2014 in the UK (London)

On the afternoon of August 28, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium, I boarded a Eurostar train, which rolled through France and went under the English Channel via the Channel Tunnel. That evening, I arrived in London, England:

This made it my:

• 2nd time in the United Kingdom
  • my 3rd unique country that I first visited back in 2002
• 3rd time in UK territory
  • UK in 2002
  • Cayman Islands in 2003

Visit

As part of my 2014 European tour, London would be the last stop of the trip. The travel agency's guide allowed us a great degree of freedom to explore on our own while also available to take others on guided tours. This being my second time in this city, I opted to visit a few places on my own.

That included The Argyll Arms, a pub on Oxford and Regent Streets where my father once worked in the 1970s. I also met up with a distant cousin and drank some brews at various places in the area around Bethnal Green station, including a place called Brewdog Shoreditch. The ride home on a double decker bus after a few pints was quite something...

I still snuck in some touristy things, such as visiting the British Museum thoroughly. The most memorable artifact there was their Easter Island moai (famous head sculpture) still on display. In 1868, someone had stolen it from Easter Island. When it arrived in England, Queen Victoria offered it to the Museum, where it has existed since, as of 2014.

I also stood at a street corner (Parliament and Great George) and instantly felt a flashback to 2002, when the Westminster Abbey came into view across the street.

For our flight back home to Toronto on August 30, the tour group still took us to Heathrow Airport. As I flew out of the UK via Manchester in 2002, I had no idea how bad the airport would be for departures. No one had any idea where to go. "Queues" were being made and people "queued" up for all the wrong reasons. The chaos all around cemented the idea in my mind never to fly out of Heathrow ever again.