London Day 1 - We Arrived!

Travel day was long, but fine.  For those who don't know, we had enough frequent flyer miles to make the trip on business class, which was nice. We had three seats together in the center of the Boeing 777.  The seats went into all kinds of positions, and went nearly flat for sleeping.  Best part were the larger restrooms in biz class...twice the size of the usual airplane bathroom...and it always smelled so nice. 

Service was good...loved the little cup of hot nuts and of course the hot towels to wash up.  Meals were decent. Had some fresh fruit with my meals that included a mystery fruit that couldn't be cut with a knife. Probably not a commentary on the fruit as much as the dull little knives, which didn't cut salad either. Ally took a bite of the mystery fruit, and declared it had no taste whatsoever.

Welcome to London!

You know how the giant photo of smiling Kobe always greeted you at LAX?  At London Heathrow you have the giant photo of the smiling (and I think much younger and royally Photoshopped) Queen. Ally is channeling her "not impressed" face.

Customs line at Heathrow

We made it through customs fine, were wished a pleasant holiday, and caught the tube out to Eart's Court, where the apartment we're staying at is located. Paul, the landlord, let us in and showed us around.  It's a nice enough place, though the couch is really low to the ground.  But it'll work. The location is great - we're a block from Starbucks, there's a pub next door, and the tube stop is less than two blocks away.

Ally says Paul looks like a British Seth McFarlane (Gramme, google him) and said things like "bruvah" and "favah" when referring to his brother and father.

We were dead tired, but it was only 2pm and we wanted to stay up as late as we could to try and get on London time.  First order of business was a shower...and boy did that feel good!  We didn't go beyond our neighborhood today...wandered a long time to find a place with food I could eat.  Came to the realization that will not be easy in London.  Turkey, sandwiches or otherwise, simply doesn't exist here.  As Jorge pointed out "it's an American bird." We finally settled on a burger place called Byron, where they serve "proper burgers." I got them to take the chicken from a caesar salad and put it on a Nicoise salad for me, and that worked.

Then it was back to the apartment, where we could find nothing but bizarre British game shows on the telly.