Night Rider

Since I have that 13 hour layover in London I figured it would be the perfect time to visit my old buddy Kyle from SCAD who went on to do bigger and better things in London. Lucky him. And lucky me that I didn't have to sit around in the Heathrow airport for like 13 hours just for a one hour flight to Ireland.

My flight got into London around 21:30 or 9:30pm at night. Ah yes, the big changeover of 12 to 24 hour days. Military time as we Americans like to call you. The rest of the world just calls it time. But yes, flight in at around then and it was about a 6 hour flight so it wasn't terrible. Except for the girl next to me kept getting up and I ended up snapping to connector on my nice headphones that I just bought a couple months ago. Pissed. We'll see how that story pans out.

Anyways, last night was quite the adventure and I'm a little astonished I'm sitting here in the airport writing this now. But alas, I am a champ. And that's how I roll. Basically I got off of the DC to London flight and walked the 8 miles to the exit and met my homie Kyle Hopkins who I knew from when the kid went to SCAD. Now he makes sick jewelry and goes to Fashion Weeks in Europe so I'd say the kid is faring ok in England.

So he picked me up and we took the ridiculously long tube trip back to town and immediately went for a bite to eat. Kebabs and Felafel were on the bill. It was way more adventurous than I thought it would be because while we were in there, an old drunkard started talking to us and forced us to walk him home a few blocks away. Basically he was the most hard to understand person I've ever encountered in my life. He said he spoke cockney-ed English or something like that. Like I said, couldn't understand the guy. Well he chatted with us about women, and the price of gold, and how to hold a gun, how we shouldn't be gangstas, why I have a good face, him talking funny, him giving us a million handshakes, he trying to get a pint with us, and all sorts of mayhem within just a few darn blocks. It was quite ridiculous and a great start to my first trip overseas. Needless to say the Kebab gyro was delicious.

Then Kyle and I went back to his ridiculous dorm and watched the more insane, horrifying, scary, intriguing movie I have ever known to exist. Even crazier than Holy Mountain yes. But we won't go into that. Gross.

After that we decided to go touring about London at around 3 in the morning which was brilliant. We took several double decker buses, and walked a bit to get to downtown London. All this with my awesome “oyster” card. Basically the coolest way to do public transit ever. Suck it Chicago. Haha. No seriously it's that cool.

So we got to downtown and basically saw a super old castle, walked around London bridge, walked millennium bridge, and another bridge. We love bridges. But it was around sunrise at this point so it was looking gorgeous. We talked about how Brits are basically insane because they don't like Oreos, they don't know what American biscuits are (KFC doesn't sell 'em here), a lemonade is the name for a Sprite because they don't have lemonade!!!, the don't have grits, soda is fizzy drink, oh and there are almost no guns in England. At all. Not even the cops. How awesome is that. Props.

Then we just headed back to Kyle's dorm, cooked some hashbrowns, and I hit the tube back to the airport and here I am. What an adventure. I wasn't sure I'd be able to navigate the Tube by myself but by golly I did and it was fantastic. Although I kept falling asleep and thinking that I was going to miss my stop. ha. Well I'll be back in the UK again soon. Fun times so far.

Off to my flight to Ireland and start my real journey. Woohoo.