Sheep Guarding Llama

We got up at five in the morning. We had originally worried about getting up at four and rushing to the airport but everyone that I spoke to in London said that because we were just taking a domestic flight from little Gatwick Airport that we only needed to arrive twenty to thirty minutes before the actual flight and that we would be perfectly fine. So we were not very concerned about the time. We assumed that flying inside of the UK was nothing like flying inside of the US.

We took a taxi to the Gatwick Express Train at Victoria Station. The cab driver seemed to think that we did not have enough time for the flight. Not a good sign. We got to Victoria Station and hopped onto the Express that was just about to leave. That zipped us up to Gatwick pretty quickly. We rushed into the airport thinking that we should be fine as we were there more than thirty minutes before our flight – more than the maximum time that had been suggested to us.

We rushed to where Aer Lingus should have been to check us in and there was no Aer Lingus. We got someone who worked at the airport to tell us that forty minutes or more before the flights that the tickets are considered void and that the airlines packed up and left! So apparently no one that we talked to has ever flown inside of the UK before because you need a minimum of an hour and a half to be able to safely get onto a local flight.

We panic booked a direct flight to Belfast with EasyJet. Instead of £40 we ended up having to spend £300!  Ouch.  That made for an expensive education in flying inside of the UK.  This trip has been expensive enough so far.  With the final exchange it was $614 for the second flight after having lost the money on the first one.  At least we didn’t then have to pay for the train trip from Dublin to Belfast although that would have been minor.

The upside was that we actually arrived in Belfast a little before we had planned on getting there even with the earlier flight.   We caught the bus that took forty-five minutes to go from Belfast International to the city itself.  The larger airport that we arrived at was quite a bit outside of the city proper but we did get a chance to look at the countryside as we headed into town.

We were pretty tired by the time that we got to the hotel.  We checked in and immediately headed over to Chambers next door for a quick lunch.  We ate and came back and napped for a while.  Today is Thanksgiving so officially it is a holiday for me although I spent about four hours today working as much as usual but just from my BlackBerry.

After our nap we walked downtown which took about twenty minutes and met up with about a dozen people from the office at a famous Belfast landmark pub called The Crown Bar.  We had a few drinks and then, once everyone was there, we walked just up the block to the Red Panda and had a nice Chinese dinner.  Then after dinner returned to the Crown for a few hours of craic.  It was a really good time and Dominica and I both enjoyed ourselves very much.

After the pub my friend who organized the get together gave us a ride to the hotel (my first ever ride in a Renault.)  We got back and were straight off to sleep.  We were totally exhausted.  Very busy day and no pictures today.

Today is Dominica and my last real day in London. I was up nice and early and off to the office early enough so that I arrived and had no one to let me in. It was a little before eight when I got to the office even after having missed three trains on the DLR simply because I wasn’t willing to be as rude and obnoxious as it apparently is required to be to catch a train in this town. In New York people do not shove you out of the way to get onto the train. Partially because in New York they run enough trains to handle the volume. And partially just because the culture does not let you be that aggressive getting onto a train.

Dominica had gotten a buy one day, get one day free tour bus pass yesterday so she decided to take advantage of the free day of touring to continue taking bus tours of London. The sun was out today so she had an opportunity to get more pictures than she got yesterday. She also got a chance to take a walking tour of the Tower of London once she was done with the bus.

It worked out well that I got in so early, though, because I ended up being able to meet up with a friend for morning coffee in the company canteen whom I wouldn’t have had a chance to meet with otherwise. So that worked out well.

By the time that we were done with morning coffee there were people in the office to let me in. For some reason my badge would let me into the building but it wouldn’t let me onto the correct floors so I could get to the office and could see the desks but couldn’t get to them to sit down and actually work.

Today ended up being almost entirely meetings. Very little chance at all to sit down and actually use a workstation. And when I finally did have a chance to do that I kept getting locked out of the workstation that had the tools that I needed so I was effectively useless.

Before leaving the office I did get a chance to get a tour of the trading floor on Canary Wharf which is far nicer than the floor in Tribeca. After my tour one of my developers from the wharf and I went out to another bar on the wharf and got a drink before heading for home. We didn’t get very much time as I had to get back to Tower Gateway and pick up Dominica and get back to the wharf before it was too late to get food.

So I rushed back to the hotel using the Docklands Light Rail, picked up Dominica and we rushed back to Heron Quay via the DLR to meet a friend from the office at Nando’s. We had a really nice dinner and a good time hanging out. Nando’s had some really amazing food. Several people had told me that I really had to eat there so we were glad to have gotten the chance to before we left. And it was open until a relatively decent hour.

After dinner we came back to the hotel and got to sleep as soon as all of the early packing was done. Dominica had managed to pack up almost everything before I had picked her up so we were in pretty good shape.  Tomorrow we are off to Northern Ireland. Our original plans were to take a train through Wales and a ferry from Hollyhead to Dublin and then a train from Dublin to Belfast.  But Min got a great deal on tickets flying to Dublin and then taking the train up that will save us a lot of time so we decided to do that.

I ended up working until one in the morning yesterday. One of the downsides to work from the United Kingdom is that the normal work that I would be doing back home is shifted five hours later than it is here so people sort of expect me to be around at really insane hours. But so much work was backed up that I stayed up late getting things back on track. That made me very tired and made for a late “local” morning today.

I slept in figuring that I would be more useful rested than groggy and then headed into the office in the late morning. I got in and was immediately swept off to a lunch meeting. The rest of my day was spent just going from meeting to meeting. There are so many people that I am here to meet that it is a bizarre schedule. I am doing almost none of my regular work in lieu of tonnes of alternative work. At least things are very interesting.

I worked until after seven. Dominica spent the day taking a bus tour while riding on the top of one of the double decker buses. It was cold and dark and really hard to get pictures but she did her best all bundled up riding on the top of the bus all by herself in the drizzle.  She took a lot of pictures and is planning to do more tomorrow.

After work I took the DLR (Docklands Light Rail) from Canary Wharf to Tower Gateway and walked to the Sleep Inn to meet Dominica. Now that I know how to use the DLR it is incredibly simple for me to get from the hotel to the office.  It turns out that this is a great location for us to be staying at because it is easy for me to go to work and easy for Dominica to go sight-seeing.  It was about eight when I got back. We walked back to the Minories Pub and got some dinner there. Fish and chips, of course. The two great meals of Britain: fish & chips and wellington pastries.

We were hoping to get dessert but the pub closed while we were eating and wouldn’t let us get the rest of our meals. This is one of the most obvious differences that we have been seeing between the UK and America. In the US restaurants normally stay open as long as there is a constant flow of customers. The certainly don’t stop serving food once they let you in the door. You can always safely finish the meal that you have started. In the UK the focus isn’t on the business but on getting home. So they close early, stop in the middle of your meal, never post hours, etc. Very strange to our way of thinking. We assume that if you are a business that you did it intentionally and it isn’t putting you out to attempt to buy something from you. Eating in London is like an imposition on the restaurant.

So our dinner was cut short. We walked back to the Sleep Inn just as their own restaurant stopped serving food. London must be the sleepiest town on the planet. I have never seen anyplace that shuts down so early. This is on par with Newark back home. The city only seems to exist as a place for people to grab lunch. They expect everyone to eat at home for dinner and go to bed after EastEnders.

The little bar at the hotel did have some snack foods prepackaged that they could sell us so we made due with those and some coffee. Then it was up to the hotel room where I did just a little more office work and then off to bed.

Dominica and I got up early this morning so that we could get an early breakfast at the Avonpark House in Stratford-upon-Avon. Our vegetarian breakfast consists of scrambled eggs, baked beans, dry toast, Linda McCartney sausage, coffee, apple juice and yoghurt. Pretty healthy.

I worked from the Avonpark House for a little while before we headed out to catch the train. I wanted to make sure that the basics from the weekend were taken care of before being unable to connect to the office for a little while. I cleared out my email, took care of tickets and requests, got back to people from over the weekend, let people know where I was, etc. It took about two hours to get everything straightened out but at least everything was in line for the day.

We hired a Hackney Carriage to take us round to the train station where we caught the train bound for London. Unlike the train that we took coming northbound this southbound train stopped at all of the little tiny village stations along the route making it take much longer.

We got to Marylebone Station and walked from there to Baker Street where we were able to catch the London Underground which took us to Aldgate in City of London. From there we walked a ways south down to Prescott where we are staying near the Tower of London at the Sleep Inn City of London.

We were pretty exhausted by the time that we got to the hotel. We got checked in and situated then I had to head out to get to the office on Canary Wharf. I went to the desk but they really had no idea how to get there or how to get me information on how to get there. So pretty much I was left to my own devices.

I decided that the distance wasn’t that far and the underground is confusing so I just walked. Oops. That took about an hour and a half (I had been hearing that it was just half an hour.) I was a good distance from the hotel when I caught my first glimpse of Canary Wharf and realized how far away it was. Later I was informed that the area that I walked through was very scary and it was amazing that I wasn’t mugged. But none of it felt in the least bit worrisome. It felt much safer than the good bits of Manhattan and those aren’t really scary either.

I wasn’t in the office for very long since most of the day had been spent traveling. It took a good hour or more in the office just to figure out how to get a working workstation for me. The company that I work for doesn’t have any system for employees working outside of their home region to have their desktop logins work. They take away web access, email, etc. so you can’t even get the basic tools necessary to tell someone that your login is broken. So I have to work as someone else and log in remotely to my workstation on Wall Street even to just check my mail or to lookup a telephone number.

After work two of my coworkers and I walked over to Henry Addinson on the Wharf for a pint of ale and then took the DLR over to Tower Gateway to meet Dominica and walk down to St. Katherine’s Wharf to look for dinner. We ended up settling on an Indian place called Mala which was very good.

After we got back to our hotel I logged in again and ended up having to work until one in the morning. I am going to be pretty tired tomorrow.

I tried to take pictures today and was able to get a few off but only just a few. It is so dark in London, both because of the weather but also because we are much farther north than we are used to being back home and the sun is very low and dim and sets extremely early compared to what we are used to. There is almost never any light here.

I slept for about ten hours and Dominica slept for about thirteen. We were up at eight this morning so we had just barely enough time to shower and to get downstairs to get our breakfasts. It was a vegetarian version of an English breakfast with toast, beans, scrambled eggs, yoghurt, juice, coffee and Linda McCartney sausage (a British made vegetarian sausage that is very good.)

I did just a tiny bit of work for the office – most just making sure that everything was okay and cleaning up my email so that my BlackBerry would work again. Then we set off for town to begin our day.

Today was much cooler than yesterday and just as we were about to leave the inn it began to rain pretty steadily. We gave it a few minutes but there was no sign of it stopping so we decided that we had to head out into it anyway.

We started by taking a standard bus tour of town. I wasn’t able to get any pictures because of the rain. We never got off of the bus because of the weather. We were wet enough as it was. The bus just went around the village and to a few sights close to town. Any tour of Stratford-upon-Avon is just a tour of a handful of semi-significant William Shakespeare sights like his birthplace, his wife’s cottage, his mother’s farm and his daughter’s husband’s office. It is a strange collection of historic sites to have as a tourist attraction to be sure.

We were glad that we took the bus tour since we got to go to the “famous” sites since we were already here and we got an overview of the village. But it didn’t last very long and didn’t cover anything very exciting. After the tour we stopped into the Pen and Parchment which was right next to where we caught the tour bus and looked very inviting.

Lunch was excellent and we were very happy to discover that the Pen and Parchment had real ale (cask drawn) on draught. We both got cranberry and brie Wellington. It was awesome. The food here is really great.

After lunch we took the “city” bus over to the market town of Warwick where the famous Warwick Castle is located. This was the first time for either Dominica or I to ever take an “actual” bus that was not a tour bus. We are pretty sure that buses here in the UK are nothing like they are in the United States. In the US they are often scary. I would never want to venture onto a Newark city bus, for example. But here in England the buses are clean and pleasant and the drivers are helpful and you can pay with credit card and they can make change if they need to. It was a great experience. We didn’t feel like the bus was dirty or scary in the least.

We got a nice view of the region around Warwickshire while on the bus. We got dropped off at the market in Warwick and from there we walked through town to the castle. We spent several hours doing the self-guided walking tour of the castle. It was incredibly dark from the overcast sky and it was raining lightly the whole time so we were very hard up for getting any pictures. I took what I could and got them uploaded to Flickr. Several of them are blurry but we didn’t have that many good shots and we wanted to have a good set of pics from the castle so we decided to leave them in the set.

We were getting really cold at the castle so we headed back into Warwick and caught the bus back to Stratford-upon-Avon. It was getting cold and damp quickly and we were really getting ready to get inside somewhere. We were very excited when we got picked up by one of the rare double decker buses and got to ride authentically in a real British double decker on the top deck in the front row. It was very cool.

We decided to get dinner at the Old Tramway Pub which is located almost directly next to the inn where we are staying. We got there but found that they had just stopped serving dinner. It was just fifteen past five in the afternoon. They told us that pubs in Britain stop serving food on Sundays very early. So we had a couple of drinks to warm up and spent abut an hour hanging out with the locals before walking back into town to find some food at a regular restaurant.

We went to Thespians, an Indian and Bengali restaurant, on Sheep Street. I have never had an opportunity to have Bengali cuisine before so I went for the vegetarian recommendations of the house. The food was excellent. We really like the restaurant. While we were eating we noticed out of the window that the rain that had been coming down all day had turned to snow!

It was a cold walk home in the snow after having spent the whole day outside in the wind and the rain. We were pretty wet for most of the day and the weather was starting to get to us after having been out in it for so long.

We got back to the Avonpark House and settled in for the evening. Tomorrow morning we are eating breakfast here at the inn and then catching the train down to London.