Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Dale and I touched down at London Heathrow at 12:52pm on Thursday 17 May 2012. To get there, we had travelled from Auckland to Sydney (around 3 hours), Sydney to Abu Dhabi (15 hours), and Abu Dhabi to London (7 hours). Despite stopovers in Sydney (5 days so that Dale could attend an orthodontics course) and Abu Dhabi (2 days), we were red-eyed and weary when we ambled off the plain towards customs. By the time we were seated on the tube and rocketing along the Piccadilly line we had gained a second wind. The realisation that we had arrived in Europe on the first step of a 5 month long escape from our young-professional reality began to sink in.
I love London and since Dale had never visited the UK before I immediately began the hard-sell. The bucking and swaying of the underground train was not "violent and jarring", it was"exciting, like a rollercoaster". The rows of crowded duplex housing were not "cluttered and claustrophobic" but "charmingly historic". And the twanging accents of the American girls chatting loudly beside us was not gratingly obnoxious but a demonstration of London's attractiveness to people from all over the world.
We made our way to B & B Belgravia where we were issued with a key to a room on the top floor. Fortunately Dale's biceps were up to the challenge of man-handling both suitcases up 3 narrow flights of stairs - must be all those tooth extractions! We then set out on an introductory walk around Westminster. I was ready to launch into a lengthy walk-by of my favourite significant buildings along the Thames, but Dale's enthusiasm for London architecture began to flag by the time we got to Westminster Bridge and only picked up again at the suggestion of a ride in a double decker bus.
By 5pm our jet lag had well and truly caught up with us, so we provisioned ourselves with a bottle of red wine and an array of antipasto ingredients from an Italian deli and headed back to Belgravia for a picnic in our room and an early night.
- comments