London

Travelling to Europe is really a pain. Thanks to my week of living the easy life, I’ve calibrated my internal clock perfectly incorrectly for the 7 hour time change, so I wasn’t ready to sleep on our Trans-Atlantic flight until we were about to land.

There’s also the amount of time it takes to get here. We left Nashville at 3:50 PM and will be arriving in Naples at 9:55 PM one day later. That’s 30 hours with the time zone change, and still 23 without. Of course, we’re using accumulated American miles, so the connections and layovers suck, but that’s still a lot of time in an airplane.

And American sure doesn’t do much to make it any better. I think that was the least legroom of any flight I’ve taken. And I have a theory about the food. I think that somebody out there has become very wealthy for making food as tasteless as possible.

In any case, I’m writing this from London’s Gatwick airport, right as we’re beginning the second half of our 8 hour layover. The first thing we did was find a computer so I could do the Da Vinci Code Quest Final Challenge Thing. It was mostly predictable—harder versions of the same puzzles. With Dad’s help, we finished in about an hour and ten minutes, which surely won’t be enough to win, but I never was really expecting to anyway.

After that we had lunch at a restaraunt in the airport. I figured that, since I wouldn’t be in London long, I might as well do the British thing and have fish and chips, so I did.

I noticed a few odd things about London. First, people actually walk on the left side of. Obviously, I knew they drive on the left, but I never really made the connection to walking.

Also, like any international airport, the place is littered with duty free shops selling beer, wine, cigarettes, and so forth. But what caught my eye were the cigarettes. Unlike American packaging which tries to hide their poisonous nature (i.e. the surgeon-general’s warning), here it is emblazoned on all sides with messages like “Smoking kills,” “Smoking causes fatal lung cancer,” and “Smoking is highly addictive, don’t start.” I have photos, which I will post when I get home.

The last thing is security. Compared to the US, security here is lax. We had to go out of the secure zone to get to the lounge,e and when we went back through, they didn’t check our IDs, just the boarding passes. And the metal detector is set low enough that nobody had to take off their shoes.

Later addendum: they did eventually check our IDs at the gate.