Landed and Lethargic

I have photos now. The journal from this day was a little more disjointed and in multiple tenses because I was EXHAUSTED. I tried to edit it up a bit and clarify some points.

June 21, 2013
(June 21, 2013)

Our first picture from the plane, which includes our friendly Frenchman, who was actually quiet and  kept to himself the whole trip. But I'm sure he was a friendly sort of person.

I honestly can't say that I remember the last 24 hours in any great detail. We arrived in Gatwick, sped through customs (wat) and looked for our bus. Naturally, since I booked us for pick up at the North Terminal, we arrived in the South Terminal. Thankfully, this isn't Canada, so a convenient, quick shuttle train was available to transport passengers between terminals. We arrived, found our stop number, waited for the bus (which turned out to be driven by a humourless young man) and was promptly driven to the South Terminal to pick up more passengers (...yeah). At least we were able to get good seats.

Anyhow, we rode on the bus for about an hour and got stuck in traffic. I tried desperately not to puke from the combination of sudden, frequent braking and the dizzying blur of SHRUBBERY. Rachel passed out from the exhaustion many times, doing the all too familiar "head bob" (I am well acquainted with those from boring university classes). I did not have the luxury of sleeping as a young child kicked my seat all the way to London. So I ate rockets that I found in my backpack to keep me awake and stave off motion sickness. The traffic was mostly due to an accident (a truck had flipped over onto its side) and we were almost in one of our own as a van came speeding down the highway on the wrong side of the road. It was about 2 inches away from hitting us.

When we arrived in London, we were delivered to an old looking warehouse building with a London Tube sign on it. This was not where we had to be to catch the tube to our hostel, so we wandered around the area a little confused until we spotted a string of people who had been on the bus with us. We followed the trail of suitcases down the street to West Brompton station where we were advised that an Oyster Card was not practical for a four day stay in London (we had been told by a friend that Oyster Cards could be more cost efficient depending on our length of stay in the city). We got a day pass instead. That we used once.

...

We figured out which side of the platform to wait on, but spent quite a few minutes trying to figure out what train we were supposed to take. We met another woman, who had been on the bus with us and was from Vancouver, in the same situation as ourselves. We muddled through it together and boarded the train that would get us to our hostels. She left us at South Kensington and we moved to find ourselves a seat for the journey. Then we waited. And waited.

And waited.

And then thirty to forty minutes later on the district line, we arrived in Upton Park (later in Berlin, we told the Londoners we were staying with where our hostel had been and they were shocked, saying how ridiculously far out from the centre we were). We got off the train, went up through the turnstiles and realized once we reached outside that we had no idea where we were going. We started walking one direction after I vaguely remembered that the hostel was supposed to be a short walk from the station, We found a map of the community on a board near an open flea market and figured out that our hostel was a few blocks away. We dragged our tired selves down the street until we spotted the Boleyn Tavern.

 The Boleyn Tavern, with our hostel sitting on top along a BUSY street. Seriously, I think a siren went off every five minutes along this road. While we were trying to sleep.

The hostel website informed us that we would have to call into the pub below to check in, but a man outside spotted me trying the locked doors and told us he could let us in. He led us to the door, a small, black entry that required a keycard for access next to a wall topped with barbed wire (cosy!). He let us in and and climbed a steep, blue-carpeted, narrow staircase to the reception desk. We were later informed that these were dubbed the "Anne Frank Stairs" (named thus by one of their previous customers).

The Entry

The man at reception, Jared, told us that our beds were not yet ready, so we were told to come back in an hour. We were allowed to store our bags in a room with hundreds of jars of jam (???) and were referred to a cafe for lunch after I asked what was good in the area. Jared suggested the cafe "Friends," which he said had a couch and everything like the TV show. Upon walking there, we confirmed that they did, indeed, have a couch.

The "Friends" cafe...along with some lovely flowers.

Rachel got a muffin (blueberry) and I got a ham sandwich with "traditional English tea." And then we sat, staring blankly into space for an hour while we ate. We returned to the hostel and the beds still weren't prepared, so we found a (dirty) couch in the lounge where we found out about the floods back at home in Calgary, Canmore and High River. I was pretty upset about this, as was Rachel as well. Upon returning, Calgary has recovered very well, but at the time we thought that a huge chunk of our city had been completely destroyed. It was mostly that case in High River, which still hasn't recovered from the disaster. High River had been nearly wiped out, but we learned that the people had really banded together to help each other out and open their homes to those affected.

Once our beds were ready, we got our disgusting sheets for our grody beds and went upstairs to settle in (Jared, who gave us our sheets, walked away without telling us what room we were in. Brilliant.) We met three other women in the room, who were there when we arrived. The one pair of women didn't seem to be too sure of where they were from when we asked (they seemed a little confused on the matter), though they were just as tired as we were (so we'll let that slide). The other woman, Katelin, who hails from Oklahoma City, was staying on the bed near Rachel. She too had tragedy strike her home recently with a class 5 tornado. She told us where she was travelling and learned she was seeing a lot of the same places we were. We talked for awhile and decided to go see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace and walk around central London tomorrow. Oh and the Tower of London of course.

I can't wait to walk through St. James Park and see Rachel's reaction to the over-enthusiastic, fat, little squirrels. Anyhow, we went for a "nap" and ended up sleeping a long time. We updated ourselves on home and decided to go for a walk in our area. We happened to be staying near the West Ham Football Stadium (unfortunately not Arsenal for Rachel) and we discovered that the part of town we are staying in is, essentially, the equivalent of North East Calgary...on a much larger scale.

I can't get over how old buildings are here compared with those in Calgary. And if the weather continues the way it has back in our home, it never be that way. We walked down Green Street and then back to Barking. We chanced upon a Dr. Who store in which we fully intend to return to tomorrow when it's open to send pictures to Kristy (yeah we totally forgot). We dropped by a Tesco, picked up Fanta (Fanta Zero by accident...ugh), some pre-made sandwiches and salad (which turned out to be pretty disgusting) and some British Cadbury chocolate, then returned to the lounge to eat. After we were done eating and watching awful British sitcoms, we returned to our dorm to plan our next, hopefully more exciting and less confusing, day.