United Kingdom: London, Derby, Burnaston, & Birmingham

The first day of my trip was London, and I loved every minute of it!!  London is so charming, exactly what you would picture, and every thing is in English!!

I was so excited to see vending machines full of food... it's the small pleasures in life!!  (Japan only has vending machines for beverages.)

 

Here is our hotel. Seriously, if this is what the hotel looks like imagine all of the other buildings!!  The architecture was so fascinating!

 

The hotel did have it's flaws though. Who bolts the blow dryer to the drawer in the desk?! It was definitely odd...

 

Here's typical London taxi cabs you can find every where.  I kept thinking that Super Nanny was about to jump out! 

The interesting part was that they have no trunk. The seats for passengers are all of the way in the rear, and your luggage rides with you in the vast backseat space. The only problem was whenever our taxi driver sped up, our rolling luggage would come sliding toward us. They also had 2 jumper seats that folded down from the driver partition and faced backward if you needed seating for more than 3 passengers.

Another famous London sight: red double decker buses!

We didn't have any time for sightseeing, but the taxi did drive by Buckingham Palace on the way to the office in the morning!  I will certainly have to come back here on vacation some day to experience all that it has to offer!  London is the largest city in Europe and everyone speaks English, what's not to love?!

We took a train from Heathrow airport to Paddington Station, and look who I met...

Paddington Bear!!

You may recall the children's book A Bear Called Paddington.  I had no idea that there are 12 different Paddington books (he's quite the celebrity), and the orginal one dates all of the way back to 1958!  Needless to say, stuffed Paddington Bears were on sale everywhere, some as costly as $500!

I guess they have to make their money somehow... I also saw that it cost 30 GBP (~$0.44) to use the restroom in the stations.  (Payable only in coins of 10 GBP denomination.)  I made a mental note because I didn't exchange any currency for my one day stopover, and clearly they don't accept American Express!

The trains in UK seems older, louder, dirtier, and shakier than the ones in Japan (but still acceptable).  One thing I was not happy about was that half of the seats in the train car faced backward and the other half faced forward.  In Japan each train seat has a foot pedal that will rotate the seats from one direction to another.  For a girl who gets motion sickness, I'm really not a fan of riding backwards on a train for 90 minutes...

Oh yeah, speaking of train differences... London also does not keep to their train time schedule like Japan does.  We learned this the hard way when trying to get to Derby, and we watched our train pull away from the platform without us on it.  When we turned around, the clock still indicated that we had 30 seconds before departure!!  I could complain about missing my non-refundable train because it left early by a few seconds, or maybe next time we should allow ourselves a few more minutes of buffer!!  I always thought it was nerve-racking how Japanese people like to wait until the very last second for everything, so I'm okay that we finally had to learn our lesson!!

UK also had some silly signs and sayings:

• Bizarre to be called "Love" at the airport.  As in "I'm just going to check your bag, Love".
• "TO LET" was in giant letters all over the places.  I kept thinking I was seeing "TOILET" (now you know what's always on my mind...), but it actually meant "Office Space for Rent".
• "Taxi Set Down" is really the same as "Taxi Drop Off".
• And I'm going to use this as a Transfreight safety message one day: "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases!"

I hear the volcanic ash cloud is looming over UK causing airport delays again this week--London is one city I wouldn't mind being stranded in! 

Next comes France...