Next floor - bedsheets, women's lingerie, housewares, and the top of the bus

The morning started out fairly uneventful, I awoken early due to the heat in the hostel. The temperature outside is cool at night, but for whatever reason the hostel always seems to be stifling hot. Even when standing next to the open window. After a short breakfast I decided to head out randomly across the city. I ended up somewhere in the Holborn district near the royals courts.

One of the greatest pleasures I take in traveling is learning the pulse of the city. What are people wearing, work or leisure? Where are they eating? What snippets of conversation show the flow of daily life? What shops are being visited by folks or shopping sprees and which during daily life? What pedestrian flows happen at what time in what direction? Where do they go and where are they coming from? It takes about a week, but then you get the hang of the local metro and where the local stop for a bite. You no longer stand out like a sore thumb and you move in sync with the invisible hand of that city’s hive mentality.

I walked to city until about 3pm when I headed out to find one of the hop on/hop off open roof double decker busses. I figured I could take a rest off my feet and ride along for a couple hours enjoying the breeze. While waiting for the bus, I had to deal with some drunken British version of a redneck. His nose had obviously been broken many many times, he was missing teeth, and he had an umbrella in one hand and a half bottle of cheap wine in the other. He had just been kicked off the previous tour bus for scaring the women and children. He made some innocuous comments to me but never actually came out and be rude or confrontational. More of a high school “pushy push” type hope of escalation, so I answered his question about my tattoo then turned my back on him and ignored him to talk to the bus stop attendant. Just goes to show that there are assholes are everywhere.

The bus itself was great. The weather was overcast with promise a rain in the morning. So a nice cool breeze hit my face as we drove all around London, looking at all the neat buildings, parks, and statues. The two hours flew by fairly quickly. The view from the height made it better than walking in some cases, but made tree lined streets a royal pain in the ass as I couldn’t take pictures and had to occasionally hold my hat to prevent it from getting knocked off.

Back at the hostel, I dropped off my things at the room and picked up the laundry they did while I was away. Jess was there so we decided to go find some places to get drinks. I had walked by a pub called Lord Nelson that reminded me on the inside of Chuck’s art cars. All sorts of paintings and odd things hanging from the walls and ceiling. Very eclectic and artistic and obviously a local young bar hangout. I tried a sample of a frozen Pimm’s slushy and found it to be interesting but we settled on drinking a number of ciders and a beer. They also had an outdoor charcoal grill were they were cooking up beef, venison, or lamb burgers. We opted for the beef burgers and topped them with a salad mixture and grilled onions. It was interesting to talk to Jess about politics but I could tell she was initially apprehensive about WWII (naturally) though she warmed up when I talked about our treatment of the Native Americans and the Japanese concentration camps here during the same war. We had quite a long and interesting chat about all sorts of things. She was fun, its too bad I know I’ll never see her again as she would be a fun person to hang out with.