Thursday, July 24, 2008

I love London

I'm in London for work right now and was reminded of how much I like the city. I don't love waking up only an hour and 20 minutes before my flight, but I'll save that for a different post about alarm clocks that only cost $10.

After arrival at Heathrow I took the "tube" (subway) to my destination, and love the fact that trains come every 3-4 minutes. It's so efficient. I also enjoyed watching some American tourists from Ohio figure out how they were going to get to Westminster. A nice man told them where they should get off to change subway lines - but you could see that they were clearly confused. Polite about receiving the advice, but confused. They didn't get off where they were told, and another passenger then told them that it really would be easier if they got off and changed lines. They halfheartedly agreed and got off at the next stop. They didn't look terribly confident but were probably thinking that it would be rude to ignore similar advice from TWO passengers.

It reminded me of when I first moved to London. If you grow up in a suburb of a smaller town in the midwest (and yes I think of Rochester as the midwest) - you don't use public transportation. You drive - so the whole concept of changing trains and reading public transport maps can really be a daunting challenge. For me, navigating a city now is no big deal - but I can remember that it took me a while to ramp up.

How do I know that these Americans were from Ohio? Because in typical American fashion - I and the rest of the train heard their story. :-)

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