London: Where Everything That Could Have Gone Wrong Did Go Wrong

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This is a long one, so get ready.

London was interesting to say the least…I think Allison and I can both say that we’re very glad to have gone to London, and while it was by no means bad there were many small things that added up to make a rather unfortunate trip to London.

Sunday, February 14

It all started in Brussels. We arrived from Amsterdam and had about an hour before our train to London left. Now, for all of the other trains we have taken since coming to France, we have always gotten to the station way too early and ended up freezing to death while waiting. So, this time, we decided to stop in the station for a hot chocolate before getting on the train to London, because it would be pointless to get to the platform more than 10…maybe 15 minutes before its scheduled departure. (A few hours earlier at the Amsterdam train station we almost got on the wrong train because we where there too early! There was a different train leaving from the same platform only 15 minutes before ours left—luckily we asked before getting on the train and realized that we needed to wait if we didn’t want to end up in Amsterdam North…)

So we sat and warmed up a bit in a small café and about 20 or 25 minutes before our train left we decided to go ahead and meander toward our train. We followed the signs pointing us toward platform 2, and found ourselves faced with…security! Uh oh. We hadn’t realized that we were going to have to put all our things through an X-Ray machine and take off our shoes and coats to walk through a scanner. But apparently Great Britain likes to be difficult. So we started feeling a little bit of pressure to rush because trains don’t really wait and they don’t really get delayed. Of course when I walked through the metal detector it started uncontrollably beeping so I had to be wanded. Once we made it through security, we were greeted by another gem of a surprise: customs. We started to get kind of flustered because we had approximately ten minutes until our train started moving. A worker person pointed us toward a station where there wasn’t really a line, and we showed the guy our passports, and then he told us that we had to fill out a form to get into London. I told him that we were on the train that left in 10 minutes and asked if we would make it, to which he just replied “it depends on how fast you fill out the forms.” So we rushed back to where the forms were and started filling out our names, birthdates, etc. And then we had to write where we were staying while in London (which was a mandatory section). And of course, Allison and I had just been talking a lot about Dublin and our plans for when we got there that I just said, write Trinity College because that’s where Anna goes to school. (Minor lapse of thought—that’s where we were staying in Dublin.) Allison was just kind of freaking out that we were going to completely miss our train, so she didn’t say anything and just wrote it down, but when we went back to give the customs guy our papers he asked us where exactly we were staying, to which I replied with our friend Anna at Trinity College. When he asked where Trinity College was and I said downtown Dublin, he looked at us as if we were retarded. “You’re going to Dublin?” whoops. We eventually redeemed ourselves, and he was fairly nice to us as he could see we were really flustered. (“We just have to have where you’re staying so that if your parents call the British Embassy, we can tell them where you are.” Which, by the way, is the worst reason I’ve ever heard. How do you know I told my parents I’m going to London? How do you know how long I’m staying in that hotel?)

Anyway, from there we sprinted to the platform from there, still awkwardly holding our coats and bags from going through security, somehow hauled the suitcase on board, and luckily found our assigned seats fairly easily (probably because they were pretty much the only ones left). I don’t think either of our hearts stopped racing until we got to Kings Cross Station. One of the worst and most embarrassing experiences of my life.

We reached Kings Cross Station around 9:30, hit up an ATM to get some English Pounds, then went to the grocery store in the station to buy something for dinner and breakfast. The only directions I had to our 49 pound a night hotel were ones that I had written down from looking at a map. We exited the station, trying to figure out exactly what street we were on (all I had was to turn left after leaving the station, but I don’t think we came out that exit). Someone saw that we were staring at a post-it note and came up to us to ask if he could help. I told him the street we were looking for and he said he’d never heard of it. I knew it was a main road really close by, so we instantly knew that he would be useless and spent the next 2 minutes trying to convince him to leave us so that we could find our own way, and sure enough, as soon as he left and we started walking a bit, we found the road I had written down and after about a 10 minute fairly easy (although cold) walk found our hotel. When we arrived, the guy made me show him my passport and he wrote down my information which I thought was weird, but he said that was the rule in London for foreigners. Weird security things in London. I didn’t really want to give him my passport, but we had no other option.

We found our room, which was about the size of a closet with two twin beds, and went to bed pretty quickly. The beds were some of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever experienced—before falling asleep I counted 14 springs that I could actually feel in contact with my body at once instant. But we were tired enough that we slept well enough.

Monday, February 15

We got up the next morning I got up to shower at 7 instead of 8 because I forgot to change my alarm to the London time zone. The shower was luke warm at best. My early rising gave us plenty of time for our complementary continental breakfast before meeting Yinan at a close by Tube stop to take us to her, Emily’s and Lindsay’s apartment (Our friends from Bucknell who we were staying with the rest of our time in London). We went downstairs to the basement where breakfast was served, where we had to wait to sit at a table that had other people speaking a foreign language that we didn’t recognize and ate yogurt and toast.

We then left to walk with our huge suitcase around the streets of London to find Yinan—probably about a 15 minute walk. (Uphill, of course. And a 50ish pound suitcase makes it significantly worse.) So far London didn’t look like anything special—just a big city with lots of buildings packed into a small space. We easily found Yinan at the Angel Tube stop, and then walked about ten more minutes to her apartment. Where we found that they lived on the top floor—the sixth floor. And the elevator had broken the night before. Joy. So, considering the fact that neither Yinan or Allison could lift the suitcase, I carried the monster up all those stairs.

Wiping the sweat off my forehead with sore arms, we finally entered their flat, which was actually a pretty sweet set up. They only had one bedroom for all three of them, but a nice bathroom and a nice big kitchen/living room with two couches for us to sleep on!

After leaving our huge suitcase and backpacks in their flat, we went to see a few sights around London while the weather was fairly nice (cold, but not raining). We went back to the tube station and figured it out pretty easily and went straight to see Big Ben. We took some pictures (as you can see) and saw Westminster Abbey and then took a stroll down to Buckingham Palace (we thought we could try to go in there, but found out once we got there that we couldn’t and only saw the gift shop). Also we saw that in the winter the changing of the guards only happens every other day and we had come on the off day. Bummer.

We then decided to try to take a bus to Trafalger Square (the all day tickets we had bought on the metro were also an all day bas on the London bus system—pretty sweet deal). Right by Buckingham Palace there was a tour bus stop, which we thought might be interesting, but when we saw that it cost like 30 pounds we decided not to. But there was a nice woman there who told us that we could take the London Public bus system (with the cool double decker red buses) because there were certain lines that drove through all the great sites of London that we would want to see. We just had to take the 15 to the 7 and we would see everything we could want to! She pointed us just down the road we were on to catch the 15. Then we realized that there were a ton of bus stops around and we had no idea which one was the right one. So we looked around a bit, and then from afar saw a bus 15 stopped! We started running towards it and got on just in time. Feeling pretty good ourselves, we climbed to the second story of the bus and sat in front and got a great view of the road. We sat on the bus for a while, without seeing anything too special (“Wow, it’s a good thing we took the bus! This would have been a really long walk!”) We hit some construction traffic and started going really slowly.

Every time the bus stopped, a woman would come on the bus speakers and say “Fulham, Broadway!” After being on the bus about an hour, we saw a sign that said “Fulham Broadway.” Yes, this was the first time we truly considered the possibility that we were going the wrong direction. Whoops. Oh well, right? We’ll just stay on this bus and it will go in a small loop and we’ll just take it the other direction. We said this at the last stop. Right before the driver turned off the engine. So we sheepishly walked down the double decker stairs and asked the driver when he would be leaving again. He asked where we wanted to go and when we told him he responded with, “You girls got on going the wrong direction, didn’t you?” Yes. Yes we did.

He pointed us across the intersection to where the bus route started. But we decided to take this opportunity to eat a bit of a late lunch (delicious hamburgers) and to look at a map, which showed us that we were randomly in south west London—pretty much far away from anything we would want to be by. After our leisurely lunch we went back and got on the right bus, rode it for around another hour, and got off at Trafalgar square, where it was probably about 33 degrees and raining. This was probably the single most miserable moment of our entire trip. We stood in the middle of the square, did a 360 while snapping a few pictures, then proceeded to look for the 7 bus to take us to the Tower Bridge. However, there are about 50 billion bus stops around Trafalger Square, in all directions, and we had no idea where we should go and we were miserable at that instant. We say a sign for a café inside a bookstore where we took refuge and I got a latté to go and Allison got a muffin to go. The latté warmed me up, but after asking a few people in the bookstore, nobody knew where the 7 bus stopped. So we faced the London miserable-ness again and eventually found our bus. Where there was no room to sit, so we were standing, squished together with many other London-ers on the top floor of a bus. This kept Allison from being able to eat her muffin which added to the unhappiness.

We eventually descended the bus close to the Tower bride, where we found souvenir shops to meander through to warm up and get out of the rain which was enjoyable for all of 5 minutes. We eventually braved the weather again to get closer to the Tower Bridge in order to take a picture in the miserable rain, then found the closest tube station to head back to our friend’s apartments. Of course, this was during rush hour. We squeezed on our first tube, and then when we transferred to our second one there were so many people on it we literally couldn’t fit. Allison wasn’t a fan of waiting for the next one just to be jammed on with other people again, so we decided to try attempt number two at conquering the London bus system. When consulting our map, a friendly Londoner came up to try to help us, but didn’t exactly understand that we wanted to take a bus instead of a tube, and then gave us the most complicated directions ever on how to get to a bus stop he thought might work, although I’m pretty sure he thought he was giving us the most straightforward directions that has ever been dictated to mankind. After leaving him and consulting a few maps at bus stops, we found the right one, were able to grab a seat, and find our way back to our friends’ flat.

When we got back, Emily and Lindsay were home and it was great to see them. We visited for a while, and then Allison and I got mini frozen pizzas to eat while our friends all went to dinner with somebody’s mom who was in town. We changed into our PJs and got into relax mode while our pizzas baked, and then sadly upon taking the pizzas out of the oven, mine flipped face down on the bottom of their oven, not only taking all the toppings off my pizza but also cooking cheese onto their oven.

We ate what we could of our one pound pizzas (therefore they were only marginal—especially with a lack of toppings…) and then began scrubbing the oven to try to destroy the evidence (which worked after a bit of elbow grease—they’ll only know if they read this…)

Our friends invited us out to a pub afterward, but we thought it would be a bit too complicated to meet them there and enjoyed just veg-ing on the couch for the rest of the night, (and we found 20 pound seats to see Wicked the next night online) then we went to bed before too late to get ready for an early morning of what we hoped would be a more successful day in London.

Tuesday, February 16:

We got up early-ish to go to the London Zoo! Allison and I both love animals so we thought this would be a good pick me up. And it was. Once we got there. Again, we took used the bus system because there’s no tube stop close to the London Zoo, and the bus took about an hour. But it did drop us off close, at a stop called “London Zoo” so there was no confusion there. It was absolutely POURING rain, but we decided to look at this as crowd control. As in there were hardly any people there.

We visited the penguins first, which were actually just kept outside—apparently there are penguins that don’t have to live in the Artic! Who knew? Despite the gross weather, Allison and I had a great day at the zoo, even though the animals seemed to be kind of lazy because of the rain. However, to be quite honest, I was expecting a bit more from the London Zoo. In fact, I would say that it really doesn’t have much on the Oregon Zoo. They did have lions and kangaroos, but no elephants or rhinos! Also their reptile house was pretty sweet (London Zoo Reptile House—where Harry Potter discovers he’s magical by making the glass disappear—anyone? Anyone?) and they had pygmy hippos which were so cute! (Although no real hippos—I was really anticipating the London Zoo to rival the San Diego Zoo, but really there’s hardly a comparison.)

After hitting up all the exhibits, Allison and I trudged back to our bus stop in the rain where we saw our bus pulling away just as we came around the corner. There was an electronic reader board there telling us the next bus was in 10 minutes, and the one after that was in 16 minutes. Wishing we would have spent 10 more minutes at the zoo, we huddled under the small bus stop cover and stared at the reader board as the times approached zero. We noticed that the second bus was making up lots of time, and around 4 minutes until arrival, the two buses were neck and neck. The bus that was originally first pulled ahead right before it came to the bus stop, but we decided to hold out for the second bus with the hopefully more aggressive driver in London rush hour traffic.

As the first bus pulled up, we couldn’t believe we were doing it, but we let it pass without getting on, but once we got on the second bus we knew it was all worth it when our driving was running red lights left and right. That is, it was all worth it until a hoard of 10 British children with two moms got on the bus and surrounded Allison and I—screaming and hitting each other, and the moms talking on the phones, and the children talking literally into my and Allison’s ears. It was rather unpleasant to say the least and equally unfortunate that they had gotten on the bus a mere two stops after us, and got off the bus one stop before us. Needless to say, we were happy to get off the bus, grab some pasta to go, and head back to Emily, Lindsay, and Yinan’s flat.

We got back and had just enough time to shower and eat before leaving again for the 30 minute tube ride to where we were going to see Wicked. That was by far our favorite part of London—we had bought cheap tickets with only “partial view” so we had no idea what to expect—probably a giant pole right in front of our seats. When we got there we realized that this just meant we were sitting above/behind one of the doorways, so there was a banister/wall in front of our seats, so we just had to lean forward a bit to be able to see the stage instead of slouching in our seats, which wasn’t bad at all.

The musical was wonderful. Allison and I had both heard a lot about it, so it was great to see it for ourselves and the actors and actresses were marvelous. Also we easily found our way home afterwards on not so crowed tubes, then went straight to bed.

Wednesday, February 17:

Again, we woke up early to go to the Museum of Natural History and the Science Museum. Of courses, today was a beautiful day and we were about to spend the entirety of it inside.

We walked to the Tube station, bought our all days passes and made our way to the museums. The tube was packed, even though it was about 10 am, and it seemed that EVERYONE was getting off at our stop. There was a huge mob of people, and to accommodate for the huge amounts of people, all the exits from the Tube were open (you didn’t have to present your ticket again). We didn’t understand why there were so many people there! We found out later it was because that week was also the week that the London school kids had their February break, and every single one of them had chosen Wednesday as the day to go to the free science museum and the Museum of Natural History.

The masses of people caused the museums to not be as cool as they would have been if nobody had been there, or even if just a normal sized crowd had been there. We stood in a long line to get into the Museum of Natural History first, but it moved pretty quickly and we got in within ten minutes or so. Then we decided to see their dinosaur exhibit, which was supposed to be really cool, but it’s kind of a walk through thing, and we ended up spending like an hour basically standing in line/going through the exhibit super slowly.

We mulled around the museum for a couple hours, then decided that the museum cafeteria was wayyyyy to expensive, so we looked for a restaurant of some sort on our walk to the science museum. However, the science museum was directly next door. So, we decided to take a walk around the very large block to see if there was anywhere else we could eat, but of course we’re probably on one of the only blocks in London that didn’t have any food. I think this was because we were right next to some sort of college/business school campus, which we ended up walking through. When we had almost come full circle to the Science Museum and had decided we would just have to eat there, we spotted the school cafeteria at this university and decided to check it out, which ended up working out well (except we felt pretty awkward when they asked us for our Student IDs at the university and we were just like uh…..but that was only for an extra discount).

After our random school cafeteria lunch, we went back to the science museum which would have probably been my favorite place if there hadn’t been so many people. At one point, I was reading a sign about how rainbows were discovered and a boy around 8 years old just came over and started rolling around on the sign that I was clearly reading. I have never seen so many misbehaved children and unhappy parents in my entire life.

We left the Science Museum absolutely hating mankind and returned to our friends’ flat. Luckily, the night got better because we met up with all the London DGs (five of them in all), went to dinner (fish and chips), went to Amanda’s school bar (yes, there was a bar on campus…weird) and then went to a club with their friends which was pretty fun. Allison and I bought a raffle ticket there for a trip for two to Egypt, but sadly number 64 did not pull through for us.

Allison and I left with Yinan a little earlier so that we could get home and go to bed, but Yinan didn’t actually know how to get home from there, so after wandering from bus stop to bus stop for far too long, I made the executive decision to hail a cab which got us home a mere five minutes before Emily and Lindsay who had stayed for another hour, but knew how to use the public transportation to get home.

Thursday, February 18

We woke up the next morning excited to set off for Dublin. We packed our things, and of course, discovered that the elevator had broken the night before yet again, so we slammed our 50ish pound suitcase down the six flights of stairs, probably waking everyone in the building up in the process. We set off for the tube, which would take us to the bus stop for EasyBus, the bus company that runs lots of shuttles from London’s airports to downtown for fairly cheap. I had bought our tickets online and printed them out in advance, because this company had lots of good reviews. We got to the bus stop fairly early (we didn’t want to miss the bus) so we waited for probably a little over half an hour. Our bus was supposed to pick us up at 10:26. Around then, a bus kind of slowed down and the driver looked at us, but the bus was green and the EasyBus color is orange, so we didn’t make any action to lurch towards the bus, but I thought if the driver opened the door I would ask him. However, we received no such grace. After stalling for approximatedly 2.5 seconds, the bus kept moving and in doing so allowed us to see that it said “In Partnership with EasyBus” in orange on the back. Allison and I freaked out a little, running maybe 10 feet down the sidewalk, but realizing that it was useless. We had been waiting with a couple from Italy (but who spoke English) and we all freaked out together for a bit, wondering what we should do (the airport we were going to was about an hour bus ride). Thank goodness, the couple showed us that their shuttle reservation was actually for 10:46, so we could just get on the next bus if there was room. Luckily there was room, and Allison and I just got to the airport 20 minutes later than originally planned, but still we enough time.

Or so we thought.

We go to check our bag with at the RyanAir desk and are surprised by the fact that no, luggage weight limits aren’t the standard US 50 pounds, but 15 kilos—about 35 pounds. Our suitcase weighed 22 kilos. Attempted to shove as much more as we could into our backpacks, but it still weighed about 20 kilos. Whoops. We decided that we would just have to pay the overweight fee. The very unhelpful woman behind the desk took this moment to inform us that it’s not just an overweight fee, but it costs 20 UK POUNDS for EACH KILO your suitcase is overweight. I can’t remember the exact exchange rate but a pound is around $1.50. So Allison and I start mildly freaking out again, repacking our backpacks and suitcase in the middle of the airport—so much for being smart with the “couples” packing. Allison had to through away a big bottle of water she had, and a jar of jam we had bought for breakfast, as well as putting on many more layers and testing the strength of the zippers on our backpacks.

In the middle of all this, the unhelpful English woman glances down at us over the rim of her glasses (I can’t actually remember if she had glasses or not, but when I think back to this moment I picture her peering over little half moon spectacles) and says, “You might want hurry, you have 15 minutes to get to your gate.” WHAT??? On my watch we still had like 45 minutes, so she was referring to when they start boarding, but still.

We just had to zip up our suitcase, and say that we had reduced our weight to 17 kilos, only 2 overweight and decided we had no other option but to pay the fee to get out of London. When we informed her this, she got out a slip, started writing as slowly as a 3rd grader trying to print as neat as possible, gave us the slip of paper and said, “You have to go across the way to pay the fine, then bring the slip back here and I’ll check the bag.”

Allison and I looked at each other, mutually communicating that we were both experiencing the most diabolical moment of our lives. Allison ran to the “payment counter” while I finished zipping up our suitcase (a very easy task) and our backpacks (which was near impossible). Allison returned just as I pulling another sweater over my head, forced the suitcase payment paper at the British woman, and ran for security, which was not a short line. Especially since the man directed us to the line that was about 3 times longer than the other. I had a minor heart attack that I had lost my passport but eventually found it in a weird pocket in my backpack that I must have just shoved it in.

It took about 10 minutes to walk from security to our gate, where we were met by a huge mass of people. There were two gates right next to each other with planes departing at about the same time, and no seats in the room and no organized line. Allison and I were sweating like fat men in Texas and had no idea where we should be going to ensure we got on the RIGHT airplane (which in our opinion couldn’t happen fast enough). In the end, She stood at the end of a mile long line while I walked to the front, knocking over everything in my way with my giant backpack, only to return without knowing whether or not we were standing in the right line.

In the end, we ended up cutting probably the majority of the line which meant we got seats next to each other where we could sit down, breathe, and say farewell to London.

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Photos

London Eye
We did NOT go on it..Allison's scared of heights and I wasn't to keen to go either...

"Fulham Broadway"
It wasn't until we saw this sign that we truly realized that something had gone horribly wrong.

Lion.
This is the only way I could get a picture of any of the four lions without random people climbing all over, so it's super zoomed in. I think it shows off his features rather nicely.

The Tower Bridge
You can't tell that it's raining in this picture...I suppose that's a good thing

London Zoo Pictures!
A bearded Pig...

Pygmy Hippo!!!
Sooooo cute

The stage at Wicked
A few times during the musical that huge bat thing started to move and it always freaked me out...I thought it was kind of unnecessary...

Sweet Escalator
See the hoards of people? Picture them all crowed around one small sign, or in line to see dinosaurs, or trying to share in some interactive experience...

A Real Model T!
The Science Museum was cool

Me: In My Natural Element
(Get it??)

Comments

[Mom]

Whew!
A whirlwind! You were busy. I'm glad you escaped London.

[G.Irene G. Walt]

Want to meet in London?
I can't imagine! The up side is that you are gaining experience in foreign travel. How many times were you near tears? We love you.

[Mom]

Get out!
So glad you finally got out of London! Your biorhythms must have been out of sync with the Brits while you were there. But you did some great activities while there.