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Hey, so I made it in one piece down here in London. But I did not have Internet access until just now. Let us see what I have missed..
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The flight over was fairly uneventful. We had a tail wind and ended up arriving at the airport nearly half-an-hour early. I tried to go to sleep as long and as often as I could, but the seats on this particular flight were not very comfortable. I was not able to stretch out my legs, and there was little arm space so I rubbed elbows with my neighbor. If it was that pretty Indian chick that was sitting next to me then it would not have been too bad, but some white dude actually had that seat. (Mind you, I found out that that Indian chick was actually a mother of two and her family was sitting behind her.)
As such, I did not get a lot of sleep. I tried to tire myself out by reading, and I ended up going through most of Ubik by the time we reached London. I finished off the rest of the book while going through customs.
The customs check itself was very straightforward. The line up was a nightmare. Customs at Gatwick had most holders of EU passports herded down one ramp, while the other passport holders were forced to walk down the hall to another ramp. Ironically, both ramps led into the same room and terminated pretty much next to each other! The line was long when I got there: The line up maze was full and people had started to line up outside of the maze. Since the wait seemed to be very long, I decided to take a leak before getting into line. This was a mistake. When I got back outside, the lineup stretched from the entrance to the maze all the way up the ramp! This added thirty minutes to my wait! I probably should have held it in.
So I got back into line and spent the next hour and a half finishing off Ubik and starting Naked Lunch. When I was deep into the line, I looked back and noticed that the line up had not diminished. In fact, it had gone up past the top of the ramp, around the bend and down the hallway that we had to walk down. I am very glad that I did not end up arriving late, the tail wind helped..
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Despite the delay, MJO was still waiting for me at the airport. We went out for lunch, and then headed down to his place while he extolled the virtues and vices (mostly vices.. okay, only vices) of the London train system, the weather, and customer service.
We got a bit of stuff done. I was able to pick up a converter for my laptop, and batteries for my camera (which died later that day). We took a bus tour of the city and stopped off at the Tower of London but was a few minutes too late to get inside.
Instead, we headed back and had dinner at an Indian restaurant and then walked back in the rain.
I did notice that there were quite a number of attractive women around, and of various races and creeds. Now this could be due to a number of factors. One is that there are more attractive females in London than there is in Toronto. It is possible, but I do not think that it would be that big of a difference. Another possibility was that a lot of them were tourists, which artificially increase the number of people in the city which also increases the number of better looking people. Another possibility was that I was changing my perception of what "attractive" meant.
Well, whatever the reason, I think I will take more observations tomorrow.
