London On The Fly – First Impressions

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Flying to Europe from the east coast of America usually involves getting on a plane around 8 at night, flying all night, and then arriving at your destination in the morning of the following day.  When I used to fly every year to Scotland, Icelandair had a hub at BWI in Baltimore and you would land in Keflavik in the early hours, grab some beer and fish for about an hour or so, get on another plane and proceed to Glasgow.  Icelandair was awesome.  They even gave you hot towels in the economy cattle-call section.  Keflavik International Airport was all stainless steel and stained glass surreal, complete with a baby dinosaur hatching from a gigantic silver dinosaur egg out front.  It was especially bizarre looking in the dead of winter when the whole place resembled Ice Station Zebra.  But things have changed, and Father Time has not been kind to Iceland.  Keflavik now resembles an airport in a third world nation.  I’m thinking the economic disaster in 2008 really hit Iceland hard.  The airport looks like a dark basement with cheesy red Ikea knockoff furniture. The duty free is expensively sparse and women guards eye everyone with woolly suspicion. There was one noisy coffee machine to service the mobs of bleary-eyed passengers who had flown all night.  And then there are these weird sandwiches with strange combinations of undefinable food wrapped in thick tasteless bread.  Why can’t the good just stay good?

Coming in from busy Heathrow Airport on the hectic motorway we went through inexpicable environmental zones with weird signs — Emissions, Camera Enforcement, Peak Travel — but no toll plazas.

London in the summer rivals NYC in crowds.  LOTS of Chinese.

The Thames is dirty brown with a honking swift current.  If you were to fall in you would be long gone.

Red double-decker buses and blue Barclay’s smart bikes were everywhere.  Riding a bike in the maddening city looks scary crazy.

Indian film makers were shooting action movies along the South Bank like they owned the place.

The biggest change is Climate Change.  These days it is much warmer and dryer.  Which means it is not as green and lush.  But when it rains, it’s pretty soggy and under water.

Fracking is a very contentious issue and you hear about it wherever you go.  Given the crisis in the Ukraine and the need to become “energy independent”, the Brits are looking hungrily to the oil and gas, shale, and coal areas in the Midlands, central Scotland, and the southeast coast in order to reduce dependence on foreign energy.

WiFi is a giant pain in the ass in Britain if you don’t have a SIM card which essentially plugs you into the British phone system.  It’s not cheap to go that route, and some American phone companies, like Verizon, are not compatible with the European phone system.  It’s not like what we are used to in the U.S. where you can just walk outside and are seamlessly connected.  That kind of service is totally non-existent in Britain without a phone card.  In order to get on-line, you need to go into a business that offers WiFi, either free or for a charge, and then you need to ask the proprietor for their user name and password.  

The English are totally plugged in to the Internet just like us and everyone is walking around engrossed in their Smart phones wherever you go.  You feel left out when your phone isn’t connected.  It was amusing to see that they have complemented the classic red English phone booths that are still in every British city, and all over the place in London, with cute little black and yellow “WIFI  Here” phone booths on the busier streets.