London OR “What?! People speak English?”

So I went to London over this last weekend and let me just say, I absolutely LOVED it…. Anyway, I’ll start at the beginning.

After my lunch of Tortilla (thanks Edson!) I headed to the airport. Now not knowing how long it would take me to get there or if the airline would have a problem with the fact that my ticket listed my name as Jason Taylor instead of Jason Vanderwoude (darn double apellidos… and we won’t even get into the three hours I spent on the phone with EDreams and Air France, all in Español by the way…) So I arrived at Burjas at 4:30… One problem, my flight didn’t leave until 7:30… Oops… So in a true Vanderwoude fashion, I had a good 2:40 to kill in the airport. Security there was an absolute joke. I went got my ticket, was never ID-ed, walked up to the metal detector, beeped as I went through, and then had them wand my belt, never once asking a question… So I spent my time in the magical world of Duty-Free everything and playing solitaire on my phone… Woot! Anyway, I finally boarded and began my journey to London.

The flight was fine… Just me and a bunch of English businessmen and women with around six bags each of duty free alcohol… We arrived on time and I deplaned thinking that Heathrow looked a little small… Anyway my bag came super quick and I went to find the Heathrow Express train that Ashley told me to take… Well funny story… Lately I haven’t exactly been thinking a lot so I’m a tad bit slow... I actually arrived in London at London City Airport, not Heathrow… Hey, to my defense I don’t know London, never been there before, so it was easy to confuse the airports… Anywho, a nice older man working at the train station helped me plan my route.

I was on the train for about 1:30 when I arrived at Wimbledon… Now I had thought that Ashley was gunna meet me at the Tube station so I got there and waited around for a while… Now, my phone was out of money and since I was on roaming I couldn’t receive calls either… Oops,! Never mind the fact that I didn’t have Ashley or Taylor’s numbers in my phone… AY! So after about another hour or so I decided to go get in a cab find a hotel with internet access and try to contact the girls… So the cab takes me “about six or seven quid” from the station to a Holiday Inn Express and as we pull up (miracle of miracles) my phone rings. It’s Ashley (thank GOD)… So long story short I pay another 10 quid to head over to their place…

It was super great to see both of them and their flat (the penthouse) is super cute and the neighborhood is even cuter (so many little British children!!!). After a bottle of wine and some tortilla chips we settled in for the evening.

The next day Taylor had to go to work early so Ashley and I decided to do a little shopping/exploring the city and met Taylor for lunch at a cute French bistro. Now I won’t go into every detail of what I did while there, but I found it very hard to communicate with English speaking people the first day and a half I was there… Yeah… Anyway over the weekend I saw some of the sites, did some super expensive (have you seen the exchange rate lately?!?!) shopping and tried out the night life a little… Again SUPER GREAT TRIP…

I’m sitting in class as I write this so I should probably cut off this entry here… Suffice to say I love London and can’t wait to get back there at some point and explore some more!

Oh yeah, on the way back I stopped in Paris (Charles Degaul [sp?] Airport) for about an hour and a half. Very friendly people, couldn’t really understand them… Anyway, I had a pastry, bought some magazines and then headed back the Spain… A good end to a great weekend!

¡Chao!