London
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.
