UK Trip Page
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This page is a sort of blog about my company trip to the United Kingdom. I will be in London and Aberdeen, Scotland for approximately two weeks.
For pictures, click on the following link: PICS
1/12/03:
(Dates will look funny because this is how they write them out here...day/month/year. Gotta adapt!) Well, after months of planning we flew out of Houston at 4:20 PM Sunday and arrived in London at 7:30 AM Monday. 9 hour flight and then add on 6 hours time difference. Ray and I had planned on being tired enough to sleep quite a bit on the plane, but neither of us got more than 15 minutes at a time. They did have movies showing on a screen on the back of the seat in front of us, so we watched parts of Pirates of the Caribbean, The Italian Job, and a few others. We got off the plane in London and of course, it was raining.
Our first taste of how Londonites are was waiting to clear customs. There were hundreds of people in queue (line) and everyone was wearing dark clothing and nobody was talking to anyone else. This ended up being a recurring theme throughout our stay in London.
We arrived at the office around 10 AM and worked till 4:30. We had lunch at this Italian restaurant called ASK where I discovered the way British pounds (dollars) work. They don't have 1 pound bills, only coins. They have 2 pound and 2 pence (penny) coins, and 20 pence coins instead of quarters, but everything else is the same.
After work we checked into our hotel, The Millennium Britannia, which was really nice. It sits on the edge of a square with a park in the middle. The American and Canadian Embassies were on the left and right sides. The American Embassy has gates and cement blocks set up around it for security. There are guards outside of it on all four corners that carry some bad-ass machine guns. We saw about 5 total Embassies and none of the others had security like ours.
The hotel is located about 3 blocks from the office and then 3 more blocks away from a big shopping district on Bond Street. We walked over there and this ended up being a very crowded area. Saw lots of double-decker buses here which was cool. We got tickets for the subway and rode around for a while, stopped off and walked around St. Pauls Cathedral. Of course we didn't take our cameras because of the rain which was constant all day long. We traveled all the way to London and where do we end up eating dinner our first night? Subway. It was kinda neat, you got the food on the ground floor and ate upstairs, which doubled as an internet cafe. It looked down onto Bond Street so that was neat for people watching.
Some observations we made:
You hardly saw anyone walking together except for couples. Women were walking down streets by themselves which you just wouldn't see in Houston. I guess crime isn't as prevalent here as in the States.
Taxis are EVERYWHERE! They are pretty much the same style, but they have different advertisements on them which in some cases were very colorful.
If you thought that people drove crazy in Houston, it ain't NOTHING like driving in London. It's not just that they drive on the wrong side of the road, but they cut in front of each other, tailgate, and about 50 other things that would get you shot at or arrested in Houston. Motorcycles pretty much do whatever the hell they want, including weaving in and out while other cars are waiting at lights and getting to the front of the red light. When we made a comment about it to a cab driver he basically said "Yeah, they drive all over the road, but if we hit one we just keep on driving."
We ended up back at the hotel around 7:30 or so and I was asleep by 8:30, but that's what happens when you're up for 31 hours straight!
2/12/03:
Woke up to a pretty good day. Worked through lunch and left early around 4:00, which is about when the sun sets in London this time of year so, no daytime pictures again. Took some pictures of the office, and I'll post a few of those when I get online to actually publish this update.
Of course, as soon as we get back to the hotel and shower and leave, it starts raining. We took the subway to Harrod's first off to do some shopping. Harrod's is billed as the largest department store in the country. There are 6 stories with a food court in the middle. (The way they do floors is different here in the UK as well. The first floor is called ground and the second floor is actually called the 1st floor.) The store was absolutely HUGE! The food court in the middle is not like American food courts. It was more like a very fancy grocery store which had several parts where they would prepare food that they sold for a meal. We took our purchases back to the Hotel, and rode the subway to Piccadilly Circus which is where most of the big pubs and clubs are.
We stayed around several pubs till quarter after midnight, then when we went to take the subway home we find that the subway shuts down at midnight. We couldn't find any taxis that are normally all over the place during the daytime so we started walking the 5 miles home...at 12:45 am in the morning....in a strange city in a strange land...with only a general idea of where our hotel was. After several direction changes and tips from others walking at that time of night we made it home around 3:30 am. Needless to say our wives were very upset with good reason because we should've been home hours ago and they weren't able to get in touch with us.
More strange observations:
Way Out = Exit; Give Way = Yield; Mobile (pronounced mowbeyel) = cell phone; At traffic lights the cars waiting at the red light get a yellow light telling them that the light is about to turn green. Most cars start going as soon as they see the yellow light. Haven't seen any near wrecks at intersections, so I don't know how the timing works for the lights.
3/12/03:
Made it into the office around 10:00, more than a little hung over and exhausted from our trek back to the hotel. We finished all the work we could do in London, only one computer and one networked printer are left and the printer hasn't even made it here yet. It's the old one from the Aberdeen office and they haven't received their replacement, so not sure what's going to happen there. So we checked out of the hotel and had a 1:40 flight to Aberdeen. Got to London Heathrow airport with plenty of time to spare and were ready to board around 12:30. We check the flight board and there had been a lot of cancellations earlier due to fog in the area. There were flights boarding though and the board either said Cancelled, Now boarding, or wait at your particular gate. We were waiting at our gate till 2:10 and no announcements were made and the status on the board never changed. So I asked at the service desk and they said that they should be boarding at around 2:30. We ended up not boarding till 3:30! Got into Aberdeen around 5:15 and to our hotel at 6:00.
The hotel here in Aberdeen is pretty terrible. The halls have worn down carpet with duct tape in certain areas and wallpaper peeling off the walls. The rooms themselves aren't terrible, but there is zero internet access in the entire hotel. It just needs a major renovation. We just had dinner in the hotel restaurant which wasn't horrible, but there wasn't much to choose from. I had cajun (yes, cajun!) chicken breast and Ray just had a burger and chips (which are french fries).
Main observation about Aberdeen so far is that the people are MUCH friendlier, and people actually wear colorful clothes. Ray remarked that without peoples accents it could've been any airport in the States.
4/12/03:
The breakfast buffet at both the London and Aberdeen hotels have had pretty much the exact same thing. Weird things they both have had include runny scrambled eggs, fatty undercooked bacon, sauteed mushrooms, and baked beans.
Got to the office at 8, worked our butts off till all day. Things went smooth till the afternoon. Then I made the mistake of taking a laptop off of our corporate network domain without changing the users local password. Which basically means I screwed it up without much chance of fixing it. Then a little bit later I was setting up one of the computers that was a replacement for one that was stolen out of our original shipment. We had asked our vendor to make sure that all the power supplies were switched over from 110 to 230 power. Obviously they forgot because I plugged it in and fried the power supply. So not a very good afternoon for me.