Today started off well…we made it to the tube station just in time to catch the train we’d targeted. We got to our appointed tube stop, found the bus we needed, and then exited the bus at the stop we’d planned. In fact, we’d spent over an hour the night before examining maps and planning our route. Unfortunately, in the end I decided to depend on a ‘handy’ official British Transport site, which allowed me to enter my starting tube stop and ending address, and spit out a few route options. Since the options provided by this site were far simpler than anything we’d come up with, we decided to go with it. When we left the bus and started walking, we discovered that we were nowhere near where we needed to be. So, we found another bus, and rode for about 15 more minutes and then walked for 20 additional minutes to reach the church building. By that point, we were pretty late. Lucky for us, they have an hour and a half of worship, so we still got to participate in what felt like a full service to us. We liked the place, and despite the long commute to get there, I can see us going back regularly. However, I think we’ll see if we can find something closer over the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, since London is preparing for the 2012 Olympics, there is a good deal of construction going on in the Underground. That translates to some major line closures on weekends, which means what would be a very long commute to the Wembley church in the first place, becomes a longer and very complex commute.
After services we headed back to Pepperdine to join up with a bus tour they were providing for the students (and families). It was a fun time! It was cool to realize that we’d already visited most of the “major” London sites on our rambling walks. I now have a list of new places where I’d like to spend time, and we enjoyed hearing more historical and novel details about some of the sites we’d visited already. For me, one of the highlights was getting to see and drive across the Tower Bridge. I also really liked seeing some of the modern architecture in the financial/business downtown. (We learned that London actually has 2 downtowns – one is the financial/business district, and the other is the government center.) We heard tons of interesting facts about Harrod’s, and one that stood out to me was that when they installed England’s first escalator back in the 1800’s, they had employees waiting at the top to offer brandy for the men and smelling salts for the women to calm their nerves after a ride on the moving stairs. Also, you’ll see a picture of a wall with plants growing out of it in the collage. I really thought that was a cool sight. It was a very nice design created with the plants….I’m not really sure how they did it!
Once we were done with the bus tour, it was on to dinner (we had burgers & fries), and then back to the house. We got to have nice phone calls with my parents and Daniel’s mom. I am loving Skype – just the phone call capability at this point, though I’m sure the video calling is pretty great too!
Tomorrow is orientation for Daniel and another day at work for me. We have dinner reservations at Amaya, which is an Indian restaurant we saw featured on Giada’s Weekend Getaways. Should be good!
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