Europe – Part 1 : The airplane and London

I thought about making this series 3 part and calling this post Europe – Part 1 : The fellowship of the tourist camera, but just like Robert Jordan I can’t limit myself to a paltry 3 part series. Besides, I generally forget to take pictures by the 3rd day of travelling anyways…

The story began when I arrived well in time for my flight at Toronto Airport on a Monday evening. After flying (no pun intended) through the check-in and security stations, I discovered that I had the honor of waiting two hours for my flight. Such are the miracles of our modern transport system. Fortunately, I had company to help pass the time.

The flight itself was not without pain. The space allotted for the average sized Canadian seems to decrease everytime I fly; I remain thankful for aisle seats. Nonetheless, after an otherwise uneventful flight the plane landed on the first try in London. Asserting my identity as an EU citizen for the first time, I found customs to be painless. Within minutes I had collected my luggage and set out to de-confuse myself on the issue of transportation to my hostel.

Hostels can be interesting places. My room looked like this (mess provided by yours truly) :

The view outside of my room was one of stimulating diversity :

In addition, the toilet stalls at the hostel were rather interesting… ever had to pull your legs up so that the door could close? It’s not my fault, I swear!
At about 1 pm, after an hour nap (only having gotton about an hour and a half of sleep on the plane), I set off to walk around London. I found myself in the vincinity of London’s parks fairly quickly, and decided to walk to Buckingham Palace,

Westminster,

and within sight of Benny.

It should be noted that I did attend an evensong service at Westminster. The service was amazing, with a really good choir. The occassion was only slightly marred by those that had less of an interest in the service and more of an interest in seeing the inside of Westminster for free. The latter incentive was only a minor part of my motivation, naturally.

After having explored London for about seven hours with little food or sleep, I headed back to the hostel, stopping for food on the way. Up early the next morning, I took the train back to Gatwick to catch a plane. (Tune in next time… )