One way to the UK?

TO begin with, let me just say that last week flew by in a hectic rush and this week has been much the same – very little time to play on the internet and update my blog (so not good!).

Well, I can’t much remember what happened between last Tuesday and Friday… so I thought to start with the interesting stuff anyway! Last Friday I left work early, about 14:30 to get out to Marlebone Station to catch the National Rail up to Birmingham – to meet my rellies there for the first time and also to help celebrate my Aunty Gill’s 50th birthday! So I left work early, thinking I had plenty of time to get the bus up to home (15 minutes) and then get the tube from Mile End to Marlebone (only 1 change along the way) to arrive at the station at least by 16:30, half an hour before my 17:00 train. Well… the bus bit went fine, but as I went to walk down into Mile End station there were people streaming out of it and I was thinking ‘what, rush hour in the middle of the day’, but no, I then overheard a lady going ‘there’s a train on fire, there’s a fire’. So that was the start of another little adventure… I turned around and luckily the #25 bus pulled up, which goes from Mile End to Oxford Street in the city so on I jumped…. the only thing is the bus has to stop so often and goes so slowly!!! SO I jumped off at about Aldgate or somewhere, looked in at the tube station and found the Central Line was now totally stopped because of the Mile End situation…. and so with the bus also gone and time ticking I hailed a black cab and jumped in…. on asking the driver if we could make it to Marlebone by 17:00 he was like Ahahaha… well umm have you seen the traffic? I’ll try love, but no guarantees. So there I sat, in the back of a taxi, lucky I still have nails – cursing London Underground and the city traffic on a Friday and the driver could sense my frustration and kept saying once we’re out of the city blocks we’ll be there in 10 minutes… well his 10 minutes was my 15 minutes and as we pulled up near Marlebone (accross the road, no point fighting traffic to get near the door), I already had my bags on and I opened the door and jumped out, narrowly avoiding being wiped out by a big red bus (!) and chucked £20 in the window and ran for the platform! Luckily I already had my ticket and literally ran straight onto the train, found an empty seat and 2 minutes later it pulled out of the station!!! Phew – adventure plus for the city-scene haha. That was just the trip up there – the two hour train ride went quite fast cuz the guy next to me was obviously from outside of London (no he was, I could tell you his life story) and he kept talking on and on and on! Even when I opened my study book and began reading, if I looked up he would go “soo… as I was saying to mike yesterday, oh that’s my employee” argh! Oh well, can’t say everyone here is friendly so I guess it was nice coming from a stranger! haha.

I will write about my actual weekend on another entry…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.