A grey drizzle fell from a leaden sky above London as I waited outside the Chinese consulate on Portland Place. The rows of terraced houses merged with the colour of the sky, their entrances guarded by black-painted iron bar fences. The street was busy with early morning traffic, but not yet congested with the full flood of rush hour.
By the time the doors opened at 9am, there was a queue of about 10 people, but I was second in line and retrieved our visa-laden passports in short order. Walking back down to Oxford Circus, the streets became more and more crowded, and in the tunnels the trains were crowded. I met Linda in a small cafe in Earls Court, and we picked up our tickets to Tehran without fuss, then arranged to ship a carton of things home with S-A-N-Z.
We picked up a box there, and I set off to take it back over to the flat while Linda went for a haircut. Riding the tube mid-morning is fun and interesting. The crowds have gone, but there is still a broad cross-section of people to watch, and always something new to see, posters to read, sounds to listen to, and smells to discern.
At Kennington, I dropped the box off, then caught a bus over to Haymarket and met Linda at the Stockpot. Lunch over, we wandered down past Trafalgar Square through a street market and up the Strand to the Qantas office where we changed the date of our Hong Kong-Sydney-Christchurch flight from November 13 to November 18. That done, we explored a shop called the Kasbah, selling goods from Morocco, a place that instantly transported us back to that wonderful country of high mountains, mysterious cities, and glittering jewellery. The shop even contained a tiny chai stall, where people sat sipping apple tea poured from silver pots into small glasses and a small fountain trickled into the tiled alcove in the wall.
Outside, I set off to find Her Majesty’s stationery office on High Holborn, where I bought a copy of some bottled water regulations, then walked back to Oxford Street, pausing to browse in a few bookshops along the way. The pavement of Oxford Street was crowded, so I hopped on a bus up to Oxford Circus and met Linda there. We went back to the flat and sorted out some of our gear.
In the evening, a big group of us — Linda, Ferg, Lucy, Claire, Joe, Blue, Kerry, and their friends Tony (a wanker) and Trish, Scotty, Devi, Nicky, Sue, Dave, and Hannah went for a curry at Gandhi’s Tandoori in Kennington.
CurseOfTheTraveller 