Day 1 in London

Arta and I made it to London safe and sound...having seen a wide selection of interesting and not so interesting movies on the way. We are in our hotel room, and here is Arta with her magnifying glass, checking out some of the tube connections for tomorrow! She is sleeping now, but...

....her last words before falling asleep were, "can't you just do a small blogpost before falling asleep?" No. or rather... not a post that would fully capture the day. I will let her do more later, but here are some point form notes on the day:

1. district and circle lines were closed for the weekend... our 15 minute heathrow express ride was thus followed by a HUGELY circuitous trip up bakerloo, then back down the picadilly line. in the end, it would have been fast to take the slow train from heathrow!.... and to have avoided lugging bags up and down tube lines were the lifts were not working.

2. found the hotel, but the room was not made up yet, so we and left our bags in the room and went out to explore. found a cooperative grocery where we got apples and drinks.... then took the 328 bus up to golders green.... slowest bus in the history of time... maybe 2 hours to get up there, but we were at the front top of the double decker, and I was following our progress on the London A-Z, so I got a good sense of some of the areas.

4. bought a pay as you go phone at the end of the golder's green line.

5. took the tube back from golders green, which was another adventure of trying to negotiate our way back with a number of tube lines down for weekend construction.

6. found an indian curry/kabob place near the hotel: medium spicy lamb curry, and a mild spinach curry. the naan was yummy.

7. returned to very small hotel room and unpacked all the bag... laid down at 6pm for a 1 hour nap, woke up at 11pm.... as I was standing between the beds, water starting pouring out of the fire alarm above my head in a steady stream. i tried to catch it in my coffee mug... then the fire alarm went.... then details to be added, but basically we had to be moved out of the room to a basement room (which is bigger... so in the end it was all good).

signing off from day 1, Rebecca