Reflections on London

I meant to post this back in November when I was in London. But I somehow spaced it and just found it today when cleaning up my hard drive.

London is much more expensive that I had imagined. I was here in the late 1990’s a lot and it didn’t seem that bad. But, as an example, today I paid about $34 to ride the London Underground for 3 days. The ticket is only good for one station (i.e. I didn’t pay that much money for a pass that I could use to go anywhere), and the station I’m riding to is only 2.7 miles from my hotel. That comes out to about $2.09 a mile, which, interestingly enough, is also the exchange rate right now (1 BPS to 2.09USD). I would walk but cobblestones + 4 inch heels = haven’t my knees suffered enough.

The office I’m working in is amazing. Watching British romantic comedies used to make me scoff at the places where the characters worked. Now I realize there actually are offices like that in the city. This particular client’s office is all glass walls, fancy glass doors, lounges with wide plank wood floors and modern couches that aren’t moldy and stained, trendy yet tasteful colors on the walls, and cube wall dividers that are curvy and covered in colored material rather than the usual square metal set up that is conducive to boredom and depression.

The bad thing is every time someone starts talking to me I start thinking about Monty Python’s flying circus and I have to think of something sad (e.g. dogs that have been run over by cars) so I don’t start laughing. Especially when they say “cheers” or “right, then”. And today when I was going out to get a sandwich the guy sitting next to me said “going out for some lunchy munchy then?” and I had to think about buying Lucent stock at $72 and selling it at $6 to not crack up. I also think it’s funny the way certain words have an “s” on the end. For example, they have a bin for recycling that says “drinks cans”. There is also a “motors parks” and a “computers lab” in the building.

My favorite thing that I have discovered (besides how cheap, relative to US, French wines are – the only cheap thing in UK and it’s unfortunate I can’t spend my entire day drinking) is a snack called flap cakes. They are oatmeal and something called “inverted sugar” pressed into a bar. It’s like being able to eat oatmeal without needing a bowl. Flap cakes come plain or with fruit. And inverted sugar is my favorite ingredient that I’ve ever heard of, replacing “lemon zest”, which in real life is rather disappointing. “Zest” suggests some kind of excitement and zest is essentially just pieces of a peel in your food. Even I can do that. Inverted sugar sounds very X games-ish and daring, like something a chef would make in a bake off sponsored by Red Bull, and the next day there would be the headline: Chef Pulls Inverted Sugar – Wins Bakeoff.