London Day 1

We landed! After the longest flight I've been on in a while (11 hours) on the crappiest airline ever (United, I'm talking to you), and a 45 minute ride in our first London taxi, we arrived at our temporary corporate housing.

But before I go on, let me enumerate the many many compelling reasons why one should never ever fly United:

1. They only feed you two meals on an 11 hour flight, and no option to buy additional food.

2. The said meals include a sandwich with cream cheese, a slice of American cheese and a lonely sad piece of turkey on an extremely dry loaf that's incongruously slightly damp on the outside, and a chicken dinner with chunks of chicken (I hope!) floating in an unidentifiable gelatinous brown sauce with orangey rice dotted with sickly green peas.

3. They destroy your luggage and the things within after rummaging through them all - I don't know what my eyebrow pencil did to piss them off, but it was snapped in half! And my canvas bag had 3 large holes ripped into it. United, please teach your security staff what a bomb looks like, and that a Shu Uemura pencil is not it.

4. We almost didn't even get onto our flight since they had a grand total of 3 agents serving 28 kiosks. Needless to say, there was lots of screaming (not on our part) by a lot of angry would-be fliers, and the only reason we got on the plane on time is because a nice agent agreed to help me after I begged him for 5 minutes. This was after we were patiently waiting at our kiosk for 30 minutes for someone to help us.

YOU SUCK HOT BALLS UNITED.

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But onto happier and funner things, our corporate apartment! It's a newly reburbished building in South Bank, and we got a two bedroom/ two bath.


Some things that I expected:

Smallest laundry machine ever that takes 3 hours to wash 4 shirts tops

Switches to turn on every single power outlet

No screens on the windows - I've already battled two large horseflies

Toilets w/ two different flushers - a small one for pee, and a larger one for poo


Things that were unexpected:

We live right by Tower Bridge! We caught a glimpse of it after grocery shopping at Mark & Spencers, and we somehow wandered into Potters Field, which is a nice smallish park right by the Tower Bridge entrance. It felt surreal walking toward the Bridge, like we were walking into a movie set. There were a surprising number of tourists about, considering it was Sunday night, and we heard an unbelievable amount of different languages being spoken around us.

How often the waitstaff say thank you while serving you dinner. They even say thank you while filling your water. Like we're doing them a favor by letting them pour our water. =)

How long it takes for it to get dark. I don't think it was proper night until 9PM.

It hasn't rained yet...