aunt wanted to see London, I wanted to ride a train through the chunnel, so some how we setteled on a 9 day trip with 4 days in London and 4 days in Paris (the 9th day disappeared somewhere over the atlantic). Lucky you, you get to come along, and by come along, I mean read about it in my blog, which really isn’t as much fun, but it is far cheeper and less exhausting. I think I’m going to write one blog post for everyday of my trip, and maybe a few extras, but we’ll have to see how it goes. Here a picture of some Great Britain Pounds, my passport, and some Euros. Foreign money is so much fun, it’s like Monopoly money with holograms.

We departed for our trip on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009. The plan was for me to fly to Chicago and meet up with my Aunt who was flying from Nebraska. Then we would both be on the same flight from Chicago to London. My flight was delayed because of a broken compass. They tried to fix it for an hour, and then gave up. They did find us another airplane, but it turns out that plane had something wrong with it’s landing gear. Way to go American Airlines! Finally they flew us in another plane and we made it to Chicago 4 hours late, which means I missed my plane to London. Fortunately, there are three flights a night from Chicago to London, and I made the second one. The picture below is my view during the 8 hour flight to London. This was on a 777, which is an amazing airplane. The engines are big enough to stand in and each seat had a personal video screen with movies and TV shows. The longest flight I had been on before this was 4 hours, so 8 hours in airplane seat was a new experience for me. Five hours into the flight, I was convinced that sitting in a coach airline seat for more than 4 hours was a form of torture far worse than water-boarding. Then I found a way to stretch out my legs. This helped a lot, but I wish I had figured it out 5 hours earlier. I didn’t get much sleep on the flight, but I did watch 17 Again and I Love You Man. Both are decent movies, if you are stuck on an airplane.

Since I didn’t have a window seat on the plane, this was my first view of the UK. I was fascinated by the the signs that said UK Border. The made me wonder just where I was if I wasn’t in the UK yet. Was it some sort of no-man’s land? I was also scared to take this picture, because I’m pretty sure the US customs people don’t want you taking their picture. As it turns out, even using your cell phone in an International terminal in the US is a $500 fine. I figured in the UK I could just claim to be a dumb tourist though, and nobody seemed to care. Also, notice how worn down Heathrow looks. I think the UK could spend a little money on remodeling their biggest airport.

I left Chicago Thursday night and arrived in London on Friday morning, which was actually like 4:00 am to me. Everyone said you have to stay up all day the first day, so that you will fall asleep at night and hopefully wake up adjusted to the new time zone. So we checked in to our hotel and headed out to do some sightseeing. Here is a picture of a London telephone booth and a statue of some guy and a tower that is a monument to something. I was tired, give me a break.

This is a picture of Piccadilly Circus. Despite the name, there were no hula hooping bears, elephants, or trapeze artist. I think the UK needs to look up the definition of circus. Piccadilly Circus is kind of like times square and is near the west end theaters, Regent street shopping (think Michigan Avenue or 5th Avenue), and not too far from Buckingham palace.

Since we were tired, we decided to take a an open top double decker bus tour of London. This was a great way to get our bearings and relax at the same time. Here is a picture from the bus. The woman in the hat was our tour guide.

Here is another picture from the bus. If you look close, you can see Big Ben in the background. Now if you were from London, you would say, “Actually, that’s not Big Ben. Big Ben is the bell inside the tower, which you can’t see”. Whatever dude, it looks like Big Ben to me.

One thing that fascinated me about London is that there were giant jumbo jets constantly flying overhead. It’s surreal to see something as relatively new as a jumbo jet flying over architecture that is so old. It’s also weird to think that these planes are coming from and flying to destinations all over the world. It definitely reminded me that I was in a truly international city.

We were in London right after Michael Jackson’s death, and one of the shows in London’s west end is a Michael Jackson themed show. Outside of it, fans had created a memorial with flowers and signs. Kind of cool I guess.

This is Harrod’s, a giant department store in London. It’s owned by an Egyptian man who’s son was in the car with Princess Diana when she died. There is a small memorial to the two inside the store, but I didn’t see it. I did however buy wine and salted caramels. The caramels were delicious. I haven’t tried the wine yet.

Due to my love of subways, I had to take a picture of the Tube. This is actually one of my favorite pictures from the trip. That might have something to do with the attractive young ladies, but I also think the blurred motion of the train is cool, and also the way some parts of the picture are blurry and some are in focus. This of course was all by accident, I actually thought this was a wasted picture until I looked at it on my computer. If you click on the picture, you can see a larger version.

Another thing I loved about the tube is that if you are going one direction on the Piccadilly line, there is this recorded voice that says, “This is the Piccadilly Line to Cockfosters”. It’s funny because it is this female british voice that speaks in a very dignified manner, but Piccadilly and Cockfosters are completely ridiculous words. You should hear it yourself, here is a Youtube video I found.

One thing that that took me by surprise about London was how few British people there were. The employees in our hotel were eastern european, we had waiters from South Africa and Italy, and of course tourist from all over are everywhere. If felt like only 10% of the people around us were actually British. I don’t know why this surprised me though, because you would see the same thing in any big american city, and I’m not complaining, I thought it was totally cool, I just didn’t expect it.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have day two posted. This will include Westminster Abbey, The London Eye, and The Tower of London. In the mean time, you can check out pictures and a few videos from my trip in my flickr set here.