London Town

Nicole and I set forth on an impromptu trip to London, England. We had been deciding between primarily that and Hong Kong and London won out because there were more seats on the plane. This was our first adventure in flying American Airlines long-haul. The gate agent was sympathetic to us since there were over 20 seats in business class, but we are not able to be awarded them because we are not mainline American employees. Silliness. Downright silliness. We had to settle for a row to ourselves in economy comfort.

Some ten hours later, we arrived at Heathrow airport, where the weather was surprisingly not all that different from Los Angeles. It was overcast with a dampness in the air and a temperature around 55. After Customs, we had to take the Tube for about an hour until we arrived at our Air BnB in the middle of the city. It's about two blocks from Buckingham Palace and around half a mile from Parliament. We both took naps in an attempt to find some semblance of a normal sleep schedule and woke up to get some food. I found a pub down the street that seemed to fit the bill. I had fish and chips, which came with a rather sizable fish. It could have doubled as a baseball bat in a pinch. We each had a pint to go with our meals (naturally) as we commented on how the U.S. is the only country to serve its beer ice cold...perhaps to cover up the lack of flavor or substance. After the pub we went out for a walk around the area. We spent a while trying to get some decent pictures of Big Ben at night, but that bright face of the clock complicated the exposures.

It was a bit brisk out with an occasional snap of wind throwing dirt in our eyes, but it was nothing compared to our recent stopovers in Tokyo and especially Vienna. At one point I even started shooting some timelapse. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to share the video that was created from that shoot because I am using the Microsoft Surface to blog, which cannot do basic editing or importing. In order to get these pictures in the blog, I had to send them from my camera to my iPhone through WiFi and then back them up to a cloud drive and then re-download them on the surface. Contrary to what the commercials may lead you to believe, the Surface is really not that versatile. They may show someone pretending to be creative and drawing and doing fancy things, but they don't show the 30 minute process of trying to connect a Bluetooth keyboard. So I apologize for the crudity of the images, as I'm not even going to attempt to edit using the surface. Use your imagination to fix the exposures and levels.