Fish and Chips

Well Kara and I have left the US and made our way to London for a short visit. It was a lot of fun but it was not the London that I was expecting. Of course most of my perception came from Mary Poppins. Everybody spoke proper English and dressed in a professional manner. I knew that wasn’t going to be the case, but I wasn’t expecting what I saw. It reminded me a lot of New York City. There were types of people on the underground (yes, I said underground). They looked like they came from all over Europe and the world. You could definitely tell the difference between and Englishman and an American. I don’t know if it is the weather, geographic area or what. There is a definite difference.

I also realized something else that may seem painfully obvious to most. England and the US are two distinctly different countries. We may speak the same language about 90% of the time, but we are two very different independent countries. They are not our little brother like I thought even though I knew better.

While in London we did some site seeing and got to see a few of the places that I’ve only heard about growing up. We flew into Gatwick airport. There are three airports in London. Gatwick and Heathrow seem to be the major international airports there. If you are going to fly and stay in London Heathrow is your best bet. The train fair in is about a 1/3 of what it is from Gatwick.

We stayed in the Wharf district which is about 3 miles East of central London. We stayed at the Britannia International for less then $100 a night. We got a nice room for this amount while if you stayed in Central London you would get a cramped room and share the bathroom for the same amount. The Wharf district is beautiful in terms of the enormous buildings it has and how modern the whole place is. This compared to the unique architecture of London where the buildings are large for the time when they were built one to several hundreds of years ago.

The main attractions we saw were the London Eye http://www.londoneye.com. This is an observation wheel that is around 135m high. We got some cool pictures while inside.

We saw Parliament, Big Ben, The London Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, Piccadilly Circus and The London Tower. Unfortunately Parliament, Big Bend and The London Tower were closed when we were in the area. We were happy to just see them and we’ll try to visit next time we are going through. We’ll have some pictures posted as soon as I can get the right software loaded on my computer here in Qatar.