The trip to London and back

I overslept Thursday morning after a restless night in Montpellier. I had planned on getting up by 9 or so to get ready for my flight to London. Instead, I woke up around 10:30 to realize I was going to have to rush to catch my 12:15 flight to London Gatwick. Lucky for me, there were no glitches, other than having fun trying to figure out how French gasoline pumps work. They have pay at the pump in France, but they only take French credit cards, even British credit cards don't work in gasoline pumps in France.

The flight to London Gatwick was for the most part uneventful, and I arrived on time around 1:00 pm local time. After making it through immigration control I hopped on the Gatwick Express which brought me into Victoria Station in Central London in 30 minutes. I love cities where you can get on public transit from the airport and be where you need to be in the city. As an aside, Hong Kong does it one better, letting you check in your bags at the train station on your way to the airport, so you don't have to deal with your bags on the train.

Anyway, from Victoria Station, I grabbed a taxi to my hotel, a Radisson Sussex, which are well known in London for having very luxurious accomodations, in the minimum amount of space. The room is considered a bargain at 124 pounds a night in the West End of London, but there's barely room for one person in the room. Perfect for a lone business traveler like me. And there are the luxury items, Gilchrist & Soames amenities, towel warmer, Bang and Olefson TV and stereo, fluffy down comforter, among other things.

As it turned out I had a meeting at 4pm local time with a possible new partner, after the meeting I found out that the local office had not been able to schedule any meetings for me for Friday, so another co-worker who was returning Friday to the states recommended I also change my flight to leave Friday instead of Saturday. After the meeting, my co-worker Jeff and I went to join another co-worker and some people from another partner company at a bar called Ochre in London. The funny thing about it was we had an impossible time finding the bar, and it took three London taxi cabs to get us there, mostly because we'd give the cabbie directions, and he'd latch on to one aspect of the directions, and we'd end up somewhere wrong. We told the first one we needed to go to Ludgate Circus, and then somewhere along the way we got a call from our co-worker who told us we should tell the cabbie that there's an HSBC bank near there and to drop us off there. So, he ended up dropping us off at an HSBC bank but not the right one! The second cab, we told we needed to go to Ludgate Circus, but to a street called Creed Lane, and he ended up taking us to CreeChurch Lane. The third cabbie (and by this time it wasn't funny any more), finally got us to the right location.

So we had a few drinks at Ochre, before going around the corner to an Indian restaurant for dinner called Bengal Tiger. After dinner Jeff still wanted to go out, so we ended up at an Australian bar called Wallabout, where we had one drink before going back to the hotel for the night, a short night, since I agreed to meet Jeff at 8am to catch a cab to Paddington Station to take the Heathrow Express to London Heathrow. I caught the early 10am flight back to SFO.
So I'm back in the Bay Area, a day earlier. Another day to recover from jet lag before I have to make it back into work next week.