Europe

This is going to be a travel log of sorts of my trips to Europe. Starting with my first trip and my first city, London England.

July 2003.

Landed in Heath row airport and we get out luggage, quite a bit for two people, but some of it it’s used yet, we have extra bags to bring back gifts and clothes in. Since we will be here for three weeks I had to pack all kinds of extra items, like pain killers and such. We will also be attending a convention in Geneva later, so we had more dressy items that we had to pack.

We make our way to the subway and find one that will take us to the center of town; from there we will change trains and get another that will take us to the Kennsington station. We are staying in that area. We are quite tired and dragging all these bags doesn’t help. I know we look like tourists, but soon we can check in throw our bags in the room and lighten our load. It is rush hour and everyone is commuting to work.

On the way in we can see the small houses and other stations on the outskirts of town. There is graffiti on some of the buildings and retaining walls. Since I have been to New York City and seen really hard core graffiti this looks lame and doesn’t have the curves of either the New York kind or the LA kind. There is none of that hip-hop feel to it. It’s too straight up and down and stiff looking, not funky.

We change trains and get confused as to which platform we need to get to. My man walks over the a hard core punk rocker who looks like he could kill with his bare hands and says, “ Excuse me sir, could you tell me where we need to be to get the train that takes us to Kennsington Station?” He gives him a bewildered look for a second then tells us nicely where we should get the train. He is thanked and he nods and turns back towards his train.

We make it to the Hotel just fine and check into the smallest room I have even seen. Good thing we had watched American movies that showed this, I was prepared.

We didn’t know where to go eat, but we found Safeway and got some wine, pepperoni and French bread. We found that after wondering around the area by the hotel, there was a nice park we went into and then we looked for food. We took that back to the room had a snack and went to sleep. The whole time we were in London we kept missing dinner because we would take naps and wake up too late. The next day we planned to go sightseeing. Sure it was touristy, but you have to see it once, right?