The London Expedition

This post is certainly long overdue, but things got pretty hectic at ACN for the past week. On October 14 while I was in London, I had my students turn in their papers to the office assistant at the school; as soon as I hit the ground in Norway again and made it back to my apartment, I started grading these 70-odd papers.

As for my trip to London, I think it went pretty well, all withstanding. Getting to and from London wasn’t really as big of a hassle as I’d imagined it to be, but getting around in the city was a little difficult, since I’m so stubborn.

On the afternoon of October 12, I got a ride to the Rygge airport by someone from ACN. I got to the airport a couple of hours before my plane was set to depart, and there wasn’t any issue in the airport (although the ticket counter attendant said, “Have a nice flight,” to which I replied, “You, too!”).

I chose to fly with an airline called Ryanair again, the same airline I used to get to Belgium. The problem with Ryanair is that you don’t fly into the main airports of big European cities like Brussels or London—you fly into smaller airports that are usually an hour’s travel away. For my trip to Bruges in Belgium, I had to fly into a place called Charleroi, which was about an hour by bus from big train hub in Brussels; similarly, my trip to London took me to Stansted airport, which is a two-hour bus ride into London. Even though I had to take a bus into London from Stansted, my total airfare for this trip was $42. Yes. $42.

I could have taken a train from the airport to the center of London where I was staying, and that would have cut my travel time in half, really. There are trains that go from Stansted straight into the Liverpool Street tube station, and from there, I could have taken the tubes all the way to my hotel. I didn’t take the tubes because I had printed walking directions from one particular bus station to my hotel, and I figured that would be simpler than trying to go through the tubes and learn the tube-routes, having just stepped into the city.

Walking around London on a Saturday night is quite interesting, as there are people everywhere. Of course, being it was a Saturday, everyone was standing in the streets, standing outside of pubs and taverns smoking, or waiting in line to get into the big London clubs. I started reading my map, and I started walking, avoiding the crowds where I could. Instead of going straight to my hotel, I ended up wandering into Trafalgar Square, and I knew I was in the wrong place. What Google Maps claimed was a 45-minute walk from Victoria Coach Station to my hotel quickly turned into a 2-hour trial by fire, taking wrong turns, backtracking, walking (terror-stricken) through a pitch-black Green Park. I tried flagging down a taxi after simply giving up on getting to my hotel, but none of them would stop for me—so I kept walking.

I finally got to my hotel on Charlotte Street after walking nearly 2.5 miles from the Victoria Coach Station. I had already made my hotel reservation online, and I printed the confirmation and brought it with me—only, when I got to the address listed for the hotel, there wasn’t a hotel at that address. There were no signs that I could see, and I stood there, defeated. I saw a few English gents in cooks’ clothing standing outside a pub that served “gourmet hot dogs,” and I told them my plight. (“Y’walked all’uh way from Vitoria? Yer fookin’ crazy, man!”) One of them bounced down from the pub’s entryway and buzzed the door at 68 Charlotte Street, and a very nice Indian man came down the stairs and took my hotel confirmation.

The man’s name was Kumar, and he walked me away from 68 Charlotte Street to an entirely different building, which was my hotel. From the look of it, the building had once been an apartment building, but it was renovated to become an apartment-hotel hybrid (the place was even called an “aparthotel”).

The hotel was really…interesting. There were four floors to the building, and I was on the first floor; on each floor, there were four “hotel rooms,” two shared bathrooms, and a small kitchen. On the fifth floor, there was a fully-stocked kitchen and a dining room—each morning, you could go into this kitchen and cook whatever food was in the fridge, but then you did your own dishes once you were done. It really was an interesting setup, and it did save me a little money in the long run, not having to buy breakfast for seven days.

I hardly ever saw other people, but I certainly heard them—the walls were paper thin. I was lying in bed on the first night, and I heard someone cough in the next room, but it sounded like he was sitting at the foot of my bed. If I were staying in London for a couple of nights, this place would have been ideal—just a place to rest my head after a long day of sightseeing. Staying there for seven nights, though, seemed like a stretch. Plus, if I were traveling with someone, there’s no way I would stay in any aparthotel again. The place was in a central location, and everything I wanted to see in London was within walking distance of my hotel (almost everything), so in the end, I really sacrificed comfort for location. Most people would probably say I should have taken the tubes more, but really, I didn’t mind the walking, and my feet never hurt throughout the entire seven days of walking I did.

That first night in London, I had no idea where I was going—again, a 45-minute walk turned into 2.5 hours of mindless, panicked wandering. Three days later, I was telling people directions. It really took me by surprise how quickly and easily I learned my way around the city. Because I don’t like having strict plans while I travel, I would wake up in the morning, research what I wanted to see in the day, memorize the way to get there with Google Maps on my laptop, and then go. If you ever get to London, ask people on the street for directions—for as big of a city and as busy of a city as London, everyone on the street was incredibly nice and helpful. Even people working in businesses will give directions if you’re really stuck. London is obviously a huge tourist spot, so half the time, you’ll end up asking a tourist for directions, anyway.

Because the streets were so familiar to me by the end of the trip, I walked straight from the aparthotel to the Victoria Coach Station at 6:00 in the morning on October 19. I took my bus back to Stansted, waited around at the airport for a few hours (better two hours early than one minute late), and flew back here to Norway. It really was a great trip, and I think I’m starting to get the hang of traveling (and maybe even a touch of the “travel-bug”).