From SoCal to Soho.
I like the picture above, taken somewhere over the Atlantic in the hours before dawn. It's also one of the few pictures taken before the second day of the trip.
The passage of time had washed away all of the discomforts of my last transatlantic flight. The "food" was beyond inedible, I got no sleep, and a man a few rows in front of me was playing a movie with German audio at full volume from his laptop. Apparently, he didn't realize that his headphones were plugged into the microphone jack. Federal airline regulations must require at least one utterly incompetent fool on every flight.
Walking through Victoria train station. I felt a bit like Vincent Vega. "I mean, they got all the same shit over there that they got here but it's just, there, it's just a little different." I'll spare you the gee-whiz comparisons that every first-time visitor makes, but I did find an amusing sign in the Tube for a public health campaign.
Oddly enough, I suddenly had a craving for pie. More on that later.
Once on the Tube platform, a system status sign reported that the Circle line would be shut down all weekend for track work. Along with death and taxes, an urban constant. Thus began the Troubles. The hotel was fully booked, so we'd have to come back at noon (nearly four hours away) to check for early vacancies. "Non-smoking" rooms were a quaint suggestion, and the lobby itself smelled like an old ashtray. The weather was about twenty degrees colder than the forecast predicted, and the lack of sleep was really starting to affect me. We "checked" our bags by lining them up in front of the hotel counter and headed out to kill some time, hopefully without getting ourselves killed. I couldn't get the whole "driving on the left" thing straight in my head, but more on that later, too.
Our first meal was at Pret. The coronation chicken sandwich had a distinctly stronger curry flavor than it's New York cousin. Kensington High Street was a blur, and I crashed in a coffee house sofa while Yoo Mee looked for warmer clothes. Mediocre hot chocolate tastes the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
Noon approached like an oasis rippling on a desert horizon. We sat in the front seat of the upper level of a double decker bus bound for Notting Hill Gate. Weaving through the tight traffic and narrow streets reminded me of the view from an AT-AT in The Empire Strikes Back. It's when I also noticed London's famed proliferation of surveillance cameras. The bus had at least five cameras, maybe more, with an LCD monitor at front cycling through each of them. Multiply that by all the busses in the city... it's a lot of data.
The hotel room was a study in economy. The bed was two twin beds (or maybe junior twin beds) pushed together, and the room was about three feet larger than the bed on three sides. The shower stall in the bathroom was barely large enough for one person and sported a large crack in the fiberglass floor. Creature Comforts came to mind. I was just glad to have a place to lie down and promptly fell asleep.
Gnawing hunger drove us out of the hotel several hours later. We took in the sights along Oxford and Regent Streets on a Piccadilly Circus-bound bus. We got off a few streets away from Piccadilly Circus and wandered around, eventually eating at a nearby Wagamama's. Yes, it's relatively inexpensive and bears a striking resemblance to Republic, or maybe it's the other way around. Either way, the food was a bit disaapointing.
A few minutes later we were in Piccadilly Circus. Here's a picture of it from a travel web site. My first thought was, "that's it?" When you live near Times Square, all other cities suddenly become shorter and dimmer.
Not quite satisfied with dinner, still hungry and a bit curious, I searched Vindigo for a nearby sushi restaurant. Restaurant Yoshino was highly rated and tucked away in a nearby side street. Decor and service were very good, and the chef was very friendly. The fish? Above average but not exceptional. I'll take my favorite sushi joints here in New York.
So the first day got off to a bumpy start. I skimmed Time Out and took some notes before falling sleep. Tomorrow would be a better day.
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