London Calling

I got into the London Gatwick airport last night at about 11:30. The train I had booked to get to London Bridge station got detoured or something (there were a lot of "urgent's" everywhere with new directions to places in London I don't know) and the ticket machine wouldn't recognize my card anyway (meaning I couldn't print out my tickets) so I just bought another ticket - this one for the Gatwick Express. Non-stop between Gatwick and Victoria.

The confusion led to me using up a fair amount of my newly bought phone credit (because i can't top-up outside of Germany) trying to get Steph to go to Victoria instead. Which worked. When I got to Victoria I was just putting my luggage down on the platform when AG called. Apparently Steph just didn't recognize me at first - I was wearing a coat (which I don't do at home), my hair was darker, longer, I'm paler, and I was on the phone with someone. I found this concept quite amusing - but it's sad that we hadn't seen each other in that long. :(

ANYWAY, so the weekend was spent in London. The wonderful part was that we didn't have a terribly concrete plan... except to find Banksy pieces. So most of the weekend was spent wandering and getting by (meaning we ate). And we did find Banksy pieces!!! I uh... may have turned into a giddy five year old girl... maybe.... We also found the 100 Club, which is basically the first venue in which punk music was ever played (that wasn't someone's garage or something) and meant to find a few other sites but never got around to it. We did find Platform 9 3/4 as well, which was really entertaining. It's basically half of a luggage cart sticking out of a wall. Picture time!

We met some really awesome people, too. The first night at the hostel was incredibly entertaining - the place is designed for "young backpackers" which I think just translates to party-ish. The place is right above a bar, at any rate. But there was a misunderstanding between Steph and the people there, so we only had it booked for 1 night. Fortunately we took so long trying to figure out the luggage storage place the next day (they said we could keep our luggage there during the day while we found another place) that we were right there when two people from the other hostel connected to the one we were in cancelled. So we shlepped our stuff all the way over, but it was considerably quieter there. Except for the French guys who played guitar and sang all day in the room next door. The guy who worked there was named Fernando and had a CRAZY upbringing: I think he was Portugese, but he'd lived in Germany, China, South Africa, and a couple other places. He was really nice and actually gave us graffiti-finding advice.

Pictures will come soon, I promise.

written by  lost_red_balloon on March 1, 2009 from London, United Kingdom
from the travel blog: I'm a homeless illegal immigrant...?
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