Hello, my lovely readers!
I apologize for the delay in letting you know that I have arrived safely in London. To be honest, I have actually spent the past day and a half attempting to recover from my flight over here. This has actually resulted in the breaking of a few personal records (this is kind of relevant to the Olympics, yeah?):
1. Drank something like 20 cups of water yesterday in an effort to combat severe dehydration.
2. Slept for maybe 1.5 hours on the flight over (remind me next time I try to fly on a red eye that it's a terrible idea), but then slept for fourteen hours last night/this morning/this afternoon.
You may be thinking—as I certainly did every time that I was awake for ten minutes together—that sleeping away the majority of the day is a terrible waste of limited time in London. Again, I'm not really going to argue with this. But now that I no longer feel like I'm going to collapse every time that I stand up, I think that I've made the right decision.
Ok, enough of that. Let's talk about other things.
As you may have heard on the news, London is supposedly packed to the gills with tourists already. I don't know if I showed up in the wrong London (or at the very least, the wrong part of London), but I sailed through customs at the un-crowded airport and took an un-crowded tube trip across town to East London where I walked down un-crowded streets to the flat. So that was a pleasant surprise.
Another pleasant surprise: you can see the Olympic Stadium from the balcony of the flat. They were running a rehearsal of the opening ceremonies last night, and while it was much too far away to see anything specific (sorry), I can tell you that a great many lights and flashy things are involved. (Rumors abound as to what the ceremonies will feature; I'm personally hoping for this option.)
An unpleasant surprise: the weather in London is hot and sunny. Normally, this would fall under the pleasant surprise category, except that the Brits don't believe in air conditioning (see the archives of the blog for how they also don't believe in adequate heating during the winter). So while everyone else is running around exclaiming how wonderful it is that the weather is so uncharacteristically gorgeous, I've been laying sprawled across the sofa waiting for a breeze to come through the window and grumbling about how I just left this sort of weather and would really appreciate it if the rainy, 60-something conditions would come back now.
Also, the fire alarm just went off. But it stopped before I made it out of the door. Which is a good thing, because I would have forgotten to take the keys with me. And then I would have been locked out of the flat for the second time in two days. But we don't need to go into that. Long story short, a fire alarm has gone off in nearly every single hotel/flat I've stayed in since I was last in England, including this same flat, a year and a half ago. It's a gift, what can I say?
In other news, my British accent keeps making random appearances when I try to have conversations with people. And by random, I mean that one or two words will unintentionally come out with a British accent in the middle of a regular American-flavored sentence. I think I really confused the customs officer when this happened at the airport. Oops?
Well, my friends, I think I have carried on about uninteresting things for long enough. So after I finish holding this staring contest with the pigeon that seems determined to fly through the balcony door, I'm going to leave the flat and do interesting things, so that I can tell you about them tomorrow. Sound good? It's a deal.
Cheers!
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