I went to London for a few days over Thanksgiving to visit my sister.  It was a good time.  

I am terrible at being a tourist.. I took a total of 2 pictures during the entire trip, and they are just of my sister and me in a tube station... but I don't think you can even tell where we were.  I got my daughter a doll at an English toy store, and I got a cool printed t-shirt at one of the Camden markets.  I also found a cd (Metromony) that I hadn't been able to track down over here yet.  I did drink alot of beer.. mainly stuck to the bitters since those are mostly unavailable over here... also managed to drink a couple of guiness pints.  Bought a program from the London Wasps Rugby game, but accidently left it with my sister.  Hoping to get it back when I see her over Christmas.  That's it.  Had a good time walking around and exploring more of the city.  Stood over the prime meridian and saw the official clock of the world (Greenwich mean time).  Ate some bangars and mash, a killer donut, some good italian food, some decent chinese food, and a chicken and mushroom pie.

Everytime I visit England (twice now), I am amazed at the cultural differences between here and there, despite the shared language (sort of).  Protocols for how to do things is different over there.  For instance, it is not usual to tip the bartender at the pub, or at least not much.  I would tend to leave a half pound or so, but it was not expected.  At restaurants, the typical tip is 10%, and on all occasions for us, they just added it to the bill.  People over there are very polite and personable if you talk to them.  At least the Englishmen (and women) are.  I do have a hard time with accents, though.  Toward the end of the trip, I was getting a little better at understanding them, but there are also so many foreigners living and working over there that the varied accents from the different places take the difficulty to another level. 

One thing that people always say about England is that their food is terrible.  I have always eaten well over there so I didn't quite understand it.  I think I am finally understanding the perspective now.  There are many excellen restaurants and such over there, and I have eaten at some great places, both this trip and the last.  The thing is, as Americans, we are used to having many quick, cheap, and somewhat healthy options when it comes to food.  In England, you seem to have two extremes.  On one hand, you can spend a lot of money and go to a restaurant where you will spend 2-3 hours eating a multi-course meal.  These are typically very good.  On the other hand, you have small take-out type places where you can get a basic, pre-made sandwich or fried food for relatively cheap.  This is where the opinions are formed I feel.  To eat like an American is accustomed, the options are just not very good.  Another option is to go to a Pub, which can be very hit-and-miss.  I had some  very good pub food while there, which was not so expensive.  But to do this, one has to be comfortable going into a pub for dinner and not mind dealing with the smokyness of the place.  I did notice that there were more American-like cafe options in the central part of the city, so maybe the American culture around food is catching on... but considering the obesity rate and current health state of Americans, is that such a good thing?  The best way to eat in England is regular trips to the local grocer to get food to make yourself at home.  This doesn't help visiting Americans much, but it does shed some light on how the locals can survive with the food options as they are.

So anyway... Here are my two pictures from England.  They were taken sitting on a bench waiting for the tube train to pick us up.  I don't remember which tube stop it was nor if we were heading home or out.  I think it was after we had been out for a while but we were going to visit another place...

 Here is what I (we) did for my little European vacation...

Wed. Nov 22:  

This is the day I flew out of Nashville.  I worked in the morning and then took a half day and Matt gave me a ride to the airport.  He took me at lunch, and "they" always suggest getting to the airport a couple hours early for international travel.  So I ended up getting to the airport about 3 hours early.  So this would be my first of many hours of waiting around.  I did things such as drink a beer, read a book,  and read a magazine for the three hours until my flight.  We finally got going and were pushed along by the wind so that we would arrive about 15 minutes ahead of schedule.  Now, my flight was later to leave than the one I originally signed up for by about 20 minutes, so when this flight changed on the schedule, my second flight from Chicago to London was also changed to a later flight.  I originally had picked the first one because I would have only had about a 45 minute layover in Chicago.  With my flight landing early, I had plenty of time to make the earlier flight, but they wouldn't let me on due to checked luggage not being with me.  So I waited another 3 hours, during which I drank a couple more beers and ate some pizza and walked the length of the terminal about 20 times.  My goal was to make myself drowsy from beer and tired from walking so that I would sleep on my long flight to London. 

I finally boarded the huge plane to London and that flight got underway.  The tail wind was evidently continuing for this flight because they announced a flight time to London of about 6 hours and 20 minutes.  That sounded great, except that I needed to get some sleep.   I also wanted to eat the dinner they would be serving.  So I got a glass of wine and a pretty good dinner. Before they even picked up my tray after eating I had gone to sleep.  My sleep wasn't terrific, but it was good enough to make the time pass quickly.

Thurs. Nov 23:

Thanksgiving.  I woke up on the plane when I heard them serving the morning breakfast to people a few seats up.  Perfect timing.  I ended up sleeping a little more than 4 hours and felt quite refreshed and ready for coffee and their light breakfast.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a bowl of fresh fruit and some starbucks coffee.  Very nice.

I got off the plane when we landed and went through imigration/customs very quickly, no problems.  Got my bag and started out to find my way into London.  Tori had emailed me the sequence of tube trains I needed to take, but it took me a while to find my bearings in the airport.  FIrst I found an ATM machine and withdrew the money I intended to use for the trip.  Then I found my way to the  underground station.  Finally figured out how to get an extension for my tube pass to get me into the city and proceeded to make my way through to find Tori's stop.  She met me at the station and took me up to her flat so I could unload and rest a little.  

She has a cool place.  A pretty small room, but at least she has a private bathroom (closet) and a window that opens and such.  She has several flatmates, all of whom I met except one... the one that none of the others really know or get along with.  Anyway.  That afternoon, Tori and I went to the grocery store down the road to get her some groceries.  There grocery store was about the same size as what we have here, but it was organized kind of randomly.  They have tons of pre-prepared foods that you just put in the oven or microwave to heat up.  Most of the food I didn't recognize.  Some of the food was the same as over here, and then some looked the same and was from the same manufacturer, but had different names.  Their take on things is a little different than ours over here.

After the gorcery store trip, we into the city to explore a little.  I think we went to Liverpool area and checked out a cool market, walked along this one street  that is packed with Indian restaurants where the owners or whoever stands outside trying to persuade us to eat at their place, and had a drink at a pub.  We then walked more and found this cool area where a bunch of bike riders (the street variety like messengers and such) were hanging out.  Amazing how many people over there ride fixed-gear bikes.  Anyway.  We continued one one of the walks for which Tori had a card.  We went to another pub where we ate dinner.  Then we headed back to her place and I crashed out pretty quickly.  The lack of sleep was catching up to me, so I gave in and got to bed early so that I would be ready to go again the next day.

Fri. Nov 24:

Friday morning, we slept in late before finding our way back out to the streets to do more exploring.  First we headed to Greenwich and saw some old ship which was being worked on, so we couldn't tour it.  Then we went to the location where the prime meridian(0 degrees longitude) is marked and where the standard units of english measurment reside.  This is also where the Greenwich mean time clock is.  There is an observatory, as wll, but it was also closed due to refurbishment.  I have read that November is the London tourist downtime... so that is probably why everything was under construction.

Next we headed into central London and proceeded to walk.  And then we walked and then walked somemore.  We walked across the Thames river on  one of the bridges.  We walked up a couple of the main shopping districts.  We covered tons of ground and then were tired.  One of our stops was a 5-6 story toystore that was crazy with shoppers, and it wasn't black friday in England.  Anyway, we eventually headed back to Tori's side of town and looked for a place to sit and eat.  The only place we found was a chinese restaurant called Hong Kong City.  This place was funny.  They had a buffet section and then they had a sit-down restaurant section (which we were unaware of).  I'm not too big on chinese buffets, so when given the option, we chose to order from the menu.  So they took us to the restaurant section, which was in another room where there were a bunch of tables randomly set up with chairs and a stage on one end.  It looked like a conference hall set up for a special dinner or something.  Funny thing was they didn't bother hiding any of the mess.  There were stacks of chairs off to the side and all of the service areas were lining the walls.  We ordered food, but I think they were a little put out we didn't order any alcohol.  The food was decent, and then we had to wait an eternity for them to bring us the check.  We were tired so we didn't want to linger around too long, but it was kinda forced onto us.  We finally left there, went back to Tori's pad and relaxed until falling asleep.

Sat. Nov 25:

After walking all over London Friday, we decided to take it easy on Saturday.  But with the Rugby game scheduled for Sunday, this was also my last open day in London.  So we decided to limit our all-out exploring and just hit up a couple main areas.

First we went to Camden Town.  This is pretty-much punk central in London.  But besides all of the shops selling spiked collars and huge space boots, there were also several huge market areas.  There were tons of vendors selling cheap clothes (mostly knock-offs) as well as a bunch of vendors selling nicer things and trinkets and art and jewelry and about anything else you could imagine.  This is where I Tori and I picked up a couple cool screen-printed t-shirts.  There were also a bunch of food vendors there selling about any kind of food you could want.  We each had a crepe and a donut.  Healthy eating.  The other cool thing about Camden was the canal running through it.  We could see the different levels of water made possible by the locks that were used to move the boats along the canal.  That was very neat.

After Camden, Tori and I headed back to that shopping district from Friday to go back to the toy store.  I was determined to get Emma a doll I had seen there.  So after finding our way back and finally finding the store, we continued exploring a little, but this time we planned on having dinner at one of the Italian restaurants along this strip that had a bunch of Italian places.  On our way there, I got to experience using one of the London public bathrooms.  It looked like a subway entrance, but headed to an underground restroom with video surveillance and everything.  I can tell you I wouldn't want to review those tapes.

The restaurant we went to was good.  I think I offended them by not ordering a "starter", but we did order a bottle of house wine to share, so I think they weren't completely annoyed by us.  We did have to ask for some bread, though.  We also ordered some Tiramasu, which was pretty good.  It was a nice time, and this time we did take our time to enjoy the meal and relaxed some.  Afterwards we headed back to Tori's place and got somemore wine, but we didn't drink much of it.  We were tired from another long day (and the wine was only mediocre at best).

Sun. Nov 26:

We woke up Sunday to an alarm.  We decided that since we didn't know exactly where we were going for the Rugby match, we would head out early.  When we got on the first tube train, we realized that we didn't have the tickets.  So it was off at the first stop, waiting for the return train, and then heading back to get them.  Not a big deal.  With tickets in hand, we were on our way again.  The trip consisted of taking a few different underground trains to a particular stop, and then boarding a regular regional train to make the trip out to High Wycombe for the match.  Our timing was great because as soon as we got to the train station and I got my train ticket, there was a train boarding that we caught to take us to our destination.  We got to High Wycombe plenty early, so we went across the street to a pub where we got a couple drinks and some brunch.  Food was good here, and the drinks were good, too.  After a while, we decided it was time to head to the game.  Back across the street at the train station, there was a line(queue) forming for the shuttle what would take us to the stadium.  That shuttle dropped us about a mile or so from the stadium, which we walked to and found our seats.

The rugby match was pretty interesting.  Having watched it some on tv and read the write-up on wikipedia, Tori and I each had a basic understanding of the rules of the game.  But the nuances are still lost on me.  For instance, there were many times that I the crowd cheered for something that I didn't understand to be a good play or an advantageous occurrence.  I tried to understand, but didn't quite get there.  One thing I understand, though, is that those guys are super tough.  Also at the game, Tori and I each got a English pie.  Mine was chicken and mushroom and Tori's was Chicken Balti (some curry variety or something).  They were decent, but difficult to eat sitting in the stands with no utensils.  AFTer the game, we walked, with a crowd of people, back to the place where we were dropped off by the shuttle.  We waited there for the shuttle back to the train station.  After about 20 minutes of waiting with about 30 other people we started so suspect something was wrong; especially since we kep seeing the shuttle buses drive by full of people coming from the direction of the stadium.  As our number dwindled, we started to wonder if we are in the wrong place.  When a bunch of people decided to pony-up and pay the fare to ride the standard city bus, Tori and I decided to wander back to the stadium.  We figured if we didn't find the shuttle stop there, we would just get a cab back to the station.  Well, once we got to the stadium, there was a line of people waiting, and at the head of the line was a person holding a sign that stated "Train and Bus Stations".  We got on the next bus that came by (most likely the last because the line was cleared by this bus) and made our way back to the station.  We barely made it in time for the next train.  This train took longer to get back because of a number of stops, but we were sitting and on our way home.  A ride on a few underground trains and we were back at Tori's flat.  We walked down a bit to get a kabab (more like a gyro over here) and took it back and ate while hanging out a while with a couple of Tori's flatmates.  We then packed for my trip back and hit the sack.

Mon. Nov 27:

Monday found me up around 8:30 to leave by 9.  I had two bags for my trip back, so my first objective of the day was to get across London on the tube while taking two large bags with me.  At least one of them rolled.  At every transfer from one train to the next, it got a little more difficult because each transfer found me closer to central London and among even more Monday morning commuters.  Then, as I was on my last train and heading towards Heathrow airport, the train stated to thin out.  By the time I made it to the airport, there were only a few people remaining on my car.  At the air port, I checked in, checked my baggage, spent about 30 minutes getting through security, hit up the duty-free, went to my gate, allowed security to search my carry-on bag, and then waited about 20 minutes to board.  While waiting, I bought some bottled water for my trip, but I accidently bought sparkling water instead of non-sparkling.  Not the first time this has happend, and I doubt it will be the last.  I boarded and started what was an 8 hour, 45 minute flight back to the states.  A quick trip through immigration and I was once again home in America.  Another 3-hour wait and I was flying back to Nashville.  Matt picked me up at the airport, and I was home by about 9pm.  In bed by 10.