So You’ve Decided to Go to England
Written: Sep 30 '02 (Updated Sep 09 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Transportation access, Shopping and dining facilities
Cons: Hard to find phone cards in stock, No Tourist Information Centre
The Bottom Line: Well, I haven't really got much to say about the airport. But Valerie and I never could have visited England without it.
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| DavidK93's Full Review: London Heathrow Airport |
“David’s Adventures in Southern England,” or “Wine, Women, and Song--Can I make a substitution, please?” (Part I – So You’ve Decided to Go to England)
**[Announcement]**
So, I spent two full weeks in England, and now I want to write about it. The problem is that fourteen days of information about five cities is way too much for one review. So I’m breaking it up chronologically into separate reviews, and then I’ll be posting those under categories that are reasonably well-matched to the reviews’ contents. However, I can guarantee that they will not be perfectly matched. I hope that will be all right with you. If not…Oh! I don’t actually care. [hums]
**[/Announcement]**
I can’t believe I’ve been home for a month and I haven’t started writing this review! A big part of the reason for that is the fact that there is no computer in my room, which is itself a consequence of my roommate (a computer owner) pulling out of our housing agreement at the last minute. But that’s a completely different story. So, on with my tale of adventure, romance, and intrigue upon the windswept moors. Oh, wait, that’s Wuthering Heights.
**[Days -200 through 0]** (Jan-July, 2002)
First, a bit about the motivations for the tip. Early in 2002, my friend Valerie Kaplan (no relation) approached me about her desire to visit the Discworld Convention in England this past August. You see, it seems that although her mother, Jan, had given her consent for the project, she would not allow her daughter to travel alone. Now, I was certainly interested in the idea, but it did give me some pause. Firstly, at that time, I did not yet know what my summer plans would be. It turned out, though, that I would be able to finish my internship three weeks before the start of classes, allowing us to spend two weeks in England and returning the week before we had to be back in Pittsburgh. The main reason for some recalcitrance, though, was Valerie herself. Now, I do consider Valerie to be a friend, but I am aware of the fact that she drives people crazy. In fact, she often drives me crazy, too. She talks incessantly about the most asinine things, can never get herself organised, and has zero street smarts. But I decided to take the plunge and go for it. And now I’m going to revisit the whole fortnight, but this time I’m dragging you along with me.
Before You Go: Leave Nothing to Chance!
In the weeks leading up to our trip, Jan was quite the busy beaver. She pre-purchased all manner of things for us. BritRail passes are important for intercity travel, and must be bought in America. Jan used STA Travel (www.statravel.com) for this, and they also arranged reservations at a hostel in London. In addition, Jan bought several sets of theatre tickets, some of which were mailed to America for us, others being held at the theatres in question. She pre-ordered tickets for our tour of Buckingham palace, and those were sent to us in America. Also, we got ISIC (International Student Identity Card – www.isic.org) cards. However, in retrospect, I’m not sure that those were really necessary. The idea was that they would entitle us to the concessions (discounted) rates at many attractions. Granted, it did that. But I saw no indication that our regular Carnegie Mellon University ID cards wouldn’t have worked just as well. But it feels good to have a lot of the preparations “in the bag” before you get off the ground.
Fun Fact: AIM is a godsend when it comes to planning stuff, including times for phone conferences.
Virgin Atlantic: Getting There is Half the Fun.
Valerie is from Washington, DC, so she took a bus to Newark, NJ, and stayed at my house for a day before we left for England. My mother and sister hated her, as I knew they would. So, my mother drove us to Newark International Airport, and left us to find our way to the terminal.
We already had our tickets ($600-some-odd round trip, which I am given to understand is quite reasonable), so we began by queuing up at the Virgin Atlantic check-in counter. That brings us to the first snafu. You see, I have not yet mentioned Valerie’s staff. Valerie has a wooden staff with a knob on the end, which she bought at the Cave of the Winds in Colorado. She has decorated her staff with a copper wire, upon which she has mounted several charms that relate to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. Jan was concerned that this staff might not be permissible as a carry-on item, for obvious reasons, so she called both the US and UK officers of Virgin Atlantic. She described the staff, and was told as long as Valerie used the staff as a walking aid, it would be fine. Unfortunately, it was not. Despite what she had been told on the phone, she was required to check the staff. A box was provided for her use, but it wasn’t quite big enough, so the butt-end of the staff had to be left protruding from the box, wrapped in garish orange tape. Valerie was not pleased. As for me, I had packed everything into two duffel bags, both of which I carried on. Although Virgin Atlantic allows only one carry-on item, they make allowances for purses and the like. I had asked online, and was assured that my large duffel could be my carry-on, while my small-duffel could be considered a personal item. And indeed, it was so.
We had a late evening flight with takeoff set for 9:45pm, so we had more than an hour to kill before we boarded. While I was there, I noticed something very interesting about the Virgin Atlantic pilots and flight crews that were walking throughout the terminal. In fact, I later discovered that this observation applies to a broader group than just Virgin Atlantic employees. Here is it: British people in uniforms don’t move through space in the conventional manner. They cleave directly through the fabric of space-time itself, like a fierce tesseract of efficiency.
So, we eventually boarded at about 9pm. I cheated and stored both of my duffels in the overhead compartment (The smaller duffel should have gone under the seat in front of me, but that would have cut down on my leg room.), and Valerie took her seat next to me. We sat and waited, and our takeoff time came and went. We began to wonder what the delay was. Then, half an hour after we were supposed to be in the air, we were told that we all had to disembark, with our baggage, so they could perform an additional, random security check. God, I hate Osama bin Laden! In the end, we got off the ground a full two hours after we were meant to.
The flight itself was quite nice. Each seat was equipped with an individual television screen. At the beginning of the flight, the screens were used to display the emergency safety information. Later, they became our gateway to over a dozen available movies that start and stop whenever you want them to. They handed out pillows and blankets, and I was able to sleep comfortably for a few hours. The dinner was incredible: chicken breast in savoury gravy, steamed vegetables, a salad, a piece of chocolate cake, a cracker with cheese, soda, and a small bar of solid chocolate. The flight crew was also very pleasant. The women looked lovely in their white blouses and red skirts, while the men were absolutely delicious in purple vests. Everyone’s teeth were straight and white, by the way, in case you were wondering. And they were very considerate. Valerie and I actually slept through breakfast on the plane, and the stewardess brought us each the full meal in a carry-bag, after we told her what had happened.
There was some difficulty at the end of the flight. Because we had been delayed, there was no terminal available for us. We had to stop in the middle of a runway, walk down a special stairway that was brought out to us, and then be ferried by tram to the airport itself. Well, anyway, there we were in England.
Fun Fact: The drinking age in England is 18. I was offered wine with my dinner, even though I’m only 20.
**[Day 1]** (Tuesday, August 6, 2002)
Heathrow Airport: Gateway to a Nation
Well, to be more specific, there we were in the airport. Our arrival had originally been scheduled for about 9:30am, but we didn’t actually arrive until after 11am. So we had quite a few “administrative” details to take care of, and considerably less time in which to do it than we originally expected. First order of business was luggage. We retrieved Valerie’s staff without complications and she was glad to find it undamaged. Then we had strict orders from Jan to obtain certain things. British money was acquired through the exchange of American money (Valerie) and through an ATM machine (me). The nice thing about modern technology is that with a simple ATM card, you can indeed access your American bank account just about anywhere in the developed world. Yay! We had some trouble getting phone cards, as the machine was out of order and two different vendors were out of them. We finally got them at the foreign exchange. They were £5 BT phone cards, and they served us well, throughout the trip. We also picked up a delightful map of London at the bookstore. It’s a plastic shell with a large paper map inside that unfolds accordion-style. There were other things that we were supposed to pick up, but it turned out that the Tourist Information Centre that Jan had told us to look for, was no longer located at Heathrow. So we were all set to head to the hostel.
Fun Fact: In London Heathrow Airport, as in pretty much any other public place in England, you will not find garbage cans. The reasons for this are twofold: 1) So as not to give homeless people a reason to loiter in the hopes of finding edible refuse. 2) So the IRA can’t plant bombs in them.
Interlude 1 – British Currency: A Pound? This Thing Can’t Weigh More Than Half an Ounce!
I’ve already made mention of British Pounds (£), but the British monetary system definitely deserves a more thorough going-over. First, the basics. British currency is minted in pence (copper coins, £0.01 or 1p), tuppence (larger copper coins, 2p), and silver (okay, probably steel or zinc or something) coins in denominations of 5p (smallish), 10p (biggish), 20p (tiny), and 50p (largest silver coin), as well as £1 (gold coins that aren’t remarkably large around, but are noticeably thick) and £2 (larger than the £1 coin, with a silver disc surrounded by a gold annulus). Larger currency comes in paper form (called “notes”), in denominations of £5, £10, £20, and I believe £50 (£20 was the largest that I actually had in my possession at any time.)
The weirdest thing about the money, I think, is its inconsistency. You see, the money in England always bears the portrait of the monarch (more about her later). And every once in a while, a new portrait is commissioned. For the paper money, which presumably has a rather short shelf-life, the portraits all look the same. However, the coinage that I handled during my two weeks in England bore three different portraits. There’s a rather old one that shows the young Queen’s head and shoulders, and two different ones showing only her head and neck at adulthood and middle-age, respectively. And the backs of the pound coins were also variable. For some reason, this image is also changed at certain intervals. So some pound coins feature a cross on the back while others show some sort of cornucopia. I believe I saw five or six different engravings on pound coins while I was in England.
Fun Fact: British money is actually based on a silver standard (“pounds sterling”), unlike American currency which is purely a fiat and has no objective value.
We descended into the sleek underbelly of the airport. Terminal 1 is connected to Terminals 2, 3, and 4 via a tramway that runs every fifteen minutes or so. There is also an extensive system of hallways and travelators (We call them “moving sidewalks” or “people movers” in the US.) that conveys people between the airport and the Underground. These hallways are decorated by an advertising campaign for an investment bank (or something like that) that emphasizes their international knowledge by showing various symbols and objects, and explaining what they mean in different cultures. It was cool. At the end of the corridors, we reached the Underground itself.
Okay, that’s where I’m cutting off this review. The next one begins with an account of the Underground. I could have gone either way with that, since it fits in with the transportation motif of this review, but I decided to put it into the London review because the Underground is such a quintessential part of the London experience. Incidentally, I had this review ready a few days ago, but I held off on posting, in the hopes that they would fix that silly “Apostrophe Bug.” Of course, I should have remembered that no bug on the Epinions website can be fixed until it’s been around for at least two months. Anyway, once I write more reviews I’ll put the links here for your convenience. Thanks for reading.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Suited For: Students
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Epinions.com ID:
DavidK93
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Member: David Kaplan
Location: Baltimore, MD
Reviews written: 119
Trusted by: 179 members
About Me:
Passions has been canceled, again. But I think I'll get over it; I've gained perspective.
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