This blog post will be part of a 3-day series on a recent trip to London. It was great fun and we saw all of the highlights – Buckingham Palace, The British Museum, Tower Bridge – all from a hotel in the center of the city.
I left for the airport 30 minutes after the end of school. We had about an hour to pack, which I used to get everything in order. I was exhausted after a busy day!
Got to the airport lounge after a relatively quick security at IAD. I walked from the main terminal to the B terminal for the first time (and I’m getting closer to having seen all of IAD)!
The lounges were completely full. This seems to be a running trend of people becoming increasingly aware of how to maximize their credit card rewards programs (I remember reading an interesting article about this phenomenon some time ago). After waiting for approximately 20 minutes, we finally secured a seat at the Turkish Airlines lounge using our Priority Pass membership.
| The 7-hour flight was relatively uneventful – I slept for most of the time. With ~1 hour remaining, we flew over Ireland and Britain. I could see the farms and rural Ireland from above, and around 10 minutes later, we flew over Bristol en route to London. It was easy to tell that I’d entered the Old World, though, because it felt like every inch of land had been cultivated and split by humans over the route the plane passed. |
Heathrow is a massive airport with an impressive variety of interesting airlines from around the world. It’s also the busiest airport in all of Europe by passenger traffic, though interestingly not the one serving the most airlines (that distinction goes to Paris Charles de Gaulle).
Something else I noticed was that nearly 75% of all Heathrow workers appeared to be South Asian. It turns out that Pakistani and Bangladeshi households in the UK earn less than 70% of what white households earn on average, while Indian households earn 103% of what white households earn.
There’s substantial economic inequality among Asian communities, which isn’t particularly surprising. Some immigrant groups arrive far more educated than others, and the type of visa you enter the country with turns out to be a stronger predictor of future income than almost any other factor.
We took a one-hour Uber ride and ended up sleeping for about half of it. The driver was a Brazilian man who had originally come to the UK in 2002 to study, left, and then returned in 2018. During the portions we were awake, we talked about cows and cricket, among other things. He was very passionate about the superiority of Brazilian beef, calling American beef artificial (dreadful).
We arrived at the hotel, which turned out to be an extremely modern and nice place. The hotel is the Hilton Bankside, which sits directly in front of the world-famous Tate Modern. After taking a 1.5-hour nap and spending another half hour writing this, we finally got up and got ready to take an Uber to ride the London Eye and take the London Eye boat tour.
Our Uber driver was of Somali descent but had lived in the UK since the age of one. We talked about Somali cuisine and culture and discovered a lot of similarities with Indian cuisine, as well as a shared love of Bollywood movies.
Took the 40-minute London eye boat tour first. This tour gives you a solid view of London’s most famous sites – Tower Bridge, Parliament, and so on. I’d highly recommend doing this tour, especially if you’re staying within walking distance of everything, as we were. Having a rough idea of where all London’s more touristy attractions were located let us get where we wanted to be very quickly.
We passed under the 8 or so bridges in Central London spanning the Thames, including the Millenium Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge, Tower Bridge, and London Bridge. The bridges feel like living history of London, since some bridges date to the 18th and 19th centuries (and if it weren’t for the Great Fire of London, some may have been older!).
The views themselves were magnificent, though, and made the boat trip easily worth it. Here are some pictures.
We went to the London Eye, though we ended up waiting 30 minutes beforehand due to some technical issues, and got a beautiful view of London at night from the top. The ride itself is 15 minutes long. If I had to choose just one between the boat tour and the Eye, I’d choose the boat tour without hesitation. Of course, that’s probably why the boat tour costs a lot more.
That’s not to say the view from the Eye isn’t great though: you really do get a central view of the whole city (and in our case, at night).
It was dark by the time we walked home, but we still hadn’t eaten food. We walked to the hotel and stopped near the national theatre, where we ate at the Southbank Center Food Market. This was a complete surprise, by the way: we just stopped at a food stall, not knowing that it was part of one of the most acclaimed food markets in London.
We ate at Horn OK Please, where we ate England’s national dish – moong dal and chaat, prepared live. It was honestly some of the best food (let alone Indian food) I’ve tasted in my life, especially the chaat.
Stomachs more than satisfied and bodies well ready to rest for another day, we returned to the comforts of the hotel.