First days, yeozah!

Airports, airports, what a lovely view. We were in airports for about seven extra hours trying to get to London—turns out, one, pilots can get sick, and two, replacement pilots need sleep too. I feel rather silly because I hadn’t thought of regulated sleep times for pilots. Glad they have them though, even though they did cause us delays. Once we were actually on planes, things went fairly fabulous—in other words I slept for six hours. I don’t think there’s a greater gift for a person prone to motion sickness than an empty seat next to you on an international flight. Much like the last trip I went on, the group is doing great. Everyone’s really easy going and great at not letting the little bumps in the road make anyone miserable. Throughout the fall prep class I felt like everyone was going to get along fairly well, but this delay debacle proves my hunch, and that’s fairly amazing considering many of us didn’t really know each other before the trip. I’ve learned that the group can make or break the trip, regardless of destination, so I’m glad I can feel really comfortable around everyone. The fact we’re all relatively jolly after a seven hour delay is a good sign. So we’re a half hour from touching down in London, where we still get a bus tour, though at night instead of in the afternoon as originally planned—hopefully it has an outside option or windows that open.

Later that night
Border Patrol took forever, a little boy got separated from what I’m assuming is his dad but it all got figured out thank goodness. It was pretty cute to see him go from totally freaked out to so comfortable back in his dad’s arms, like nothing had happened. Anyway, our guide for the night was Jo, a slightly older English woman and our driver was Paul. He reminded me of David Beckham when he shaved his head, though that could be because he had a shaved head and was British. Learned our hotel is in the middle of theater district, gave us a great dinner option in Café Rouge, a French café right by a theater where we (Shane, Thomas, Hannah, Kristen, and I) got small appetizers and the like for a great price and a fabulous atmosphere—luckily Thomas took French in high school, otherwise we would have looked really dumb. Even though it wasn’t bad, I still don’t buy Jo’s assertion that London isn’t that expensive—the exchange rate is about 1.5 USD to every 1 pound, so while the numbers on the page of the menu look OK, the price in the bank account is going to be a little different, especially in comparison to upcoming Romania. While it was always the plan, Jo told us we must try Indian food while in London—the national dish of England is Indian for goodness sake. Luckily a vast majority of us already like Indian food, so we can say we had the national dish of London to boot!
Fun fact: The Queen, Elizabeth the 2nd, is 85 years old, the same age as my great grandma!