And then it was the holidays. Quite suddenly and unexpectedly. And off I flew with Nik 'Smokey Joe' Koehler and lovely Lizbet to London Town.
The first curveball hurled in our direction was Ryanair's hand luggage weight policy.
WE HAD NOT BARGAINED FOR THIS.
Of course, Niklous and myself had overweight baggage but the surprisingly jovial woman on the desk kindly suggested that we simply wear all of our clothes... So that we did. Nik caused quite a stir in the waiting area of Tours airport by piling on about 9 layers worth of his holiday outfits and gradually baring more of an uncanny resemblance to the Michelin man... I opted for shoving all my heaviest items down my top and meandered through the gate nursing a jumper full of shoes and books. As a nervous flyer Nik did not appreciate the, quite frankly, CRAP excuse for a departure lounge or indeed the rickety plane, flown by a man genuinely named Dragon, who took his descent far too fast, and essentially, crash landed in London.
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| Michelin Man |
Although when travelling through the tube system he soon cheered up every time signs for Cockfosters or Shepherd's Bush came into view.
Our hostel for 2 nights was called 'Clink', located in the Kings Cross area (yes of course we had our pictures taken by Platform 9 3/4) and was a former court house - someone was aptly being arrested in reception when we arrived, ensuring we felt incredibly safe before we had even checked in. Having left France far behind, we were shocked to realise that there were probably more French people in our hostel than in the whole of France itself (London having incidentally just been named France's sixth largest city).
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| Planking Platform 9 and 3/4 |
Over the next 2 days I attempted to show these mad-cap Americans a slice of London's bet bits. We did Harrods, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, participated in a Boots Meal Deal and had a pint in a pub, wandered around Camden, Covent Garden and Oxford Circus and rounded it off with fish and chips and a Kopparberg. We obviously couldn't miss out Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace, where with her back to the glorious building itself Lizbet couldn't hide her appreciation for the large testicles of a nearby lion statue. 'Very impressive carving' was her excuse. We were having none of it.
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| Cheeky pint |
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| Buckingham Palace |
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| Balls. And new shoes. |
There was also no chance that I would allow them to miss out on the greatest British institution of them all - Primark. They both left after about 2 minutes in there while I survived a little longer and managed to find a pair of shoes for £3! I bought two pairs. I was ecstatic.
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| CAMDEN TAAAUUN (with Cockney Accent) |
While it rained pretty much the whole time we were there, London seemed to welcome young Niklous with open arms. I have never in my life been in a group that received so much male attention! The English loved him! At one point, no word of a lie, a man stopped him in the road just to tell him he was beautiful. Me and Liz felt bitter and resented Nik for the duration of the trip.
Daniel 'Hurricane' Welsh arrived that evening, and after we had stolen about 3 hours of sleep, we awoke ourselves and dragged our heavy bags to Marble Arch to catch our airport bus at 4am. As if the hour wasn't bad enough, we proceeded to run around under the stars for about 42 minutes attempting to discover where the hell the actual bus stop was and even chasing one particular bus through the night for what seemed like miles only to discover that the sodding stop was actually back where we started. GOD I HATE THE TRANSPORT SYSTEM.
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| Unexplained egg. |
I will save the glory of Corfu for the next post and round off with an exemplary news story that I think needs to be mentioned this week. The headline on the BBC website read "Man denies Bath sex shop arson" and was a tale about a man wandering into a sex shop and before setting it alight, simply telling the shop keeper, "I've got a surprise for you...". In such a profession this was probably not the sort of surprise he was anticipating... Poor man.
Much love and whatnot, H x
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