I heart London

You know those t-shirts that every city has with "I love . . . insert city"and "love" is represented by a heart? I think those should have been patented by New York, but apparently they weren't 'cause they're everywhere. Anyway, that's what my post title means. I just don't know how to put a little heart up there.

We really enjoyed London. Despite the slight travel delays and the bitter cold, it is a beautiful city. It's clean and we felt completely safe in all the "touristy" places and in the underground. We'd been told by native Londoners that the people are generally not friendly, but we found nothing of the kind. Everyone we encountered was more than friendly and helpful as well. It was a great Christmas vacation and I hope to be lucky enough to go back some time.

We booked the Eurostar high speed train from Brussels to London two months ago and if you keep up with news across the pond at all you will know the Eurostar was inundated with passengers whose flights were cancelled at the now infamous closure of Heathrow. Apparently if you showed up at the train station, bought a ticket early enough, you literally bumped someone like us who'd had their tickets months in advance. It was quite a fiasco as evidenced by the photo below.

This is a picture of "the mother of all queues" at the London train station the day before we were to leave and head that way. Thousands of people had been lined up since 3 a.m. and most were told after waiting for hours in sub-zero temperature to go "home" and come back the next day! I believe "home" is actually where they wanted to go all along.

And inside wasn't much better. But it was a whole lot warmer, I bet. So amidst this chaos, we decided to go anyway :) If there was no train to London, then we'd wait for the next one. Or the next one.

We left home before 6 a.m. for our 8:30 train departure. Brussels is only an hour away. Well, unfortunately, a traffic accident on the interstate just 10 km from Brussels kept us at a standstill for over an hour and way past our 8:30 departure :(

But as luck would have it, as we sat on the interstate, we checked the Eurostar website and our 8:30 train was cancelled anyway! Now we could attempt to get seats on the next one at 10 a.m. Of course, at the rate we were not moving, that looked unlikely :(

But as luck would have it, the road was finally cleared and we were on our way again. Got to the station and apparently all those 8:30 passengers had taken all the coach seats so we were forced to accept first class seats on the 10 a.m. train! Naturally, the train didn't actually leave the station until about Noon, but no matter, we were on it. And due to snow, speed restrictions were in place, so it wasn't quite as "high speed" as it normally is, but no matter,we got there! All in the same day :)

I can definitely say I would recommend taking the high speed train whenever possible. Round trip from Brussels to London is about €85 and normally takes 2 hours. You can reserve seats facing each other with a table in between, take as much luggage and jumbo shampoos as you can carry, walk around freely, and bring your own food and drinks with you.

And as you can see upon our arrival, the station was back to normal. Thank you, Heathrow for getting your act together.

There is a security checkpoint similar to the airlines, but I noticed these ski poles in the overhead after we boarded . . . and to think I was worried my Coke Light and cowboy cookies would be confiscated :~|