Day 0-1; Planes and Fish'n'Chips

Spent most of the first day flying from SF to London. My flight was full of recent high school graduates from a small town near Tahoe. A couple of them told me they hadn't left the state of California before. Its great that their teachers organized the trip for them.

Arriving at Heathrow, I took the Tube into the city and then to Victoria Station where I left my bag in left luggage. Shockingly it cost US$12 to store my luggage for five and a half hours since that's how long I had before I had to get on a train to Gatwick for my flight to Prauge.

Leaving Victoria Station, I found a takeout Fish'n'Chips place and then a nearby park. Not having looked at a map yet, I was surprised how similar to Washington the place seemed. Turns out the people next to me in the park, who I'd followed from the Fish'n'Chips place since they looked liked they knew what they were doing, worked for the British Treasury Department. In fact they were talking about the same types of international captial flows/ balance of payments issues that I worked on at the Fed. Small world.

Upon consultation with my map, I took a nice long walk to a bunch of London's major tourist spots: Parliment, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Thames, Picadily Cirucs, Buckingham Place, and Trafalgar Square.

After that more time on a train and then a plane to Prague that was rather uneventful. Getting lost on public transporation at 11:30 pm in Prague on the way to my hostel, however, was.