Greg and Kat's blog

As I write this, it is the morning of our first full day in London. We got in yesterday mid-day.

So far, so good. We are saying in a hotel just around the corner from Trafalgar Square, which is walking-distance to a lot of stuff.

We found the hotel with not more than 10 minutes of walking in the wrong direction. After checking in, we walked the neighbourhood for a bit and walked by Buckingham Palace.

My initial impressions of London:

• I miss streets that meet at right-angles. Take for example this intersection near our hotel. It appears on our pocket map as five streets that come together, but when on the ground, is 100 m of roundabout where “we want to go straight” is not a useful thing to have deduced from the map.
• When in China, the dominant feeling was “wow, everything’s big”. Tienanmen Square, for example, is almost incomprehensibly huge. Here: everything so far has been smaller than I imagined it. Buckingham palace: not all that big. I think I should be more in the New York mindset: everything very dense and close together.
• British pubs are funny places. Need to investigate further.