First Day

My sister and I left sunny and warm 80F degree LA weather and landed in cloudy, overcast, and occasionally drizzly 35F degree London weather.

That was just the beginning of a long line of adjusting!

Luckily for me, my sister has been to the UK before, and so as soon as we cleared airport security, we were on our way to Paddington Station via the Heathrow Express. Apparently the Heathrow Express is the easiest and comparitively cheapest way to get to and from central London and the airport. Works for me.

I'm so excited to be using workable public transportation, I take a photo of my luggage on the train:

We wind our way to Paddington, hail a cab, have a hilarious talk with the cab driver about Amsterdam and its coffee, and in what seems an endless round of driving in circles(I've never seen so many one way streets with roundabouts in my life!), we end up at our hotel, which is on the south side of the Thames, not too far from Big Ben and Parliament:

These photos weren't taken at the hotel, but from the riverwalk two blocks away from the hotel. I insisted on walking around as soon as we got in, as we had a few hours until bedtime anyway, and it was best to keep moving instead of giving in to jetlag too early in the evening.

Here's the London Eye, a ridiculous excuse for a ferris wheel. I wouldn't be persuaded on going up in that thing...my fear of heights wouldn't let me.

I thought the closet door in our room was funny, because it reminded me of Elizabeth Berkeley in Showgirls:

Unfortunately Google wouldn't cough up a clear photo of the outfit I'm talking about. This is the closest I was able to find:

Anyway, I forget what we did for food that night...I think we just got snacks and the aforementioned magical JD and ginger cola at a local shop. We quickly came to discover that the local pubs in the immediate area had a propensity for serving Thai food. Thai food?! The last thing I want to eat in a British pub is Thai food. That's even more gross than the Chinese food/donut shops I've seen in the San Fernando Valley!

The rest of the evening was spent figuring out wifi, and reading maps to figure out where my sister had to go to work the next morning, and where I was going to spend my first day exploring.