Friday, July 14, 2006

Start of a visit

I arrived in London Thursday morning and was checked into my hotel by about 1pm. Unfortunately the guy on the flight next to me who was insanely fidgety and the turbulence, I didn't sleep much at all. I slept for about 12 hours last night so I'm feeling pretty decent today, thankfully.

The hotel I'm staying at is in Kensington, and I haven't had much time to explore the area yet, but there are tons of nice looking bistros, small grocery stores, a nice Waitrose grocery store just past the tube stop (sort of on par with Whole Foods quality but less organic/natural-ish) and some independent shops. The sheer lack of independent retail stores here was a shock - all of the High (main) streets in the towns have the same chain stores, so there's little in the way of local character. But Kensington seems to be a bit different and definitely more "posh."

The plan for this weekend is to go on an area tour with Allen, a co-worker expat who moved here about 2 months ago. He was even kind enough to bring me a little present - a book on learning to understand the Brits, both in behavior and cultural nuance. There's an incident with some pants he related to me that hopefully I will just learn vicariously.

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