{"id":1119,"date":"2010-09-03T00:16:56","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T07:16:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=1119"},"modified":"2010-09-03T00:16:56","modified_gmt":"2010-09-03T07:16:56","slug":"london-day-0-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2010\/09\/03\/london-day-0-5\/","title":{"rendered":"London, day 0.5"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I write this, it is the morning of our first full day in London.  We got in yesterday mid-day.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>My initial impressions of London:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I miss streets that meet at right-angles.  Take for example <a href=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com\/maps?f=q&#038;source=s_q&#038;hl=en&#038;q=Trafalgar+Square,+Westminster,+London+SW1Y+5,+United+Kingdom&#038;sll=32.958033,-96.850511&#038;sspn=0.024342,0.055189&#038;g=trafalgar+square&#038;ie=UTF8&#038;cd=2&#038;geocode=FbL0EQMd3gn-_w&#038;split=0&#038;hq=&#038;hnear=Trafalgar+Square,+Westminster,+London+SW1Y+5,+United+Kingdom&#038;ll=51.507357,-0.127593&#038;spn=0.001129,0.003449&#038;z=18\">this intersection<\/a> 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 &#8220;we want to go straight&#8221; is not a useful thing to have deduced from the map.<\/li>\n<li>When in China, the dominant feeling was &#8220;wow, everything&#8217;s big&#8221;.  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.<\/li>\n<li>British pubs are funny places.  Need to investigate further.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1119"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1121,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}