First Day on the Ground

I’m not sure exactly what I thought would be enough to keep my material needs satisfied for an entire year abroad, but apparently the sum of those goods weighs exactly 143 pounds. Somehow the Virgin Atlantic desk at SFO let me slide with that weight of goods - their limit technically being 70 pounds per bag - although I think this was largely due to the fact that my mother was holding much of my carry-on volume (come on, I couldn’t be the only person to ever wear two jackets onto an airplane!) during my check-in.

Sandwiched between an hour sitting on the ground at SFO before taking off and a half-hour sitting on the ground at Heathrow before de-planing was a largely uneventful 10-hour flight, during which I discovered two things I probably should have long since figured out about travel by flight: one, non-stop itineraries are worth any extra cost; and two, fuzzy slippers that you can sleep in as well as visit the bathroom in are well worth the space in your carry-on luggage.

At Heathrow I rapidly gave up on my plan to take public transportation into the center of town and hailed a cab for a mere £70 (roughly $125). Worth every last penny, I decided, when I realized that there was little reason to think I was going to be able to wrestle 143 pounds of gear up and down the escalators of the London underground, especially after a sleepless night in flight.

The hotel I’m staying at is tightly ensconced in the border between Bloomsbury – one of the fancier areas of London – and King’s Cross, which was once described to me by a London native as such: “You’ve lived in San Francisco, you know the Tenderloin, right? It’s like the Tenderloin.” Argyle Square is quite a find though – the small central square is surrounded on all sides by reasonably priced B&B’s (some more reasonable than others – especially now, after the high season has largely ended), and is yet within walking distance to the center of the city. The Hotel Meridiana is probably typical: small utilitarian rooms, but very clean and comfortable. And only £32 a night.

And they take credit cards – which is a good thing, because my first full day here has presented me with something of a cash-flow problem. I successfully pulled a couple hundred dollars out of an ATM machine at the airport, but this was largely used up by the taxi ride into town. This evening, every ATM I visited staunchly refused to give me anything, not even an explanation as to why. However, I stuffed this issue into the back of my mind and went about the day’s activities, which were mostly centered on a) figuring out exactly how to get to the school, at which orientation for foreign students begins tomorrow; b) finding myself a cell phone; c) looking into the housing situation; and d) generally making up for having done nothing yesterday despite my early arrival around noon (it occurred to me that while some people hit the ground running, I tend to hit the ground napping – which I happily did for most of the afternoon yesterday, time which I had intended to use to start getting settled).

So I bought myself a Vodaphone setup, located the school and used their internet connections to make a few appointments with letting agents, and in the evening I went to see the first of several places I had made contact with. The letting agent had said to come at 7 pm, which seemed like a strange time of day, but I arrived as planned on North Gower Street – only to find a line of people out the door waiting to see whatever waited inside. I figured whatever flats were left would be gone by the time I got to the head of the line (an hour later), but this turned out not to be the case. The studio flats (“bedsits,” as they are called) are tiny and expensive – but they have the advantage of being new (ie. clean) and within walking distance of the school. I reserved one on the spot – a ground-floor version of the smallest studio – and then began considering how I might come up with that sort of money in British cash. That little question might haunt me in the morning, but can wait for now. I headed back to the Meridiana and slept the blissful sleep of someone who has bothered to obtain full-strength sleeping pills before departing on a jet lag-inducing journey.