LOCATION, LONDON
Do you ever get the feeling that this trip really is going to be memorable?
To-wit: I land in Mother England to be told that my British passport has been cancelled…
And I’m like, “Err…um…no it hasn’t.”
“Yes it has,” they say.
“Err…um…no. I’m pretty sure I’d remember cancelling my passport…”
They ask me to step out of the line and take a seat. Then, ten minutes later, a nice man comes out and – rather apologetically I thought – tells me that yes, my passport has actually been cancelled (HUH??) and that he’s had to ‘impound’ it.
I’m like…’Err…how can it be cancelled when it was good enough to get me out of Oz. Good enough to get me into Thailand. And good enough to get me out of Thailand?’
He just shrugs/
He gives me a photocopy of it and a number to call to ‘book an appointment to reapply for a new passport’. I ask him, “What happens now?” but he lets me into the country with a cheery, “You’re still British no matter what.”
With this in hand I get to officially enter the UK.
At the airport I ring my hotel to find out where their shuttle bus is and…they don’t have one. Huh? I go to ‘airport information’ and ask them where the shuttle busses leave from, and the guy looks at me like I’m an alien. “Shuttle buses?” he asks, as if I’ve just made up the term.
Anyway, I jump on an ‘Airport Express’ train into the centre of London and then jump a cab to my hotel.
London weather is foul. Cold and bucketing down with rain. Grey skies for a thousand miles. I get to my hotel about 8 am dog tired and really wanting to have a shower and a rest, only to get told that check out for guests is 2pm, and that my room won’t be ready until then. I sigh heavily and – still in surprisingly good spirits, though – check in all my bags except my laptop bag and head off to get a coffee and to work out what to do about my lack of passport.
After throwing on some warmer clothes I venture back out into the rain and find a phone booth and ring the passport office to try to sort out my dilemma. Here I notice something strange. Unlike in Oz where public phones take say, fifty cents, when using a British phone, you get a set amount of credit which counts down on a small screen in front of you, and which you have to keep topping up. Consequently I ended up spending close to 50 quid (I kid you not) talking to several different passport people from as far a field as Durham and Bristol, to try to get an emergency appointment. Which I was not able to get…but, one nice gal said, “just turn up at Globe House before 11.45 am and I will call ahead to make sure they don’t turn you away at the door.
So…I jumped in another expensive cab (all Brit cabbies seem to be really nice by the way – no doubt something to do with them having to do about 3 years study to pass ‘The Knowledge’ - but they sure as hell ain’t cheap) and turn up at the passport place at 9.30 am, only to be told to come back ‘about 10.30 a.m.’. I go to a coffee shop for a nice hot chocolate and write some of the travel blog to kill some time, then go back to the passport place. When there we go through a metal detector and I end up seeing a very nice and VERY helpful Scottish guy who sends me upstairs (making an appointment – the very appointment I couldn’t get over the phone). Upstairs I see a not so helpful guy who does in fact get to the bottom of the problem by saying telling me that I cancelled my passport in 2005. I’m like, ‘err…no I didn’t? Really.’ He says, “I’m looking at it on my screen. You had long hair.”
HUH???
So fuck me, maybe I did cancel it? By why? But why? And how come I don’t remember?! I didn’t go anywhere overseas in 2005 I don’t think? In fact I know I didn’t. 2005 / 2006 was the year I took off completely to write full time. VERY strange.
Anyway, the not-so-helpful guy tells me to go down and use one of the internal phones to call and ‘book an appointment for next week’ to apply for a new passport. Something that “Takes a minimum of a week for a lost passport”.
Okay, um…isn’t that why I’m here? I think. You know. To GET a new passport? And isn’t us ‘talking’ already my ‘appointment?’.
Apparently not.
So…I go down and make the call. The woman – also not that helpful – tells me that, yup, it’s a minimum of a week AFTER your appointment, that you get your new passport. And that the first appointment she can get me is Monday. I tell her I’m flying out on Tuesday! She says, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing she can do’. So, I go back to the nice Scottish guy and he says, “Just hang up the phone, I’ll organize it for you. Don’t you worry about it.” WHAT A GUY! So, he books my appointment for me on the spot and back upstairs I go. When up there I pray I don’t get the same unhelpful guy at booth 7…and I don’t . I get a nice woman who takes pity on me and…one hundred and fourteen quid later (!!!) I have a new passport ordered. Pick up on Monday.
WHEW!!!
Again, I can’t tell you how completely calm and unflustered about all this I was. I’m like ZEN AND THE ART OF INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL! It’s eerie how calm and together and unstressed I’ve been over the last 48 hours.
I leave Globe House then go back to Victoria station with a HUGE grin on my face – I’m in England baby, England!!! – and just stand in the middle of the station for fully fifteen minutes grinning inanely to myself and watching people go by, and listening to the accents float over me. So cool.
Get off the train at Earl’s Court and go into an internet cafe which, at 50p for half an hour, is the only value for money thing I’m likely to discover in London I suspect.
That’s one thing about my hotel that is great, is its location. 50 metres from Earl’s Court station. There’s a McDonalds, a Nandos and a KFC, a Burger King, et al, right next to the station for late night (cheap) snacks. Convenience stores. And two internet cafes. All within 2 minutes walk of my hotel.
Came back to the hotel for check in for a quick nap, to discover I have apparently paid over 700 pounds to stay in a closet. There is a 3 meter x half meter long corridor to get into the ‘room’; then there’s a bed that is somewhere between a single and a double in size. To the left of the bed there is literally only 1 foot of space between the bed and the window. And to the right of the bed there is one and a half foot of room between the bed and a little desk and a wardrobe that only just opens due to space constrictions. And at the front of the bed there’s one meter space. Half of which is taken up by a chair and small bar stool size table.
It is RIDICULOUSLY small. (And to think, this was one of the hotels on my trip I was really looking forward to staying in – but the c*nts used some kind of fish eyed lens on their website that made the room look, if not huge, but NORMAL.
My bad for falling for it.
The only up-side to the room is a 42 inch plasma screen in front of the bed above the stool sized totally futile table. The TV has internet on it – one of the reasons I booked this hotel – but I ring up the desk when I can’t get it to work to be told that, “It doesn’t work at the moment”. I’m, like, “When will it be fixed?”.
“We don’t know, it’s been down for ages.”
Also, another whinge about this hotel, which I noticed but chose to overlook when I rang up the hotel from Sydney to book it, is that everyone – AND I MEAN EVERYONE – at the front desk is either Russian or Indian and their English is really hard to understand.
Let’s hope my hotels elsewhere on the trip cause me to bitch less.
Got home and rang up and booked tickets to see ‘We Will Rock You’ for tonight. REALLY looking forward to that!!! Got the tickets for 60 pounds, plus 15 pounds booking fee. Which was about 25 pounds cheaper (and with better tickets) than if I’d booked on-line before leaving.
Slept for an hour. Bed is very comfy, but the two pillows are of the very cheap variety. And they throw a token two 12 inch by 12 inch throw cushions onto of the pillows as if that in some way makes up for buying the cheapest pillows sold by Target.
I could’ve slept for a day, but I somehow dragged my sorry arse out of bed and into the shower to go to the theatre. The shower made me feel slightly more human. Got a taxi to the theatre for about 20 pounds.
The show was fantastic! I’m a huge Queen fan anyway and the way the play is designed and themed made it look like Blakes 7 the musical. 80s inspired costumes and kitsch. Love it!!! Plus, the actors were terrific with great voices. And I must admit a little apprehension on how the lead guy (the rebel leader) would sing Freddy’s songs. But he was great. Well, okay, his singing was great. His ‘acting’ was wooden. And I couldn’t help but think he looked a bit like Aussie actor from The Hulk.
All the other actors were terrific though (and also with terrific voices). So it did kind of make the lead guy’s ‘acting’ stick out a bit. Especially early on in the play when he had a stutter. But this minor criticism in no way impacted on my enjoyment of the show. Not a bit of it. It’s such a deliberately dated 80s style show that if anything his wooden acting could’ve been though as deliberate! (if all the other actors hadn’t been far more naturalistic in their performances, that is…).
Left the theatre and fought the bitter cold to a tube station to try to work out how to get home. This was quite fun for a while as I got lost, and kept getting off on the wrong stations. Because all the time I’m thinking, ‘Hey, I’m lost on a train IN LONDON BABY!”
Eventually got on the District Line and got off at Earl’s Court, grabbed some McDonalds and back to my hotel room.
That’s one thing about this trip so far, is my eating IS CRAP. So tired, run down, and just generally out of sorts, that I’m eating really badly and have probably put on I don’t even want to think about how much weight!
Still, it’s a holiday, so no stressing about such things, Loges!
