A Kinder, Gentler, Tower. No more beheadings.

 

So in the course of our trip through London, Jim and I have noticed some things that we think are plain weird. To that end I’ve decided to lump them together into the first of a series of occasional posts about the odd or just plain baffling things we have encountered so far.

 

EIW London #1

Nobody in London is British.

Ok that’s not true, we saw plenty of very British men and Women all over London, yet we never once saw one in a service position. I’m not talking about housekeeping staff at the hotel either. I mean every, single, person we ran into at a restaurant (bartender, waitress etc) ticket seller, hotel desk clerk, supermarket checker, etc was from somewhere else – from the accent I’d guess Eastern Europe.

So much for America being the land of opportunity. Considering all positions here come with a “living wage” and the country has fairly decent national healthcare, it seems people are flocking to London in droves for a new life. Good? Bad? I’ll leave that to Londoners to decide, but it was shocking and, to a visitor, weird. (Also made for a few strange language barrier problems in a place we speak the language; I’m doing better in Germany and my German is not at all strong.)

EIW London #2

Everyone in London is going to the airport.

Ok that’s not true either, but it looks like it. Everyone in London is dragging around wheeled luggage. Typically the size of a domestic carry-on, you see them all over the streets, probably because it’s such a walkable city, and bags get heavy fast (things we learned the hard way).

 

EIW London #3

This is a supermarket

 

Not a convenience store but an actual supermarket. They’ll stuff markets in any available space in the city, probably because Londoners buy groceries about one day at a time.

 

EIW London #4

Police and their guns

So this takes some explaining. In the course of our travels we ran into several. Metropolitan Police officers who were armed with some impressive looking semiautomatic weapons (or as they say in London, self-loading). In a couple of cases we couldn’t identify the weapon, and in some cases one member of the partnership had an entirely different weapon.

So what did we do? (Well what did I do, Jim had little to do with it.). We stopped a cop and asked the “terribly impertinent and most obviously American of questions” which was, what was he carrying? (The cop thought this hilarious)

What we learned is that due to typical British “dithering” (not my word) the Metropolitan Police Department couldn’t decide what kind of weapons to buy so they bought three kinds. But the kind each person uses isn’t a matter of officer discretion, they just take what’s left when they come on shift.

Seriously, they just take one of whatever gun is available. Which means all officers need to be trained in the operation of three different weapons because nobody knows what they are going to get of a shift.

I wouldn’t call it dithering, I’d call it inefficient.

Like the lack of queue signage at Heathrow Airport. For a country that invented the orderly line, BA has some work to do on that front. (Don’t get me started, I could make an entire post on that all by myself, but it annoyed Jim more than me so suffice it to say BA gets a 10 for flight amenities –full size sandwich, what!? — but a negative 5 for organization)

 

EIW London #5

This is a thing:

 

That’s a table tennis court (what do you call it, a table tennis table?) in front of the British Library. BYOP (bring your own paddle) and play. I’ve seen chess and basketball, soccer, bocce … But table tennis?

 

We have arrived in Germany and I can’t wait to tell you all about my adventures in the German Language (no, I didn’t start a fight). But we are only in Hamburg today and tomorrow so I am going to hold off and include all of Hamburg in one post.

Bis Morgen, meine Freunden!

 

PS Secret Message for Darci:

Think they’ll let me use their ATM?