The advantage of leaving early for a short flight is that you get to spend almost the whole day at the destination. The disadvantage, of course is that not only do you have to actually fly (which messes me up no end and I hate it) but you compound it with having to wake up at an ungodly hour (which in my case messes me up even more if it is at all possible). All of this gives me really mixed feelings about it because while it does gain me one day to tour around it also makes it a less than stelar day so… I don’t know, the jury is still out on this one.
So even though the weather was far better than I could have hopped for for this time of the year, today was a day of headaches and shivers which made me think my body was actively trying to not let me fall sick just yet. But then I may just be the flying and the waking up ridiculously early. I can only hope so, otherwise the rest of the stay will be a lot less enjoyable.
Tuxa on the other hand is definitely getting worse. After spending the last two days at home trying to beat the flu she looked like she was really going to do it but I guess the day took it’s toll on her and when the sun went down (at an whooping 16h30) her throat just gave up on her and now, not only is it hurting a lot, but it also decided to deprive her of her voice. And the cold itself also decided to charge in so there will be no partying and watching the fireworks at the Eye at midnight. Oh well, I’m not a party animal at all anyway, I just hope she gets better so she doesn’t end up spending her London days sick and in bed…
Anyway we did make the most of the day and since every store will probably be closed this weekend we decided to leave the parks and so on for the weekend and just tour the city streets today.
And so it was that we finally found where Whitard is (we lost track of it since last time we where in London and we couldn’t find it in Covent Garden and assumed it had moved out from there. I could have sworn it was not there the last time…) and we got to buy lots and lots of teas and even some related utensils. So that was really cool.
Another great thing we got to do today was to visit the Apple store. Great store, very much like the one in the New York Soho (and almost all the others I guess), very big, very clean, very white, very trendy and filled with great (and great-looking) technology.
I finally got to handle a Photo iPod and it just proved me right in my opinion of it: anyone considering using it view their photos or to show them to their friends on that screen is just crazy. So it’s only real use (for the photo part only, of course) is as an extremely portable slide-show machine with an easy interface to your TV. That way people can carry their thousands of photos over to their friends’ and bore them to death with pictures of their vacation or their children, on their own TV, that much more easily. But it is just so horribly overpriced for that!
Hopefully tomorrow Tuxa will be in better shape so that we can go watch the new year’s parade and hang around the gardens and so on. Then on sunday we are going to try and visit Oxford. I’ve never been there and would really like to get to know it.
Pub food is still great, Guiness is still the only beer I can ever enjoy, Starbucks has definitely got something to do with mushrooms since it continues to crop up just about everywhere and even though there are Internet cafés or bars with Internet access in virtually every corner of (this part of the) city I don’t have any wireless hotspots accessible from my hotel room (at all, open or closed). I do have “high speed Internet access” in my room but at the rates they charge… I don’t think so, I’m not that crazy! So this post will be made available at a later time.