Edinburgh to London - Day 1

Quite a normal morning, and I just relaxed and prepared my stuff. At 10:40, I leave for the Haymarket Train Station, which is conveniently located five minutes walk from the hotel. I take the train to Waverley Station, which is near the end of Princes Street, and wait for the train to London at 12:00. I get in, and read for most of the 4.75 hours of the trip I did not finish The China Study, but it's almost done.

I arrive in London, take a taxi to the hotel address, the driver struggles a bit to find the place (he passed twice at the same place, but took £2.60 off because of that - total of £18. I get out but there is no "Caesar Hotel" anywhere! The address I have is in fact a youth hostel, so after walking around a bit, just in case, I get in to ask some questions.

I fortunately had a second address, which was the one provided by the official web site and by CentralR. The first one was given by Google Maps. The hotel address was 26-33 Queen's Gardens. The Google maps address was 191 Queen's Gate, and pointed at the same exact place, so understandably, I thought both addresses were the same one, possibly after some renaming of streets. It turns out that Queen's Gate, in the biggest Google Maps blunder I have ever lived through, is completely on the opposite side of Hyde Park! It could indeed be a lot worse, but I still had to walk 30 minutes to get to the real Caesar Hotel.

Fortunately, they had my reservation - at least, CentralR's £50 reserve served to something, but I wish my reservation would not be there, so that I could come back at CentralR for a refund. I get the card and ask for the stairs location, but the clerk that soooooo wanted to help me with my baggages (I didn't let him) absolutely didn't see any reason why I wouldn't want to take the elevator, and virtually forced me in. I got into my room, and was in for another surprise - the room is tiny. Near-microscopic! I don't want to spend a week of vacation, staying in a hotel room, so it doesn't really matter.

I leave my stuff there and go take a long walk in the Comedy Store's direction. This is something that I had wanted to do - since I'm alone on this trip, the least that I could do would be to try having some fun in the evenings, and not stay at the hotel. I had planned on going to the Comedy Store during most evenings, but retrospectively-speaking, this limited what I could do in the late afternoon, since I didn't take the tube (subway stations), nor the bus.

The end of Regent Street.

The Apple Store on Regent Street.

I stop at a Sainsbury's Local, a store similar to the Co-Operative Food in Edinburgh, to withdraw some money and buy two £1 sandwiches for dinner. During the rest of my walk, I was increasingly aware that, even if this was not tourist season, there were a lot of people in the streets. That was Bayswater Road / Oxford Road, and when I turned right on Regent Street, I was in for another surprise. Regent Street apparently is one the busiest street I have every seen, and is the epitome of thoughtless consumerism and illogical capitalism. I hated the sight, and I hated the stores, all bigger and grander than the next one. Even though I never went to Las Vegas, I thought Regent Street could perhaps rival the Vegas Strip in term of useless luminosity and visual pollution.

Remembering Google Maps (with Street View), I finally get to where I was headed, and enter the Comedy Pub. I manage to buy a ticket at the last second, because the show was already almost sold-out. It's 19:15, and the show starts at 20:30, so I go for a small walk around. I turn the corner and see a big Comedy Store neon sign! Gaaaah, Google! (Note: as I checked when I got back home, the street view of the Comedy Store was either not updated recently, or the Comedy Store was suffering renovations. This was why I had missed it.) It turned out good, because there was no seat left for the 19:30 show.

I browsed 40 minutes in the HMV on Regent Street, and go back to the Comedy Pub, thinking of going to the Comedy Store after for the second show at 23:00. The show was nice, and I had quite a few laughs. It was four comedians, each of them doing stand-up comedy. I was having some trouble understanding some of them, but after ten minutes or so, it was okay. The third and last break was very long (around 40 minutes - I assume they had problems with something, or the guy was late), so the show ended at 23:15.

I walked back to the hotel, stopping at Sainsbury to buy a breakfast and some fruits, and I called it a night.