Made it to London!

Hooray!

I made it to London yesterday after the crush of last minute shopping packing and "ride to LAX" planning. Special thanks to Sean, Reggie, and Alan who snapped this photo as I was carrying down my gear to the car:

It's too bad you can't see how big that bag really is...

The flight was LONG and fairly uncomfortable. I elected to try out the Hindu meal which wasn't all that appetizing, but special meals are served first which is worth taking advantage of.


Virgin-Atlantic has a pretty cool flight map application that shows the progress of your flight:


Looks like we definitely took the great circle path (or very close to it). A little after 9pm, I got a twitter message from Sean letting me know I was 35,000 feet over Ontario, Canada going 644mph. Nice to know someone was tracking my flight while I was trying to force myself to fall asleep... (Twitter account is IndyMapper; without a phone (that works here) I can only send tweets when I have Internet access.)

Just before landing, I decided to try out the "aerial photo" setting on my new camera. Not bad:


I arrived in Heathrow at noon, and it took me about an hour and a half to leave the airport. I had to find a place to leave my giant bag, and figure out which trains to take to get to London. Of course I was looking out for spatial references in the airport:
Getting around London is relatively easy on foot, so I did quite a bit of walking yesterday. It took me quite a few blocks (in the wrong direction) before I finally figured out where the street names were. They are posted on the corners of the buildings, not on the traffic signals.

I got to UCL around 6:00, and caught Paul Longely just in time for a pint at the pub. His grad students took me to Agra for curry, and Paul and Mike are totally right: Curry in London beats the pants off Santa Barbara.

I could write a lot more, but it's time to for some tea and biscuits before heading out to take more pictures before my flight to Nairobi tonight.

Here are a few of the pictures I took yesterday: