Londoners

January 21, 2007: We woke fairly early even without an alarm clock because we were invited to breakfast in the barn with all of those who had stayed on the grounds the night before. Mind you, the night before had unraveled into an after hours party (I played the role of the passed out on the couch girl in the cottage where after hours events took place, which was probably the smartest thing I could have done, given the morning after conditions of those who stayed awake and continued to drink!) Most of the friends made it to breakfast, which I must note was strangely snug (I observed while in England that many quarters are close and drink cups, excluding pint glasses, of course, are tiny, leading me to reflect on our senseless size indulgences here in the States!) - therefore, I was elbow to elbow with Craig and another Allison to eat breakfast, all of us hungover, all of us travel-weary, to boot. And I mention the drink cup sizes because in our hungover states, likely all of us would have preferred giant waters and oj's versus the mini servings. But no complaints, because it was generous of Dustin and Fiona to feed us the morning after their wonderful wedding reception! After bidding farewell to Dustin and Fi, their friends Day and Geraldine, and any other wedding attendees not headed back to London on the bus, we loaded 19 people's luggage and 19 people into the transportation Dustin had arranged for us. The drive back to London took what felt like an eternity, including the stop the bus driver took to smoke a cigarette, at which point many of us piled out to retrieve snacks from the convenience store. We finally rolled into London around 4, I believe, and the bus stopped several times depending on which part of town people had planned to stay. The plan was to head to our hotel, wash up, change clothes and head out with Alison and Scott to track down American Football, despite how miserable we all felt from the travels. Alison and Scott are from Chicago, and Craig is from just outside Chicago and I was born there and my Dad was born and raised there and there you have it, the Bears were battling for their spot in the Superbowl and even though we were in London, England, we had decided to try to view the game. We managed to hunt down a sports bar called, appropriately enough, London Sports Cafe, where we stood in a queue outside for 45 minutes while their football, or soccer, wrapped up. Then, for 10 whole minutes, football watchers filed out of this seeming enormous establishment. A full 10 minutes of sports watchers filing out of a bar is a long time for people to file out of a bar, believe me. But finally we were permitted entrance, at which point we were seated in the restaurant section, just Alison, Scott, Craig and I, and we ate and drank a couple of pitchers of beer. Then a whole ordeal unfolded, which found us abandoning our prime seats to join Craig's friends upstairs, who had arrived a while after us, in an overcrowded, completely packed, standing room only section of this bar. Here, Alison and Scott good-naturedly accepted the fact that we not only wouldn't get a table, or a seat, barely beers, but also that Craig's friends, for whom we abandoned our great table downstairs, proceeded to leave not 10 minutes after their arrival (because they weren't comfortable in the packed nature of that bar). Chalk it up as bad planning on all counts. We should have figured the upstairs not to be conducive to a good time. But no matter - we powered through. At halftime of the Bears game the 4 of us departed that bar and joined the others at a place called The Walkabout, where seats were good and plenty. There we finished the Bears game and watched part of the Colts game. And so concluded our first full night in London.

January 22, 2007: Thus begins The Tour. If I haven't said so already, Craig is singlehandedly one of the finest tourist companions of our generation (many thanks to his father Ed for being this way, too). Craig believes in the art of seeing as much mainstream touristness as possible, which is always suitable to me, because I would certainly hate to miss out on any of these things yet without him, I'd struggle to see it all myself. So, off we were, into the world of London, following an impractical bizarre and overpriced breakfast at the hotel. We stayed at Melia White House located very near the Great Portland Street Station and on the edge of Regent Park. Allow me to use this instance, this breakfast instance, to explain the weakness of the American dollar in England. The ratio is currently approximately 2 U.S. dollars to 1 pound. In other words, it was safe to double every amount we spent. Example: Melia White House breakfast, buffet-style: 19 pounds. For one person. That means breakfast (per person) totalled $40. Apply this to our entire trip and it is now understandable why Americans believe London costs twice as much as New York: because it literally does. Anyway, we had some weird voucher, luckily, which entitled us to one "free" breakfast, so the meal was actually only 19 pounds for each of us.*I'm going to publish this and continue on with my London chronicles hopefully tomorrow night after we begin the work week. We've rented a couple of movies for tonight and are eating leftovers first and I just hate how quickly Sundays slip away!*Cheers.