London

So, the England leg of our trip started on Saturday the 17th when we decided to fly in on a 2 hour trip from Berlin, instead of taking the train to Holland and then take a ferry over, and then take another train we'd have to pay for once we're in England since they don't take the Eurorail pass that we've used our whole trip. So instead of traveling for an entire day+ we should have only been traveling for a couple hours along with some sitting time in the airport.

Well, it didn't quite work out that way... and it f'n sucked. We got to the airport in Berlin a few hours early since it was too damn hot at our hostel and we figured we may be able to find an earlier flight if we asked. It woulda cost us double what we'd paid already so we decided just to wait on our flight that we'd already booked. We sat at the airport for around 4 hours prior to our departure, but I bought internet for around $10 for 2 hours, bleh. At least it gave me something to do for a while... Anthony just fell asleep, like always...haha. We pretty much just took up some nice and comfy chairs at Starbux so at least we were pretty comfy.

Then we flew into London... To Heathrow Airport. FYI, there's a reeeeally long line at immigration/customs to get into this country, apparently a ton of people come here and get turned away. I now know one such person, but we'll get to that later. Anthony and I get through customs and immigration in around an hour... they even gave us a piece of paper to give to the person we talked to so they could track it, even the girl at the booth said that was a long time. Yay. We get ready to leave but don't really know where our hostel is in regards to Heathrow, so we find out where that's at and it's a whopping 2.5 hour trip to the hostel from the airport along with 3 changes we'd have to make. Well, by this time it was around 1030pm anyway and we knew we'd have to be back early in the morning to pick up Bobbi, Anthony's g/f for those who don't know that. We decided to just spend the night in the airport rather than try our hand at figuring out London at midnight and then having to wake up early. I guess we saved a few bucks too...lol.

So, we stay in the station, along with a few other people littered around sleeping, we found a spot where Anthony fell asleep and I sat there with my ipod. I decided to go over to this little cafe type of thing, Costa... it's like a Starbux in England, tons of them everywhere. I was glad to, because they had really comfortable seating and food and drinks that I was happy to have access to all night/day, and it was needed. After an entire night sitting in this cafe area, we expected Bobbi's plane in at 1040am-ish. But knowing full well how the immigration line would be, we expected her no earlier than 11-1130.

So Anthony goes to wait for her at the arrival gate for what seemed like ages... I heard both of their names over the loudspeaker but I was far away from Anthony and couldn't leave our bags, so I figured I'd wait til he was in shouting distance and tell him that his name was announced to call information. Bobbi actually got detained at immigration because the chick interviewing her didn't like her answers to some simple questions. For instance, as a girl, NEVER say you're coming to see your b/f in England. Tell them you're here on vacation to see some friends or something, but don't say anything about a b/f or g/f because they don't like that... Bobbi was fingerprinted, photographed, and put in a room for a few hours and we had no real way of doing anything. Luckily, Anthony finally had the opportunity to talk to the people at immigration and Bobbi and a few hours and a ton of stress later, she finally came out the arrivals gate... probably about 4-5 hours after her plane had arrived. She took it pretty well though it seemed. The stress pretty much threw any jet lag out the window...lol We hung out with a person I kinda knew previously who actually mentioned getting detained coming into the country and then getting sent back to the US on the same plane she arrived on an hour later. They are a bit ruthless here in the UK it seems.

So we traveled our 2 hours to a nice hotel in South Woodford via "The Tube"... London's famous underground rail system. You can pretty much get anywhere in the city via the Tube, so that was cool. That night we kept it pretty low key but having some pretty much American food at this place called The Harvester. It was good, but almost the same as going to Applebees... the menus seem fairly similar as far as I can tell. Then we walked over to a pub around the corner that I really liked. Though we couldn't stay there long since pubs in England close at 1030 on Sundays, 11pm most of the week, and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. When you're like us and used to being in places open all night... like Berlin, Munich, Prague, Budapest...etc... that was kinda crappy. The place we ended up at, had good beer, a cool owner that I talked to who said he's never met an American that liked real football... so he was a good buddy right off the bat. Sitting there hearing a bunch of folks yell at eachother in English was really fun too...lol. There was a rather wild bunch there when we got there, at one point a girl was kicking another dude in the nuts and that made everyone laugh... I imagine they're good friends, they seemed to all be having a good time at least...haha.

Yesterday we checked out some parts of London, but I'll be the first to admit, I really didn't see much of London at all, so I reckon I gotta go back at some point. :-) We went to Buckingham Palace and caught the end of the Changing of The Guard, snapped a few pics... then walked over towards Big Ben where I took a few pics and decided I needed to get off my feet. I told Anthony and Bobbi that I was meeting up with a person at a bar a few Tube stops away so they went and did a few more touristy stuff then met up with me a few hours later. The person I met was Christy, someone I'd never actually met but kind of knew from a message forum that I was on some time ago. She was the only person on my Facebook that was in London so I asked if she'd be down to hang out and show me a cool place or two, and we met up at a little pub near her school. On the way to that pub, I took the tube stop right next to the bar and the elevators had this huge line so I decided to take the stairs... I actually didn't see the sign that says "only use stairs in an emergency"... That sign was there for a reason...haha. I seriously felt like I walked about 20 floors of a building on a spiral staircase. I wondered why NOBODY was taking the stairs. They literally, just kept going and going and going. I actually think I almost died...haha. This guy at the top looked at me like I was crazy and said, you didn't read the sign did ya... to which I replied, I dunno, what sign? He laughed and pointed at the same sign and I was like, Dude, no shit. Then made my way across the street where I ordered a beer and a huge glass of water while I waited for Christy, hoping she didn't show up until at least half the sweat I had going on went away...haha.

Anthony and Bobbi made their way to the pub and we drank there for a bit before heading off to eat some Thai food. Anthony and Bobbi took off back to the hotel since Bobbi was pretty drained, she was still stuck with a bit of jet lag so that was understandable. Me and Christy went off to a bar that actually had live music going on and they stayed open late. We pretty much got drunk listening to Karaoke with a live band, which was cool... those brits were all singing really well, so that was cool. We hung out long enough for me to not be able to take the tube home, so Christy helped me find a bus and we said our goodbye's and c ya's and I was off on a bus hoping I'd be awake when the bus got to my stop. I think the bus got to my stop around 4am. I got off the bus and started walking, but I was on the other side of the station that we came into every time, so I walked a direction hoping the street I was on would intersect and it never did. So, it shoulda been a 25 minute walk to our hotel took me about an hour and a half since I walked in a big ass circle before finding out I had to go over the footbridge at the station to come out on the side that I actually knew. I walked into my hotel this morning at 530am with the sun already shining. The hotel dude had to unlock the door and all his said was , "good morning sir." My reply was, yes, it's definitely the morning, thanks. I went upstairs and crashed for a few hours and woke up around 9am and tried to sleep some more but I didn't wanna over sleep so I kept waking up... typical.

I'm now on a train to Dewsbury, which is up in Northern England, to visit an old soccer teammate and friend from high school, Joseph Wood. He lives in the UK now where he married his wife and he said he'd give me a place to stay today if I wanted to visit. So I'm heading there and Bobbi and Anthony already headed off to Edinburgh, Scotland. This train has free wifi but I don't have an english address to use it... bleh. So this will be another blog where I used wordpad to write and just copy over to my blog, like most of my train rides.

Well, that's London in a nutshell, I think tonight I'm probably just gonna have a low key night hanging out in Dewsbury. Laterz folks.