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Celebration Europe 2007 – Day 1
12 July 2007 @ 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
Lost in London! Thursday, July 12, 2007 – Flight / Hotel hunt / Star Wars The Exhibition
Our flight to London left at 9:30. We had about 6 kg of excess baggage, but didn't have to pay extra.
At around 9:45 local time (10:45 in Germany) we landed at Stansted. With the words „Stansted Airport, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, we must be cautious“ we got off our small Air Berlin plane and headed for baggage claim.
After mastering our first conversation with English people at the tourist information desk, we took the bus toward the City of London. After a ride of about 2 hours we arrived at Victoria Station in the heart of London and wanted to walk to the hotel…
…we should have taken the Tube.
After wandering aimlessly back and forth, we remembered that Tim had a map with him. But when he tried to read the map, we still walked in the wrong direction.
Alex turned out to be the better map reader. After about three hours of walking, we were both slowly getting fed up and were about to grab a taxi,
but then we tried our luck and asked the next passerby about the hotel, who was able to point us in the right direction. Fifteen minutes later we sat exhausted in our small hotel room.
But since we still wanted to go to the Star Wars Exhibition, we set off. At first Tim wanted to walk there too, but given our earlier experience, we decided to take the Tube after all.
No sooner said than done: after a walk of about 10 minutes we arrived at Earl’s Court Underground Station and bought tickets for the ride. During the ride we realized that we could have taken this line from Victoria Station to Earl’s Court as well and saved ourselves the 3 hours of wandering around London.
Something else that seemed odd to us on the Tube was the constant announcement „Mind the Gap!“ at almost every stop (anyone who has been to London will probably know it, and we can only recommend it to everyone else).
When we got off at Westminster, we already saw a big strange building on our way out and Tim just said: „What kind of weird church is that?“ As we saw more and more of this „church“, we realized it was Big Ben. So we got to see Big Ben too, and then walked toward the Star Wars Exhibition.
At the ticket desk we realized that we wouldn't have enough money left for the way back, since we otherwise only had euros, but we didn't care, we just had to get in. And it was worth it: you felt like a little kid again, and with grins on our faces and big eyes we slowly (OK, more like totally hyped and hectic) walked through the exhibition.
Unfortunately, at some point you've seen the whole exhibition, and we wanted to head back, or rather first find a place to exchange money. While looking for said place, Tim got bumped by a passerby who just said „Hey, look where you go man!“ That was another highlight of the day for Alex. Having finally reached the money exchange, Alex changed his remaining money into pounds and we could head back to the hotel. And so Thursday came to an end, and we were glad that we had handled everything so well so far.
