flying back...
Timestamp in BST, 'British Summer Time', which I would call EWDT, European Western Daylight Time. It's confusing that 'S' means 'summer' in the UK and 'standard' in the U.S. It explains why Australians are often confused about what the 'S' stands for in its time zones as well. The Brits call standard time 'mean time', hence 'GMT'. In any case, it's +01:00, although it'll be +00:00 soon, when daylight savings/summer time ends.
A few minutes ago (local time) I felt startled as I looked out the window. Aircraft of various shapes and sizes were staring at me like a pack of dogs at a gate.
I'm in London, still.
An apologetic voice over the PA explained that there was fog, and some communication problem with the ground crew, and the captain couldn't find his keys or something, so there'd be further delays. I didn't care. I was wrapped up in my book, and I'm actually not in a big hurry to get home. Nobody's meeting me at SFO; I'll just hop on BART. I suppose losing luggage isn't all bad; it makes the trek from BART to my place little easier.
And I scored! When I confirmed my reservation online, I looked to see if there were any window seats with empty spots next to them. There were none. But something must've happened to the people who were supposed to sit next to me, because I have three seats to myself! W00t!
The plane's pretty full, so I'm sure some people are grumbling about my fortune. I wonder if they'd feel better if they knew that on this trip I missed two flights, had my baggage lost twice, and that I had to spring for a €380-something business class ticket to bypass the Chunnel fire, only to find it was just a cattle class seat with a news paper. I hope to get into the habit of enjoying my fortunes without guilt.
One Day in London. Again.
This was the fourth time in six years that I've had less than 36 hours in London between flights. I need to stop doing that; there are too many people and places to see.
After arriving, dealing with paperwork for lost luggage, another round of Piccadilly-Jubilee-Southern Rail to nitoda, a_musing_amazon and twangman's place, and half an hour to plop on a bed and freshen up as much as I could without toiletries, I set off to meet valkyriekaren for lunch.
There's an excellent Italian restaurant around the corner from where she works, and it reminded me about how much bang you get for the buck (or, really, the quid) in London. An entrée and a main meal at a very pleasant restaurant here costs about as much as a decent shake and slam, slam, slam, slam, slam, slam, slam, eggs and slam at Denny's in California, once you figure in the tax (none) and tip (much less). It's still much, much more expensive than South Africa, where the food was excellent and even cheaper, but it's much harder to have lunch amongst several-centuries-old buildings in South Africa.
After a charming lunch, and hoping I'll get to spend more time with her in the future, I set off to the London Eye. Also known as the Millennium Wheel, it's that huge feris wheel that somebody plonked on the side of the Thames in recent years, and the only touristy thing I was interested in doing. I had been warned about the long wait, but the attendant told me it was only ten minutes. He pointed out the queue for buying tickets, which itself took much longer than ten minutes, and when I got to the counter, I found it was the wrong queue anyhow. The right queue took a good fifteen minutes, and when I got to the counter there, it turned out that one revolution of the Eye takes half an hour. Factoring in transit time and general stuffing around, that would make me about 20 minutes late to my next date, who wasn't answering the 'phone. I was quite sick of running late to things, so I decided to just do the Eye next time I was in town. Instead, I crossed the Millennium Bridge, and despite the much-publicised closure of the transfer between Bank and Monument stations, made it to Old Street pretty much on time.
My date turned up 20 minutes later.
My said 'date' was Laura. We were never lovers but 'appointment' doesn't feel right. We lived together as housemates back in my Oakland Hills days, along with romijordanna and another one of those non-LJ people.
It's funny how similar Laura's story is to mine, if you swap a few countries around: she moved to England for a lover, things got a bit rocky but she persisted, they got married, things went to hell, she left her partner but stuck around to see what she could make of her situation, the opportunity for citizenship came up, she took it, she wants to go back to the U.S. one day but doesn't know when. Sound familiar? But now she's back with her partner, so her story has a different ending.
Catching up with her was one of my trip's many highlights. And it was amusing to be with an ex-housemate in London, given I currently have a housemate who's an ex-Londoner.
Next I headed back for a home-made dinner by nitoda, which was absolutely wonderful, but put me in a food coma. I found a very effective energy drink in the fridge and used it to convince at least two of my hosts to come out for my last night in London for a while. I knew a noisy pub would put me to sleep and it was getting a bit late for the function Laura invited me to, so we just went for a walk along a couple more sections of the Thames.
Hmmm... turbulence. Weeee! And according to this map, we're going to fly over Greenland, and maybe Iceland, and I'll get to see if Iceland is really green and Greenland is really icy.