Alright, for those of you stumbling across this. I'm Travis Clark, Video Editor and Film Student. This is my blog documenting my adventures from day to day while on my trip here in London.
I'll be frank. I've never been good and keeping a journal or diary so I can't guarantee a daily update but I'll do my best. This is as much for your entertainment as it is mine. I'm also starting this a bit late so I'll also try to play catch-up to keep the days consistent. This is a long one so let's get started. The flight.
The flight was terrible. I am not a fan of flying for long distances such as this so, yeah. It was a direct flight from Salt Lake City which I have found to both good and bad. The good is that it's very straight forward. No worries about layovers or missing connection. The bad is that you're stuck in a metal tube with very little leg room, potential crying babies (which there were), very little legroom, the constant roar of the engines, and very little legroom. I didn't sleep for all 10 hours of the trip. If you figure that I had been awake for the 12 hours leading up to that point, you can imagine how cheerful and chip I felt after the flight. At the very least, I had access to a lot of movies while being sleepless.
We arrived in London at 1pm. Got our luggage, our Travel Cards (also known as Oyster Cards) which allow use to use the Tube and buses in Central London for "free". And by free I mean that we paid 140 pounds for the pass.
For some reason,"free" is the term being used by our professors and fellow students to describe its function. Anyways, if you use the public transport as most Londoners do, which we do, this will pay itself off very quickly. A Tube ticket can be anywhere between 2 - 6 pounds, and we've been using the Tube 4 or more times a day, everyday. That adds up to be anywhere between 200 and 600 pounds per month. So it can be worth it....anyways, I got side tracked.
...lets see here...right...we arrived in London, got our luggage and our Travel Cards, and we made our way to The Royal Bourough of South Kensington and Chelsea where we would be staying. Our professors, and their wives, met us at the station (or rather we waited 20 minutes for them) and made walked to our apartments. We walked nearly a mile with our luggage to our apartments. When you have to walk a mile, with your luggage, in a country you've never been too...you being to notice certain quirks about traffic:
1) The very first thing one notices is how small the streets and sidewalks are. Now there are about 40 of us students. Just by simply existing, we have become an inconvenience to everyone on the streets. You shouldn't walk more than 2 abreast on the sidewalks. As you can imagine, this is very difficult for a bunch of loud, social, and obliviously tired Americans to understand. Big groups in general don't do well here. (I've already seen groups of 100 walking the streets and it's madness. Madness I tell you! I felt overwhelmed and I don't even live here...technically.)
2) Cars, bikes, and buses act differently. I'm not talking about the left side of the road driving thing, though that does take some getting used too. Nope. Not nearly as big a culture shock as this. See, in the US we have a thing called "right-of-way" for pedestrians. Except for certain (apparently rare) crosswalks, this right-of-way does not exist. If you are in the middle of a street, at a crosswalk, and there is a car coming, they will honk at you and keep moving at a constant speed at you. Remember that thing I said about big groups being annoying and that thing about luggage that we were carrying? Let just say that the British automotive loved.
Our apartments, dorms really, aren't nearly as posh as the rest of the neighborhood. They make my apartment in Provo seem like luxury suites. They're small but comfortable enough. I'd say that they're narrower than the dorms at Helamen Halls at BYU but longer in order to accommodate the bathroom. Considering that we're mostly walking around London, I'm just happy we have a place to rest at the end of the day. After we got settled into our apartments, our professors took us to a pub for dinner. It was mostly traditional British food and quite good actually. A lot of people got the fish and chips as you could imagine, but I got the Lamb Shank Shepherds Pie. Most Shepherds pies I've seen in the US are made in layers (shredded/chopped meat topped with mashed potatoes). This one was just a lamb shank with mashed potatoes were decoratively baked to encase it (Think of a corndog and you've got the basic concept) served with a little cup of gravy. My first experience with food in Britian and it didn't disappoint.
By the time we finished, it was around 5pm. I've now been up for 26 hours straight by this point. I feel like I've been awake for month and I could tell you what day it was. You'd think I be allowed to go to bed and sleep for 12 hours but our professors had other plans. We were going to visit the British Film Institute that evening. Now I wish I could tell you about the BFI itself, but honestly I can't remember much. What I do remember is my first look over the River Thames while crossing the Golden Jubilee bridges. I didn't take a picture but it's a bridge I'll be crossing often so don't worry. Pictures will be coming soon.
After our quick visit to the BFI, a couple of us made the trek back to our flat in the London rain. And finally, at nearly 11pm. I slept.
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