I had the good fortune to be able to visit London on a work trip earlier this month. Here’s about how it went.

Winter is easily my second favorite season. Fall only slightly edges it out due to my preference for more comfortable, but still cool temperatures. Also the general smell of things in autumn is somehow preferable to me senses. Naturally, for winter, I love to watch a nice thick snowfall from the comfort of a warm house with a mug of coffee.

So, just as naturally, some force of the universe ensures that if I have to leave on a trip in winter, that’s the time for snow to finally fall in any substantive quantity. So on February second the groundhog predicted six more weeks of winter and in spite of all forecasts up to that point, winter was suddenly delivered to the Seattle area just as I was set to leave it for a distant island nation.

The flight to London was a bit of an apology, if the universe ever apologizes. It was a rather sparsely populated flight, affording my knees some much appreciated personal space. I’ve had the good fortune to experience every class of international flying (apart from the newer, claustrophobic looking personal closet things) ranging from “prince” to “pauper” and really the only thing that matters to me is legroom, which I was mercifully granted in spades on the way to London.

As a 6’4″ human person I’ve often thought people over a certain height should be considered “differently abled” for the purpose of airline seats. By virtue of genetics alone I am generally doomed to be miserable. Foreshadowing is a literary device in which the writer gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story.

I spent much of this luxurious flight catching up on work things I was finally able to corner myself with. That finished, I found myself unable to sleep, something I’ve never been good at doing on planes, so I read through the first parts of Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch 22, which had some ominously timely things to say about the current political state of my home country.

I arrived late enough that there wasn’t much of Monday left, but I set out to wander the streets anyway. The first night set the pattern for the rest of the week. I’d head out in a direction, with or without some vague idea of what I was looking to see. Then I would wander in that direction as long as my legs would let me. These were hardly marathons, but after a nine hour flight sometimes you really just want to walk ten miles. On this first trip I saw that the Tower of London was reasonably close by, so I thought I’d head that way.

I’ve somehow managed to avoid walking through most of the larger cities of the United States, so my perspective is a bit limited for comparison to what this city felt like. The closest comparison in my experience is Tokyo, a modern city that bustles at the right hours and has shiny new buildings inter-spliced with ancient temples and shrines. Replace those temples with churches and you’ve got a pretty good equivalence of London. And they have trains! Unlike Tokyo, however, the likelihood in London of overhearing someone randomly exclaim “Joizus Chroiast!” as you walk down the street considerably higher.

On my path I immediately noticed the propensity of the locals for jaywalking. I’m not sure if they call it jaywalking in London, but whatever they call it they do it constantly. I also discovered that I was an instantly recognizable mark for panhandlers. Regardless of what size group of people I happened to traverse into an area with, I was the one approached for practiced requests for loose change, which I had not come prepared with. Perhaps I walked different, or less determined to ignore my surroundings, which broadcast the hallmarks of “this person is a tourist.”

Whatever the case, I made it into visual range of the famous Tower, which wasn’t quite as towering as I expected. Given the time of night and the suspicious lurkers around the station I found at the end of my wandering, I snapped a few photos and turned back. On the way I stopped at an unintimidating pub and had my obligatory sample of fish and chips, which was quite excellent.

After a night’s sleep in my hotel room at the Point A on Liverpool Street, which was arguably comfortable enough for someone my height (I give it a 7.5/10 by sheer virtue of being equipped with a hair dryer that dared to do more than just caress my hair with a calm breeze), I woke up around 5am and set out for the office. Naturally this was far too early, but it’s my habit to show up at work early. Unfortunately the office I was to meet my colleagues at was not accessible by the usual means of my company badge system, so I needed to wait for them to arrive. That meant I had a few hours to kill, and so I set off to murder that time as best as I could in the early morning hours.

So I took the train to Westminster and walked around a bit. I had no particular goal other than making sure I go a look at Big Ben, but I took some time to walk down Parliament Street to see what there was to see. Mostly it was old, well kept buildings and statues of various war heroes throughout history. A few blocks in I came across a racket of protesters blowing horns and banging various things to presumably annoy their employer into increasing their wages. Would that our methods in the US were quite as direct.

After a day of work there was a group dinner, which I abstained from documenting too much of.

Wednesday and Thursday evenings I was left to my own devices, meaning I walked a lot. I wandered here and there, just absorbing the scenery of businessy people huddled around corner pubs and socializing. Pan handlers continued attempting to handle my pan with no success. I each night I eventually wandered into some place or another to get some food.

I walked down Brick Lane, a street absolutely congested with shops for trendy young people and graffiti everywhere. It was a pretty cool place to see, but I could feel the very essence of the place rejecting most of the core tenets of my own personality, apart from a nod or two to aligned philosophies.

Overall I was quite taken with the city. I’d like to go back with some proper free days to get a proper tour of it, but as congested metropolises go, this one is a pretty good time.

The flight back was, relative to the first flight, absolutely tortuous. No lucky upgrades for me this time. Economy on Virgin Airlines is not made for the long-legged among us. Less than an hour into the flight, with my knee securely lodged into the seat in front of me in the only position of relatively neutral comfort, the passenger in front of me decided it was time to “relax”, tilting their seat back without warning and crushing my knee, which I jerked painfully out of the way as quickly as I could to minimize the damage, letting out an involuntary yelp of pain, to which they heeded in no way, shape, or form.

Some hours later, during one of the various snack distributions, the flight attendant was kind enough to witness my seemingly permanent agony and requested that passenger tilt their seat back up, which I appreciated greatly. I’d better appreciate an airline that purposely shuffles people my height or taller into the seats with a bit more space. I don’t need a full section upgrade. Fancier snacks don’t mean as much as simply not hating existing.

And so my travel came to a close. I took the train back to Lynnwood from the airport, a nice new feature of the Puget Sound region, and thankfully there was snow enough left for me to get a snowman upright for a few hours before the sun came to clear out most of the snowman-grade material.