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Arrival in London

Wednesday 07/18/2007 6:07 AM (In the United Kingdom: 11:07 AM)

It’s 3:30 am US time, 9:30 am in London. I’ve been wandering around Heathrow for a couple of hours. Once I made it through immigration and collected my bags, I dug out basic toiletries and spent some time “in the toilet” (an unsavory phrase in the US, to be sure, but that’s what they call the room here) trying to make myself feel a little less grungy. 

I changed my dollars into pounds and then looked around for the Underground to get to the B&B but gave up after a few minutes and decided to try for coffee instead. So now I’m sitting in the airport coffee shop, slightly refreshed, waiting for the coffee to kick in before I head to the Underground. No internet connection here, but I have a little time to waste so I figured I might as well start my first blog post from Europe.

So now it’s just a matter of juggling my luggage on the way to the B&B – I have a manageable but cumbersome load, after reorganizing a bit. (I was so proud of fitting all my stuff into one suitcase and then learned that it was 3 pounds overweight … so I had to split my stuff into two bags at the airport in Florida. I’ve got it all back into one now.)

I feel like I’m doing that thing that I hate to see people do on blogs:  rattling on and on about the most mundane details of their day.  I’ll try to make it more interesting once I get some sleep. For now, I’m more overwhelmed than I thought I would be by the immigration process, money exchange, swirl of other travelers’ languages around me, and utter unfamiliarity with where I am and how things work.  I’m very glad right now that I have London as an intro to my international experience – hopefully I’ll be somehow a little more prepared for Finland after the 10 days here.

Oh, and once I finally made it to the end of the immigration line, the officer who was checking out my passport asked why I was here … I told him I was doing research at the British Library, and then he wanted to know what I was researching.  I said “A. A. Milne” and he looked up for the first time since comparing my face to my passport, smiled and said, “Winnie-the-Pooh!”  Then he stamped the passport and told me to have a good day. I like to think that Milne helped me avoid any further interrogation/complication.

Coffee’s done: it’s time to try to Underground.

File Under: London

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