Getting There

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The flights over were not much fun. Two 7 hours 'red-eyes' from Calgary to London (Heathrow) and then to Dubai.

The layover in London was long enough for me to spend a tourist day from Hyde Park, past Buckingham Palace, through Victoria Station, along the Thames to the London Eye (their gargantuous ferris wheel), up to Trafalgar Square, into the National Art Museum, and down into the Tube back to Heathrow.

If you haven't been lately, there is a thread of terrorist-driven paranoia that surrounds their famous landmarks and locations. The Houses of Parliament (Big Ben) have thick metal car barriers from which black, flak-jacketed police stare are you.....guns loaded and suspicious. A set of stairs from a bridgeway is clad in a heavy, black metal screen that allows you to peer through as if you are a convicted criminal descending to darkness of solitary confinement, seeing the light of civilization for the last time.

But other areas are as British as they can be. Local pub patrons stand out onto the streets (pint in one hand, fag ...cigarette... in the other) to enjoy the summer heat that spills down from the thin slices of blue sky between the buildings. Families of colourful faces sit and enjoy the relaxing calm of fountains, street performers, and general busyness of London. And vendors are making their daily bread selling newspapers, fruits, and sodas.

I have calculated that I have travelled back about 100 years for every hour I was in the air. North American history is young, the 1900s. I figure (with a very broad stroke of reasoning) modern European history began in the 1200s, the beginning of the Dark Ages, and finally into the Middle East and Central Asia about a thousand years before that....including the 3 hour flight from Dubai to Kabul.

There is a castle, a fort, a walled ancient city just over my shoulder to the North of my hotel. We'll see if I can go and see it sometime. (34 32'23"N 69 09'44E)

Cheers,

Jay

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