Monday, November 13, 2006

Thursday....could've been 9/11 (British 9/11)

Thursday was set aside for "get the touristy shite out of the way": see London's most beautiful sights, such as Big Ben, St Paul's Cathedral and Celeste before my 2 day excursion with Han. It was just by chance I stumbled upon a "free walking tour" of London. I also met a couple of Aussies who became friends during my stay.

The walking tour was very nice - I'm not going to bore you with the details and pictures you've seen a million times before, but I will tell you a couple of stories. All of the pictres from the holiday (including the touristy ones) are avialable on my flickr site. Go there and comment!

Three general observations about London:-

It's not as expensive as I thought.

It's not as busy as I thought.

It's not as racially diverse as I thought.

Don't get me wrong - it is all those things. I just expected to not being able to move in a multicultral sea of people whilst queueing for a sandwich that'd cost the earth.

Also, our American tour guide was a legend. The second American (behind MrManuel) to like football. Not the poxy padded wank-ball the yanks play, oh no, proper football! He was knowledgeable, calling Arsenal's (his team, I can hear Guy grinding his teeth in sheer anger all the way in Marlow) "Ashburton Grove", it's proper name. He called Ashley Cole a "wanker" (I love it when Yanks use that word) and thnking Alan Pardew's celebration was "total bollocks".

Outside St. James' Palace we goot our photo taken with one of the famous London Guards. It was not the trational one with the fluffy hat, but we did have a rather impressive sword. What wasn't impressive was his face, he looked about 12! Bless him, he was a babyfaced assassin

We then went along Whitehall, saw Downing Street and Westminster. Now the cops there scared me with their massive guns,but I tried to ignore it. I did have something to worry about.

From our vantage point, it appearaed as if a blimp was heading to crash into Big Ben. It wasn't just us, two RAF helicopters were watching it closely. It got close.

Very close...

But it thankfully missed, and the helicopters returned to base. In Britian, we list our dates as day, then month. The date on Thursday was November 9th, which - if it did hit - it would've been 9/11. Freaky!

What was freaky too was the whole culture shock. The talk on Westminster was about Guy Fawkes night, which nobody else knew. Odd to be around people that had no idea on Guy Fawkes Night.

It was a cool day. I met a few people who were staying in our hostel who became friends over the next few days, but I left them to look at Buckingham Palace (we skipped it because the toure guide said it was "crap", according to my hostel buddies, he was right), I had to scoot....I had a date with Celeste!

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