A Blurry Night In London

In order to make our trip to Europe more affordable, Ben (my friend from high school and traveling companion) and I had decided to take a sequence that involved landing in Heathrow at 9 PM and leaving at 7:15 AM the next day. Obviously, this presented us with the problem of what to do during the next 11 hours. Having not made any sleeping arrangements and only constrained by the duty to be in the airport in time for check-in and takeoff, we decided to make the most of the first night of our vacation by taking the next express train to central London, taking the last train back, and finally passing out at the airport with the few hours we would have left before the flight.

The first part of our plan went smashingly well. We knew that once we made it to Paddington Station, we'd only have 2 hours to wander around before we would have to rush back to the train station to make the 11:25 back to Heathrow. Because we were without a London guidebook and were too cheap to hire a taxi to take us around to see the major sights, we decided that our evening would be best spent in the immediate vicinity of Paddington. Therefore, our only reasonable course of action was to investigate the life of an English hooligan and go on an abbreviated pub crawl.

We began at the first pub we saw, Fountains Abbey. While the Guinness were excellent, we found the atmosphere, American pop music blaring from the speakers and the Tyson fight on television, to be disappointingly familiar. We asked some blokes in the pub for recommendations and they suggested a number of bars, one of which being Sir Alexander Flemmings. We sat right down at the bar and proceeded to drink pints of all of the different brews we couldn't find in the US. Because I had become rather drunk, my recollection of the time at the bar is a bit hazy. I think we started a conversation with one of the bar tenders that ended in him suggested that we spend the whole night in London and get back to Paddington whenever we felt like it because "the trains will have to leave if you have a plane to catch." The other bartender invited us to taking a picture of us standing behind the bar as if we were bar tending-- at least, that is the only way I can account for a picture that I found on my camera. I seem to recall having a conversation with an gent in the bar who supported the policy of having last call at 11:00 PM because when he lived in the US he "would drink until 2:00 AM and be unproductive at work the next morning." Great times at Flemmings! The point is that if you ever have a stop-over in London, you can have a wonderful time if you just take the express train to Paddington and get wasted British-style.

We miraculously were able to stumble our way back onto the last train and get back to Heathrow. This is where our stay in London slightly goes downhill. For various reasons, we weren't quite able to get back to our terminal of departure. Therefore, after getting advice from various maintenance workers, we decided to stumble to Terminal 2 to crash for the night. While our stay there was far from comfortable-- a cold floor, aggressive air conditioning, on-going construction, and mysterious loud noises-- it could have been much worse. We were able to get a few hours of sleep on a carpeted floor. If I had to do it all over again, I'd have brought warmer clothes, ear plugs, a bottle of Nyquil. Despite of that ordeal, we were able to get up, eat scrambled eggs, and get on our flight to Vienna.

My next entry, detailing my day in Vienna, will be considerably less substance focused and more art/architecture/culture focused.

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