Day 1: Please Mind The Gap

I slept for about 90 percent of the plane ride to London, where we'd leave from. We pondered our way out of Heathrow, and were on the right metro to our hotel. I decided that listening to The Beatles was the only appropriate thing to do, so Lennon was reminding me that nothing is real while row after row of brick buildings sped by us. There wasn't a stucco building in sight, a very strange thing indeed for two LA kids. British signs are very wordy, "Way Out" instead of Exit, "Please Mind the Gap" in white and blue all over the inside of the car and on the loudspeaker. I liked them, and the fact that there were signs, big signs(!), for books! People were readining in their spare time! It warmed my heart, it did. My blood went cold when we got off and saw the plaque commemorating the victims of the July bomb attacks in 2005. In retrospect, it might not have been my blood, but it was definetly my toes. I was dressed in sandals, jeans, and a tee shirt--which might have been fine had it not been raining the coldest rain I've ever been rained on by.The streets make spiderwebs and rhombuses from the air, but we managed to get to the hotel, to our tiny room with the most broken down mattress i've ever slept on. Thankfully, I was too tired to give a shit. We were to be up and at the Contiki departure site at 6 in the morning, then it was several hours on a bus and a ferry to France. Kirk conked out fully clothed, jet lagged as all hell, but I, having survived a collegiate sleep schedule, went to bed a few episodes of Supernanny later.