London, part II

So, I'm going to make a long story short on this one. I have to get up and go to Morocco tomorrow, and I'm not finished packing yet.

Monday was spent doing even more not-necessarily-touristy but perhaps even more fun stuff... though we did go see Big Ben and Westminster Abbey.


(When they say Big Ben is big, they're not kidding around. I got off the tube and looked up and saw it and just laughed. It's like a joke it's so big.)

Westminster Abbey:


I also got a haircut that day.. spending more money than I would have liked to but at least I got to speak English to explain it. I suppose I'm pretty happy.

Oh, and we went to Abbey Road. Here's me crossing the famous crosswalk (you can't tell from that angle it's the famous one, but it definitely is):



We were also able to get (relatively) cheap tickets for a West End (London's equivalent of Broadway) production of Les Miserables.... it was probably the best production of any play I've seen in my life. Really amazing.

So that was Monday, in a nutshell.

Now, our flight back was tuesday morning: early. 6:55 am. Out of Luton, which is an aiport about an hour outside of London. So we needed to catch a train at 4:22 to make it to Luton by about 5:15. Which meant we had to wake up at 3:30 or so.

Well we didn't.

We slept till about 4:30, both of us sleeping through our alarms, and then when I woke up we scrambled to the train station, caught the next train, and got to the airport about 5 minutes before our plane was supposed to leave. They wouldn't let us on. The next flight that had openings (this is on EasyJet, a really thriftily-organized and managed budget airline serving most of Europe) was 24 hours later.

We had to pay a "rescue fee" so that we wouldn't have to buy another flight altogether, and we had to book a hotel in Luton that night (because we didn't want to spend an extra $50 getting to London and back just to book a more expensive hotel there). We were afraid that the town of Luton was going to be a collection of like three buildings thrown up around the aiport... but it wasn't, luckily. It could have been worse, but it was still a very bad day. We got through it though, and had a little extra time to study for the exam the next day (I think I did pretty well. It was a big exam).

So anyway, eventually we got home safe, sound, and a little bit poorer than we would have liked. No worries, though.