Following on from the last post, breakfast eventually happened, once most of the crowd had cleared; All that was left seemed to be a French-speaking group of probably high-school aged girls & some slightly shell-shocked staff. The meal itself was a pretty standard Ibis buffet, with a coffee machine which did Mochas, and rather less room to move around than you’d like when it got crowded.

Post-Breakfast I headed off towards Euston Station, as I’m going to need to get there by 8:00am to catch the train to Dublin, while lugging the bag of doom (kind of regretting not having one with wheels; it’s a bit cumbersome to carry effortlessly, and I have some bruising from slinging it over one shoulder. if I spot a bag-type shop, I’ll see whether they have an appropriate shoulder strap, or something I can repurpose with a couple of carabiners or something), so knowing the way seemed like a good idea.
I’m really enjoying being able to vanish underground & reappear somewhere else using the Underground; It’s like teleporting with white tiles & odd smells. Plus, as a tourist, it’s kind of nice to know that, once I’ve found a station, getting back to the hotel will be comparatively simple, if topologically complex.

Found Euston Station without incident, then hopped a train to visit Forbidden Planet, as suggested by Tanja.
That’s a lot of bookstore.
Could have bought any number of things, but limited myself to a Dresden Files book I didn’t already have, as luggage weight may become an issue after two conventions.

By the pure chance of someone asking me whether she was going the right way for Trafalgar Square, and someone else telling her when I couldn’t, I learned that Trafalgar Square was that-a-way, so I went for a wander, which is how I happened across St. Martin In The Fields.
There was a concert about to start, so I didn’t poke about in the church itself, and instead read the historical bits & looked at the models & pictures.

Trafalgar Square had this;

I met a London Ambassador (help for the tourists, or possibly just the confused & lost) who wasn’t a fan of the Big Blue Rooster, as it detracted from the Gravitas of the square, but would have been OK with a statue of a Pigeon, as long as it wasn’t blue. A more classical pigeon, from a more civilised time.

It started raining, so I hid under a tree & got chatting with one of the other cowerers about the weather, as you do. Turns out there was a short but very powerful rain + wind event yesterday, strong enough to blow a rack of clothes onto him at the entrance to a shop, more or less at the same time as I was at Paddington, which would nicely explain it raining inside the station.

I spotted a map showing the way to the river, then found the Admiralty Arch more or less accidentally, so I wandered through to find St. James’s Park and a somewhat familiar road.

The weather couldn’t decide what it wanted to do on the sun/rain stakes, so walking under trees was quite nice.
Ended up outside Buckingham Palace, watching a couple of (I assume) fantastically bored guards march back & forth in fancy historic uniforms with massive hats, carrying something in the L85 assault rifle line.

Back through the park, with increasingly tired feet, and through a display of WW1 pictures & art, set up for the centenary.
Learned a few things, such as the role of Zeppelins in attacks on England; Don’t think that ever got covered in history classes at school, as it was all trench warfare & Gallipoli.
There was also this;

A bit south, while looking for the underground station, I did manage to take a very London sort of picture.

I’m glad that this sort of thing is so very easy to get to on public transport, as I wasn’t really in the mood to do any wandering around looking at famous buildings; The prospect of a cold drink and putting my feet up appealed more. Fortunately, it’ll be piss-easy to get back there when I do want to read plaques & take obnoxious clock-tower selfies.

I took the gondola back from the O2 / Millennium Dome,

seen here impersonating some form of alien bioconstruction, mostly because I could, and because it’s close to my hotel. Also, Gondola!!

Is it just me, or does the Millennium Dome look like an alien spacecraft which hasn’t really figured out this ‘camouflage’ thing yet, and is going for Circus Tent Meets Construction Crane?

I got a UK SIMcard, so I can now make calls & do that whole mobile Internet thing, at least while I’m in the UK. The whole sales process seemed a bit dodgy, and the store was very much a hole in the wall sort of outlet, but it seems to work, so if there’s a scam there, it’s one that gives me unlimited texts, 500 minutes of call time, and 2GB of data for the next month.
I can live with that, though I did need to do some digging to find my mobile number.
Chris, rightly, laughed at me when I said that I had no idea what my mobile number was; I found out, once I got back to NZ, that it was written on the SIM, but I also found a thing you could ‘dial’ which would tell you the number. Behold!

Thanks to Skippy The Wonder SIM, I was able to contact Chris in Essex, to arrange visiting him tomorrow. I’d been planning to take the train, as it seemed pretty easy from here, with only a couple of connections to make, but he wouldn’t hear of it, and has arranged for his son to come & pick me up instead.
I’m guessing he knows something about that train trip that they don’t mention in the brochures, even if it’s just “That is a long and tedious train journey, they charge like a wounded bull, and it’s much quicker to drive”.

That’s pretty much been my day; Day One in London, and it went well, I think.
Managed to give myself a couple of blisters, which wasn’t really part of the plan, but other than that, a good day.