So, we’re back home. Yay! It was a loooong January 7 for us. 
The flight was good and uneventful. The immigration lineup was quite long, though, and the luggage people were even slower. But after an hour we had all our bags and were on our way home to greet Queen Calli Boo the Kitty who was very vocal and very happy to see us.
It’s been a busy few days here in London. Now the time has come for us to say goodbye to this lovely city. It’ll be good, though, to be home and to not have to lug our suitcases around anymore, and to get some rest and sleep.
It’s 7am in the morning on January 7 here and we are in the process of getting ready to leave for the airport — not without having a yummy British breakfast at the hotel first, though.
The plan is to catch a cab to Paddington Station at around 8:30, then take the Heathrow Connect train back to the airport, check our bags and wait for our plane to depart at noon (all of which will hopefully happen without issues).
It’s been an interesting few days, in London, so far, even though we’re only half way through our three and a half day stay. Good things have happened, as well as not so good ones. However, at this point it’s looking like things are settling down a bit and the remaining day and a half will work out as planned.
We got into London at around noon local time on Friday, January 3. The Heathrow Connect train ride from Heathrow to Paddington station was uneventful and smooth. The first little hiccup was the taxi ride to our hotel. It took way longer than the 2.5 miles that Google Maps quoted had me expect — and our cab driver wanted cash, which had me jogging to a nearby bank machine to get some.
Our hotel, the Grange Strathmore, turned out to be less than stellar. The room was on the smallish side, the (double) bed quite narrow, with a spongy mattress that had a tendency to make you fall off the bed. Next we discovered that the complementary Internet in our room was not working properly. Our Windows Vista laptop connected fine to the local hotel network (we got a 10.x.x.x IP address, which was fine) and we could see other computers in the hotel network, but DNS just would’t work regardless of what I tried, which rendered Internet access basically useless. It turned out that the hotel had had issues with Vista before, but obviously they couldn’t be bothered to fix them either before we got there or while we were staying there (their explanation was that they couldn’t get anybody in on the weekend to look at it).
Then our toilet stopped flushing (at around 11:00pm). Of course, housekeeping wasn’t on duty anymore (and no other double rooms were available), so we were given the keys for a washroom off the hallway. The next morning I was looking at the toilet again and found out that the marble slab covering (and hiding) the water tank could be lifted. Doing so must have somehow fixed the flushing mechanism, because the toilet started flushing just perfectly fine right after that. So, nobody from the staff could have done that for us the night before?
And finally, we were woken up three times, yes THREE times, during the night by a bunch of people who were talking and laughing loudly outside our room (we were located across from the elevator). When they woke us up the second time, I looked a the clock. It was 4:45am. The times for the other two times, I don’t know, but it couldn’t have been pretty.
The hotel manager was either unwilling or unable to do anything about any of our problems, so we checked out early (for a full refund of the unused portion of our stay) and moved (by foot) to the Radisson Edwardian Vanderbilt around the corner, which is where I am sitting now in bed and typing this.
On the positive side, we’ve seen quite a few nice sights and eaten quite some good food. There should be more of either coming up during the remainder of our stay.
Yesterday, we walked through South Kensington, had a nice pasta and risotto for lunch, and continued on to the British Museum. We concluded our first day with some burgers at Ultimate Burger, which was close to the museum and provided much needed shelter from the pouring London rain. — All pubs we had tried before were full.
Today, we saw Tower Bridge and toured the Tower of London (including the impressive Crown Jewels). Afterwards, we made our way to Oxford Street for some window (and real) shopping. To rest our tired feet, we went to a pub near Oxford Street, where we had traditional British pub food and a couple of pints of (muchly needed) Foster’s.
Tomorrow, we are planning on gawking at Buckingham palace, making it to an Evensong at Westminster Abbey, taking a look at the Houses of Parliament as well as Big Ben, walking up to Trafalgar Square, and, finally, visiting the National Gallery.
Tomorrow is also Brigette’s birthday, which we are planning on celebrating with a nice dinner here in London.
I am sitting at a table at my parent’s place writing this post (typing on a German keyboard no less — leads to many wrong characters ;-)).
Happy New Year everybody!
Today was another day meeting with family — and saying good bye already. It’s almost time to head towards London already. It was a fun afternoon that went on for way longer than originally thought. My Grandma had tons and tons and tons of food — as per normal. And the most asked question there is “Do you want something to eat? To drink, maybe?” And if it’s not my Grandma asking, it’s my Aunt.
Brigette’s most used phrase these days is “Nein danke.” LOL
Tomorrow will be a shopping day in Vienna, on Thursday we’ll visit some exhibits and we’ll see if we can find some other ways of experiencing Vienna on our last day. Friday morning we’ll leave for London.
