this is a strange place

Well, we got back safely on Saturday, been recovering for the past couple of days. Not much happened on the plane, bit of a problem with my computer toolkit at security (they don’t allow any tools in carry-on baggage in the UK, which I didn’t know) but I took it back to the Delta ticket counter and they took care of checking it for me. That made us a bit late for the plane, they had finished boarding almost everyone by the time we got there, but we still made it. The flights were uneventful, I was a bit worried about customs since I had never done it before, but that went extremely smoothly. Then back home, which felt really nice.

Time for a recap:

Things I liked about the UK

• I used a credit card to pay for almost everything, and I have See ID written on the back of my credit cards, because I would like people to ask for a photo ID when I use my cards. Here in the states it is a bit of a crapshoot if people will ask, about half the time they don’t even check to see if it has been signed. Not so in the UK. Everybody asked for my ID, I think I used my card at least 50 different places and I think only once or twice was I not asked for an ID. I really liked that.
• Fast, cheap, reliable public transportation that runs constantly is very nice. I know a lot of big cities have good subway and bus systems here in the states, but in the UK even the little towns had good bus service. Here in Lexington there is the bus that I use, but one of the things I really dislike about the bus is that it only runs every half hour, so if I miss one I have to sit there for half an hour waiting for the next one. Most of the buses in London run every ten minutes or less, same with the Underground. I know that the reason they don’t here in the states is because there is no demand, which may change with gasoline’s inexorable march. That and the trains. You can take a train from just about anywhere to just about anywhere, and the trains are nice. Here, I need to drive two hours to get the nearest Amtrak station, and it would take about 16 hours to get anywhere I would want to go (namely Prairie or Grand Rapids) and once I got there I would be screwed without a car since the public transportation is either non-existent (Prairie) or doesn’t run where I need it to go (Sparta/Grand Rapids). Maybe, maybe that will change with gas prices, but I’m not holding my breath.

Things I didn’t like about the UK

• The big city gets to me after a while. I like visiting for a bit, but I couldn’t live there.
• The constant surveillance got unnerving after a while, especially after what happened at the Eye, which I am comfortable posting now that I’m back in the states. I was getting on the London Eye, and they have a security checkpoint where they go over you with a scanner and look in your bags. It was there that I found out that it was completely illegal to carry a knife with a locking blade, no matter how small that knife is, in London. My knife, which I bought when I was 8 with my Christmas money and had been carrying for 15 years was confiscated, and I had to sign a statement saying that I had been found carrying an illegal weapon. That _really_ pissed me off. It’s an asininely stupid law, and I had checked the knife laws in the UK, and what I got from an official .gov.uk website was that a folding knife with a blade shorter than 3 inches (which my knife was) was fine. It said nothing about locking blades. I can sort of, in a way, understand efforts to curb gun possession, I think that they are misguided, but I can understand where the anti-gun crowd is coming from, even thought I still disagree with them. I cannot understand where that law comes from. I use my pocketknife every day for innumerable little tasks, and not having it for a week and a half, especially while we were camping, was a huge burden. I realize that it can be used as a weapon, but so can my hands, are you going to confiscate those too?
• There were also bag checks everywhere. Every time we went into a museum or a library, getting on the train to Paris (the other trains didn’t have any checks), getting on the Eye, I felt like they were very invasive, and grew to really loathe them while I was there. And the incompetence, at the British Library I had my small computer toolkit with me (a screwdriver, a dim chip inserter and remover, stuff like that). The idiot security guard spent five minutes looking at it, finally called a supervisor over, who took one look and said it was fine. I don’t like other people going through my stuff. Even though I’m not hiding anything, it still feels extremely invasive.

Anyhow, overall we both had a lot of fun and would definitely go again. Until later.

So, I thought that we had gotten away from not speaking the language, but I guess not. But more on that later.

Grace and I slept in this morning. We were pretty exhausted from our Paris trip yesterday. We looked it up last night, and doing both the Cadbury Chocolate factory tour and Wales just wouldn’t fit in one day. It would have been about nine hours on the train, not leaving any time for the tour. We’re going to try to stop off and see it on our way up to Scotland, since it would only add a couple of hours to the trip.

Matt and Steve got in around noon, I found out this morning (about ten minutes before Grace and I were going to leave) that I needed to stick around to let them in. I thought that they were going to get keys from Seales, like I did, but I found out that Grace and I were the only ones with keys. I kind of assumed that there were one or two more to hand out. I’m kind of glad Seales called, if he hadn’t Grace and I would have been halfway to Cardiff with both the keys to the apartment when they showed up. It wasn’t a huge deal though, there wasn’t anything time critical we wanted to do in Cardiff so we just caught the train that left an hour later than we had originally planned.

Grace and I had a nice walk down Portobello Market, which is right by where the apartments are. Lots of stalls with pretty stuff, we got a few souvenirs and presents for people. Then we caught the tube to Paddington, where we caught the train to Cardiff. It was about three hours on the train. We walked around Cardiff for a while, took a lot of pictures of the castle, but we were too late to get in. Grace and I weren’t sure if we wanted to go in anyhow, it would have been 20 pounds ($40 US) for both of us. We got pictures of another nice, older-looking building but couldn’t figure out what it actually was. We had supper at a Chinese buffet, because we wanted something fast so we could catch the earlier train back to London. We had been planning on getting back to London a little after midnight, but this train (that I’m on right now) will get us back around 10:30. It was a nice, relaxing day. We mainly went just so we could say we went to Wales, and the castle was pretty neat. There’s a jousting tournament on the 20th and 21st, which would be cool to go to but that’s right when we leave. The thing that threw me a bit is that all the signs were in both English and Welsh. It was better than France, where it was just French, but I wasn’t expecting that.

Well, Grace and I are on the train now, should get back to London in about an hour and a half. The BritRail passes we have are nice, we can just hop onto and off of trains as we wish, and the trains are pretty nice too. There’s a little more legroom than in an airplane, there’s food for purchase, and the scenery is nice to watch. Much more convenient for shorter trips than flying, or even driving in some sense. I kind of wish we had more public transportation in the US, some cities have good systems (the trains in Portland were nice) but there’s no good long-distance rail service. I mean, yeah, we have Amtrak, but to take that from Lexington to Grand Rapids we would have to drive 2 hours to the nearest Amtrak station, take a train to Chicago, have a six or seven hour layover in Chicago then catch a train to Grand Rapids. It’s a similar deal getting to Prairie. Sixteen or seventeen hours on the train, and eight or nine in a car. Kind of a no-brainer.

Which brings me to a funny story. In Britain, the trains run on time. You can set your watch by the trains. On our trip from Stonehenge to Bath, some people held up the train by 30 seconds, and they got chewed out pretty good by the conductor. So, we are almost back to London when the train stops, the engineer gets on the intercom and says, in a very annoyed voice “As those of you who take this train regularly know, this is the part of the journey where we sit and wait for the Heathrow Express to get ahead of us. (huge sigh) we should be underway shortly, I apologize for the delay. We would be in Paddington Station in 8 minutes, but we have to wait for the (I could almost hear him swearing under his breath) Heathrow Express.” He said some more stuff, but I didn’t catch it. Then, about three minutes later we start going and the engineer gets back on and announces that the
Heathrow Express has gone past, and we can go. We get in about three minutes late, and you could tell that the engineer was mad when he got on the intercom. That is a far cry from the Amtrak train I was on that got stuck behind a broken freight train and we were at a dead stop for three hours, and I don’t think I even got a sorry.

We should get the equipment tomorrow, and I should actually start working. Until next time.

Not a whole lot to report today. We went to the NHM around 10, met with Chris Collins (the conservator we are working with at the NHM) who got us registered, showed us the room we are going to be in and got us security badges, which only kind of work. They don’t let us into the lab, only into the museum itself, if we need to get back into the lab we have to ring a doorbell and have someone let us in. We have to do this every time we leave, and we have to leave every time we need the loo. So, like I said, security through turning the place into an insane asylum from all the doorbells ringing. We also probably won’t get to play with their CT scanner, but hopefully we’ll have a chance to at least talk to someone about it.

We finished meeting around 1, none of the equipment had shown up yet so there wasn’t much to do. DHL lost the carnet again. Never, ever, ever ship DHL internationally. They have lost our carnet on both shipments we have made with them which means everything gets hung up at customs, and we don’t get our stuff in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time.

Grace and I spent a few hours at the Science Museum which is right next to the NHM, took a lot of pictures. We headed home around 5 and have been hanging around here ever since, cause our feet still hurt from yesterday. Grace made us a lovely dinner, and that brings us up to now when I am blogging about our day.

Really Plain
Really Plain

So, London Bridge is nowhere near as cool as I thought it would be, but more on that later.

The day went pretty well, right up until the end again. We both got a good night’s sleep, I got about 10 hours so I was feeling quite refreshed. I met with Seales and Ryan at noon to go over stuff for tomorrow. We were going to start at the Natural History Museum (NHM) today, but that got bumped to tomorrow. Grace and I grabbed some groceries after that, then headed off to take the tube into the downtown London area.

We get out of the tube station at Westminster, turn around, and we are right underneath Big Ben. That was kind of cool, to actually see it. Of course, Big Ben is a part of the Houses of Parliament and that’s a pretty neat looking building too. We crossed the Thames at Westminster Bridge, and then just started walking along the Thames since that’s where a lot of the historic stuff is.

We didn’t go in anywhere, but we walked past a lot of things on the south bank of the Thames. We walked past the London Aquarium and Tate Modern, both of which we want to go to sometime. The Eye of London (big ferris wheel, gratuitously shown in the second Fantastic Four movie) is something we want to do sometime, it looks like you can get a really good view from the top. We saw Globe Theatre (Where Shakespeare performed many of his plays (I think, Sarah, rip on me if I am mistaken)), London Bridge (as mentioned before, very plain), Tower Bridge (very cool-looking) and then we crossed over Tower Bridge to see the Tower of London. We took a bunch of pictures of all that too.

The Tower of London looked really neat. We passed by Somerset House and walked back over the Waterloo Bridge to the south bank. We also watched for several minutes while several skateboarders threw their skateboards over the wall onto the banks of the Thames, and another skateboarder threw it back over the wall. We have video, which we will post sometime. We took a quick look at Westminster Abbey (which is right behind Parliament) but by that time we had walked six or seven miles and our feet were hurting. It was getting dark too, and we got some really neat pictures of Parliament and Big Ben.

We hopped the tube back, and that’s where things got interesting. The first leg went fine, we transferred at Baker Street and then there was a problem (fire on the tracks or something), the tube was diverted, and we ended up on a different line. The guy at information told us that he thought the tube was still running, and that we had to go over to the other station (a ten minute walk) to catch it the rest of the way. Well, he was wrong. We got there and they were announcing that there was no service. We finally found the ticket office to get our money back (Paddington station is huge) only to find out that there was no need to, it must have already been taken care of automatically or something. We are using an Oyster card, which is a pre-paid pass for the tube and the buses and some other transportation, so some system must have already taken care of us. Anyhow, we had to catch a bus back home, we started out standing at the wrong bus stop, then Grace thought we were at the wrong stop so we went to another stop, where a lady told us that no, we wanted this third stop that was across the street. As we turned around, we say the buses we needed driving past, so we ran and had to knock on the door just as it was pulling away. We went up to the top of the bus, and I have to say, I think that a London bus driver could get that camel through the eye of a needle too. They took those huge buses through some holes that I would have had a hard time getting the Omni through. We got home around 11, an hour and a half or so after we left Westminster station, and it should have been half an hour. Oh well, we made it eventually.

Now for some more of that sleep stuff. That’s some good stuff. Then I need to figure out how to make the whole day go well, instead of something going wrong at the very end. And then? World peace (or maybe coffee…)

Or something like that. Not sure if I got enough extra u’s and e’s in there. Someone can correct me if I am wrong.

We got here. It wasn’t uneventful, but we are here, all our stuff is here (unlike Seales’ wife’s grandmother’s baggage) and I’m awake enough to post (I think). Now, let’s get to the not so uneventful stuff.

It started out small. We saw the taxi drive by our apartment twice before he found it, but we had plenty of time so that wasn’t a problem. Then we got to the airport and Grace’s bag was four pounds overweight. A bit frustrating, but there was no line and we were able to rearrange things in a satisfactory manner. We went through security about as smoothly as possible, and had an hour and a half to kill before our flight. But, I’d rather be early and sit at the gate then miss the flight.

The flight from Lexington to Cincinnati takes about 20 minutes from wheels-up to wheels-down. The landing wasn’t the best I have ever had (the plane should go straight down the runway, not waggling like a drunk) but they could re-use the plane so it’s all good. We had about an hour layover in Cincinnati, no big deal.

Then the flight from Cincinnati to Gatwick. Very long flight, although we had a good tailwind most of the way there so it was shorter than average. We land around 8:30 AM London time (about 7 and a half hours in the plane). This flight is when things started going poorly. I got about 1 hour of sleep, and I missed the coffee because I was in the loo. So, this left me in a slightly sour mood, but then things started picking up. We got off the plane. It was a very long walk to passport control, but that’s just walking, right? We got through passport and customs with nary a hitch, and then went to find the train to the bus station. This took a bit longer than it could have, but not much. Plus, I got my coffee on the train which is probably why I am able to write this right now. Unfortunately, the wheel on my suitcase broke, but still works (kind of) which isn’t a big deal … yet.

The bus is when we started to have problems. We have six bags between us, since we needed to bring camping stuff for Scotland, and it didn’t fit on the bus real well. But we made do.

The real boo-boo that I made was getting off at Ladbroke Street station, rather than Ladbroke Grove station. Both Grace and I are tired, hungry, and want to get to the apartment to rest. But since I got off at the wrong stop, we wandered around London for an hour, dragging six bags over crowded, narrow, not very well kept sidewalks. This is where the broken wheel became very frustrating. This did not improve our mood any. Finally, after asking two people for directions, we found the place. Neither set of directions were accurate, but they got us close enough. All we have to do is get the keys from Brent’s wife, and then we can go relax, right?

Wrong. This would have worked, except Brent’s wife hadn’t arrived yet. We sat outside their flat for an hour with all our bags before they showed up. They had had massive problems, delayed flights, lost baggage, you name it, so it’s not their fault at all.

Oh well, we’re here now, and that’s what matters. Grace is napping, and I think I might go join her since I am feeling my caffeine wearing off. I’ll post more later.