22/4/09

First, my column ran today, not my favorite I've wrote, but not so bad. I created a fan page on Facebook and I'm up to 60 fans already, although most are people I invited that I'm friends with, but there are a couple I don't know, which is intersting. I'll be curious to see how this progresses.

I didn't sleep all that well on the McDonald's bench, even though it was a surprisingly nice place to sleep compared to the other airports. They had a TV on with BBC news, which I haven't heard much of lately, so it was interesting to hear what was going on at least.

Around 5 I got up and went through security. Once I did, they were handing out gift bags with a glass bottle of water and some chocolates, so naturally I took one. I couldn't believe they would give out glass bottles to take on the plane, but I wasn't going to question it.

I got a window seat on the plane and slept the whole time. I was very tired.

I didn't even have to go through security because it was a UK flight, so I walked right through customs with no problems. I got to the bus too early.

I slept for a little of the bus ride, not all that well. Lately I've started to drool when I fall asleep on the bus, something I've never done before and rather a bad thing to start doing. We're talking like movie drool. Not good.

I got back and had a pie and unpacked. I decided to go to Starbucks and then go to one of the parks behind me and upload my pictures. The first part of the park I went to (the nice part) it didn't have any wifi I could steal. But there is another part across the street that I could steal wifi from the university at, so I sat for about an hour and worked until my computer froze.

I went and got groceries and had some food for the first time in forever. I got an Aero bar, which you are supposed to be able to 'feel the bubbles melt in your mouth.' It was chocolate with mint inside, really great actually, one of my favorites so far.

Kim called and said she had to drop some stuff off down here so I met up with her and we talked about the last week or two. I asked if she wanted to go to rent some travel books with me, so we made our way down to Borders. I got a Barcelona and Madrid book, they didn't have one for Tangier. I also forget that I'm going to Dublin on this trip, so I may have to go back and get one for that too.

We then decided to wander until we found an interesting place to eat, just going where the lights took us, which turned out to be about nowhere. We ended up in Covent Garden and we looked at a couple Italian places. After I left a fake name at one of them (Josh, not sure why) we ended up at Cafe Uno. I forgot my battery for my camera in the charger, so I made Kim take photos of my food/drinks with her phone and send them over to me.

It was cheap and the bread was good, but the pizza tasted sort of like a Sainsbury's basics pizza, just about no flavor. It could also be because I was in Italy and the pizza there was very different. But still a letdown. I decided to get Earl Grey tea since I'm in London instead of getting the free water. We'll see if I can keep justifying paying for beverages or not.

Afterwards we met up with Heidi who just got back from Prague. We didn't have any real plans so we just walked around, going actually a ways away from our part of town. We ended up at Marble Arch, which is a giant arch in the middle of the road. Really not that nice, not even lit up at night.