Brief London updates

• Umm. Monday’s a Bank holiday in the UK, but apparently all the museums and stuff should be open. So this turned out to be a good weekend to visit, because a lot of people have left the city for a vacation.

• Getting around has been pretty easy. The Tube is frequent, signage plentiful, and everything’s surpizingly close together. For example, yesterday, leaving my hotel at four-ish, I managed to visit Buckingham Palace, Victoria Tube station, Leicaster Square, Chinatown, Holburn Circus, Covent Garden, St Paul’s Cathedral, &c.; I even took a bus across the Thames, and walked back over the Jubilee Bridge — have some awesome pictures from that, I think.

• Drank a pint at a pub near Covent Garden. I could take the beer outside! It was awesome. Plus the time zone thing clicked in again, and I realized that at home it was just after lunch time. Even right now it’s 4 AM at home. This is messing with my mind.

• The whole “driving on the left side of the road” thing still confuses me. I’ll keep it in mind, walk up to the road, and still look in the wrong direction. No collisions yet!

• But the one thing that really messed with my head was the street signs. They’re on the buildings, not on the poles in the intersections. It took me half an hour to find my hotel because I couldn’t actually figure out what the streets were.

• Plan for today: take the Big Bus Company tour around London, and hopefully check out at least one of the big museums I want to visit.

bows