London Calling

We’ve finally made it!  We’ve been here a total of 30 hours at this point and we’re already in “full out” mode.  The missus had to start work today and I’m all set up in our condo with a small little office ready to do some serious work.

The last 48 hours have been hectic.  We left Halifax at 11:45pm Saturday night but there was much to do all day Saturday before take-off.  I was already packed and ready to go (only because I had moved out of my apartment 2 weeks previous) but Gina was far from it!  I knew I’d only be stressing out and in her way and maybe even be a bit of a nag, so I decided to play the first two games of my softball playoffs to keep myself busy and out of her hair.  We won both softball games and Gina packed all day and then we spent some time with her family and had a great steak dinner before heading out to the airport.

For our flight, Gina had an Executive Class ticket and I was just some poor lonely schmuck who was in Economy class, sitting beside someone I didn’t know.  We were on the same flight, but not sitting together and I didn’t have access to the Executive area and it would have cost me $700 to upgrade to Executive and we just couldn’t swing that at this point.  When we got to the airport, Gina decided to try and get me bumped up to Executive using “it’s our anniversary” as her line (it actually was our “6 month anniversary”, so she wasn’t lying).  We kept getting the run around as to if I could get bumped up or not and it came to the point where we were actually on the plane and we still didn’t know if I could get put in Executive class or not.  We talked to the flight attendant and she felt really bad but she said she could in a lot of trouble for bumping me up, so unfortunately I was still stuck in Economy class.  Our next plan was to have Gina sit beside me and try to see if we could convince the person that was supposed to sit next to me in Economy to go up to Executive for free.  The man who was going to be next to me nearly ran up to Exec when we made him the offer, which meant we got to sit beside each other instead of simply being on the same plane for 6 hours and not getting to see one another.

I just have to take a second to point out how amazing my lady is… How many people would give up a full bed and all the amazing perks in Executive class to be bumped down to no leg room and shitty food in Economy?  I’m a very lucky man!

It’s hard to eat healthy when you’re travelling!  Especially on flights that are late at night and/or overnight.  I packed a protein bar for the plane to keep me from snacking on their crappy food, but of course I ate that while in the line-up before we even got passed security and I was now stuck with the Air Canada food.  We were to have an evening meal (not sure why they called it an “evening meal” as it was about 1am when we got it) and a hot breakfast on our flight with no options to buy food otherwise (I was not happy about this as I’m use to eating every 2 hours).  The snack wasn’t bad… It was a roast beef sandwich and two pre-packed cookies. Not amazing, but not bad.  The breakfast, on the other hand, was terrible!  Their so-called “omelette” was disgusting!  I’m not even sure what was in it, but needless to say, I didn’t enjoy it… I ATE it… but I didn’t enjoy it!

We arrived in London at 9:30am local time and we were greeted by our driver, Richard.  He was a very nice guy who loved to chat and he got us to our condo, along the way showing us a lot of sights and explaining to us about how people drive and how crazy they are here and what to do and what to avoid when driving and also as a pedestrian, it was quite overwhelming to be honest.  Once we were settled and showered, we headed out to find some food because we were starving!  My goal was to find a pub, have a pint and some fish and chips, London style.  I absolutely HATE fish, but I thought my first meal here SHOULD be fish and chips for sure.

We ended up at a local pub called “Hung, Drawn & Quarter”.  I had a Guinness and Gina had ale called London’s Pride and after trying it, I think it jumped right in to my top 10 beers of all time!  We ordered a chicken sandwich with a salad and of course an order of fish and chips.  We decided to split both meals and I started with the sandwich, because I was scared of the fish.  I absolutely loved the sandwich!  It had something on it called “wholegrain mustard” which I fell in love with and I didn’t want to give up the other half, especially for FISH, but I did because I wanted to be fair (even though Gina said I didn’t have to) and we traded fish for chicken.  I didn’t want to eat this fish for two reasons; #1 its fish and #2 it was deep fried, but I tried it anyway and to my surprise, I LOVED it!!!  It was DEEEELISH!!!  I ate every last bite and was thoroughly impressed!

We finished up our meals and our beer and decided to go for a walk and see if we could find some groceries.  There isn’t much in the way of grocery stores where we live because it’s the business district and because it was a Sunday there wasn’t much open.  We found a little divey looking place and grabbed the bare essentials of water, milk, yogurt, bananas, oatmeal and some Shreddies and headed home.

The day pretty much ends there as we were both exhausted and I had been up for 31 hours straight at this point (Gina slept longer than me Saturday morning and slept a few hours on the plane) and we fell asleep on the couch.  I think the jetlag has passed already as I’m only a little bit tired right now.  I got up this morning at 7:30am and started my day and it’s been going swimmingly.  I met the missus for lunch and we had a sandwich and salad from Café Mana and now my plan for the rest of the day is to get a cell phone up and going and I think I may be a lot closer now than I was an hour ago.  I was going to try and find a gym to join, but I may put that off for a few days just so I can get a bit more comfortable with my surroundings here.  We’re going to go for a run when Gina is off work and go get some REAL groceries and get settled in to our place.