Honeymoon: Day One in London

This post could also be titled: Ei-Nyung’s Detailed Yet Boringly Undescriptive Trip Report.

We arrived in London at 12:40pm on Monday, April 10, 2006, via a direct flight from San Francisco. I have to say, the ride did not feel much longer than when I fly to Atlanta, even though it’s actually about twice as long.

We took the Heathrow Express train into Paddington Station (yes, the Paddington Station, as in Paddington Bear) which only took 15 minutes, then fumbled about a bit trying to figure out how to get the week-long Travelcards we had just purchased at the machine at this very station validated. All the signs indicated that we needed to write down our Photocard numbers on them before we could use them. There were all these photobooths that said they were valid for Photocards, so we took a pic, after asking the person at the information booth where we should get Photocards. After taking the pic, we stood in like three different lines where people told us different things. Turns out that you don’t actually need a Photcard to validate your Travelcard. All the signs will say so, but you really don’t. D’oh.

Here is a tip for those of you going on 1-2 week trip to London. Get the Travelcard at one of the National Rail stations (this would include Paddington Station), NOT on the Tube. The guidebooks had conflicting information but most of them advised getting an Oystercard, which is a rechargeable plastic transit card that lets you put cash amounts on it or put one-/three-/seven-day passes on it. You get this at the Underground stations or at any store that has an Oyster logo. The Travelcard is a simple paper ticket with a magnetized strip, issued for the passes via National Rail, but you can use it for the Tube and for buses as well. The only advantage to the Travelcard — and the reason I recommend it over the Oystercard — is that you don’t have to put a refundable deposit down on it, as you do with the Oystercard, which means that either you are out a mememto of your trip or several pounds of cashola. Getting a pass is a pretty substantial savings over putting cash on the Oystercard (1.50 pounds per ride in Zone 1, with a daily limit max of 5.50), which is a substantial savings over paying cash (3 pounds per ride). If you decide to get the Oystercard, you don’t have to register it. Don’t be fooled by all the registration forms. Just buy an Oystercard and get a pass put on it (or put cash on it). Period. Also, don’t worry about having to go outside of Zone 1. You won’t. And if you do, you’ll be buying a different kind of ticket anyway.

In London, it is foolish not to take the Tube for most of your destinations. The Tube is awesome, clean, safe, and so well organized that Seppo and I agreed that if an English-speaking, literate person with no supposed mental handicaps were still confused by the system on their second ride, there was something serious wrong with that person. Actually, you prob don’t need to even be English-speaking, as long as you can match up the signs with the words in your guidebook or whatever. In addition to all the walking, Seppo and I must have taken the Tube anywhere from 3 to 5 times a day on average.

Whew, I need to take a breather after that. *pauses*

We arrived at our hotel at around 3pm after the Photocard fiasco and rested up [read: napped] for about an hour. We roamed around Hyde Park, which was spitting distance of our hotel.

It was big and… field-y. It was pretty disappointing, especially with the gray weather (which we had expected, at least), until we hit the south end of the park, where there were the Serpentine (a man-made skinny, snake-y lake), lots of birds, and flower gardens. That was more like it!

We took the bus to Oxford Circus (we didn’t know what to do with our Travelcards here, so we did nothing and were sort of worried about getting “caught”, but we figured we had the passes so whatever) where we went to Yo! Sushi for dinner. It was pretty much exactly as I suspected it would be — conveyor belts of really weird sushi and some normal sushi — but it was definitely worth going to once. Some of the dishes are a far better bargain and pretty far out of the ordinary than others, so it is worth carefully studying the menu before diving into your usual favorites. I took a video here, but no pics. Dang.

After dinner, we dropped into Selfridge’s (one of the gigantic, impressive department stores here) just to see how it was, then dropped by Prêt à Manger to grab a sandwich and passionfruit parfait to split later, as dinner was not very filling and we had already walked like maniacs. Let me just say, those passionfruit parfaits are AWESOME.

I think on reflection that we didn’t fully get the sense of being in a foreign country the first day in London. It really felt like we were just in NY or the busy part of SF. People were not any better dressed than I expected of people in those places, when you discount the tourists. 😀

I think we got back to our hotel room around 8pm and pretty much tried to figure out what to do the rest of the week now that we felt pretty oriented and crashed early.

Day Two was quite different.