WE SAW THE QUEEN

But only for a second. 

Still! Ashley and I got pictures of her (not exactly close-ups, but pretty cool anyway)...she was in a nice car, naturally, with a million guards, including a really tall, skinny, bewildered-looking guy in a fuzzy hat (I also took a picture of him...I thought he looked more interesting, to be honest). She was scheduled for some kind of public appearance elsewhere, I guess, and Ashley, M. (our hostess), and I were lunching outside of Buckingham Palace, in the park by a bunch of fountains and statues, and suddenly we were like, "Hey, why are there a million people standing by the gates?" And then, just as we walked over to check it out, this cavalcade threaded its way between the giant gilded gates and everything started flashing (cameras). So we all grabbed our cameras and elbowed our way to a semi-clear spot, and snapped pictures in her direction, and I got her in the bottom left corner of my picture and Ashley got her in a black-and-white shot, so hers is a little blurry. If you zoom in on mine, you can actually see her pretty clearly, I'll try to post it later. She's the woman in blue-green. 

I guess most people never get to see the Queen in person in their entire lives, so we were really lucky, but to be honest, I was more impressed by the fact that we got through customs in like five minutes.

So. Brief impressions of Buckingham Palace area from XW:

1. Kind of drab. The walls are really gray and weatherbeaten. However:

2. The park around it is very beautiful. Lots of chairs and benches and a huge green lawn area; statues and fountains very nice; ate a "Yogurt Corner" which was tasty. 

3. Would NOT want to be a palace housekeeper. 

Rewind to flights. These were smooth, although I will include a detailed review of Air India, for those of you who may be interested in using the airline, as it is extremely cheap (ours were a little bit less than 700 USD each including taxes, for ORD-->Heathrow and Frankfurt-->ORD). Only comment about my PHL-->ORD flight was that I had to sit next to an extremely large man who kept looking at me every time I took a bite of my Symphony (my fav chocolate) bar, which got awkward.

Ashley and I had around eight hours to while away at O'Hare, so we decided to get something to eat and read. I had a McD's quarter pounder meal with a Scientific American; Ashley had some kind of wheat/lettuce sandwich thing with Glamour and Oprah magazine. Those of you who know both of us will probably find this to be an extremely accurate representation of our personalities. 

We boarded at 7:30 and departed around 8:40 (central time, p.m.). The following are my impressions of Air India:

Positives:

1. Good food. We had dinner and breakfast, both very satisfactory. Dinner was a spicy chicken curry (there were fish and veg options as well), with potatoes, cauliflower, and tofu (the tofu kind of surprised me), as well as a pink thing neither of us ate which I think was supposed to be dessert. I'm pretty sure it tasted good; we were just full after the entree and salad. The salad was pretty fresh, and the roll quite nice. Breakfast was a croissant, fruit, and orange juice, which was perfect for me. 

2. Great service. Steward/esses were constantly patrolling the aisles, proferring coffee, tea, juice, water, etc. They were also extremely kind and they walked past your seat like every five minutes.

3.  The tickets are extremely cheap (as mentioned).

4. Good flying. The ride was VERY smooth, and the landing absolutely fantastic. I get airsick pretty easily, and I dread the landing, because my ears feel like they're about to explode and my stomach gets very queasy, but this time literally one minute we were in the air, and the next we were on the ground. It was incredible. 

5. The screen on the seat had GAMES, not just movies. I played Hangman, Checkers, Caveman, and Gobble the Snake. Those of you who are ex/current TI-83 Silver users: do you remember Block Dude?? Caveman and Block Dude are of the same spirit. It was great. For details, see me.

Neutral:

1. Coat hook! I thought this was interesting, but Ashley refused to let me put it in a "positives" category, because she said she's seen it before and putting a coat on it would have made things even more cramped (see "negatives"). But I was intrigued, so we put it in neutrals as a compromise.

Negatives:

1. SEATS. The seats seemed to be designed to minimize comfort. I don't think any conventional human could find a single comfortable position on these seats. I didn't sleep at all, and Ash slept extremely poorly. There was this weird contour thing at the back and the neck, which I eventually tried to stuff with the poor excuse for a pillow and a blanket. Needless to say, we were all sore and stiff, not to mention exhausted, afterwards, but the smoothness of the ride and the perfection of the landing made me a lot less crabby about this than I would have been otherwise.

2. My screen was broken, so I couldn't watch any movies, which was really unfortunate, since Golden Compass and The Great Debaters were playing, which I would have liked to have the option of seeing. Oh well, the games made up for it. 

3. It was extremely hot and cramped. Even with the air fan things, it was still hot and stuffy, and the girl in front of me (who happened to be from UW, actually, we heard her say it--in fact, she was traveling with Meena's sister--we kept looking at them at the gate and going, "Is that Shanti??" but we were too wimpy to ask) did not endear herself to me by reclining at a 60 degree angle. She gave me a really dirty look, too, when I pointed out that she was balancing on my knees.

All in all--I would fly Air India again, for the price and the smoothness of flight, but don't expect to get too comfortable. 

We arrived in Heathrow about fifteen minutes early, and went through customs in about five minutes, which was a huge surprise to us. We half-expected to see customs officials running after us when we left, since we were sure we had forgotten to do something. We chilled out at the Central Bus Station, since our tix weren't until two hours later, during which time we brushed our teeth and got bled on by an injured pigeon. At 12:30 London time, we got on a bus for greater London, where we met our hostess M. Then we visited the British Museum for about two hours, where we saw pieces of the Parthneon and some Middle Eastern exhibits. Then we got on a bus back to Cambridge, where we are staying for the next five days. 

Impressions of London/Cambridge:

1. Very, very, very expensive. If you are planning on traveling, notify your bank--I think most are ok, but I couldn't use my debit card at all yesterday since I didn't tell my bank and they thought someone had stolen it and was trying to use it outside the US. I called in and it's ok now. Anyway, it's 2 dollars/GBP (pound), and about 1.57 USD/euro. Not only that, but things are more expensive here as it is. So, that's not so fun.

2. Beautiful. London is really a beautiful, very chic city; the Greyhounds here are definitely nicer (they have seatbelts!), it's a little odd adjusting to the roads, it does get rainy a lot (although right now it's amazing, 75 and sunny), and Cambridge (the campus) is extremely green and leafy and there are really nice soccer (football, I guess) fields etc. 

3. The porters at Cambridge U. scared the crap out of me...I guess students are only supposed to have one guest for two consecutive nights max here, and she's trying to get two of us in for six nights, so he wasn't very happy about that. Ah well.

4. Guy on the bus in London got really pro-UK, anti-US on us...M. leaned over and asked me if I knew if Malta was in the Commonwealth, and I thought she meant the EU, so to clarify, she said, "No, I mean the British Empire," and this old man, staring straight ahead, didn't look at us once, said in this very snotty tone, "Malta is a free and independent nation of the Commonwealth," and M. said, startled, "Oh...thanks," and then we were going to resume talking and he interrupted with, "So is Bermuda...in fact, this is true of all the nations of the Commonwealth," and we were like, "Thank you for the info..." and turned away to resume convo, and then he said, "At least we take care of our houses. Not like you. Just look at the Philippines. We always improve the countries; you destroy them," and he went on in that vein for a while, and then he and his wife moved to the other end of the bus. Hm.

5. This is a really really really great place to be if you can afford it. Like I said, it's beautiful.

Yesterday, after we got off the plane, we looked like hell, we felt like hell, we probably smelled like hell too...but we were looking, feeling, and smelling like hell in LONDON and that is making all the difference. 

-love from the UK

PS By the way, the link "xwale" is "xw" + "ale", our initials, NOT "x-wale."