SETTLES.ORG - “WAY OUT”

At 11am on 8-Jan-07, our good friend Eric Everman drove us to the Minneapolis/St Paul Airport. About 8 hours later we were boarding a plane in Houston bound for London. We sat next to a young girl (may 8 or 9?) who we think had a British father and American mother (across the aisle from us). But she was clearly growing up in England as her accent was thick and she didn’t seem to understand us at all, either. There was also a fellow a few rows in front of us with a heavy cockney accent wearing an M&M’s NASCAR jacket. Never made sense of that one…

Neither of us slept much on the plane. Fortunately, it was one of those nifty newfangled jets with individual entertainment systems installed in the back of the seat in front of you, so I watched Little Miss Sunshine (very funny, in a very guilt-ridden way) and part of John Tucker Must Die (sadly the next best thing on), as well as playing a few hours worth of video Solitaire and Hangman.

Once we touched down at Gatwick Airport in London 8 hours later, we met up with Keith Noto, a fellow UW-Madison CS grad student with my same advisor who is our roommate for the next several months. He arrived about an hour earlier via Newark. We nabbed our bags (minimal damage to my $25 guitar case and no visible damage to the guitar inside) and tried to figure out how to get to Cambridge.

We first stopped in a line for bus tickets which was quite long and slightly abstructed the path. A very haughty British businesswoman marched up to me with her luggage “trolly” and impatiently exclaimed, “You can’t just stop in the middle of the path as you please, you know.” I squeezed my guitar case in and rolled my suitcase behind me to make way for her. She looked at me with an expression I’m guessing was surprise, although it could easily be mistaken for disgust. “Oh my, I s’pose you can. Clee-vah!” And she marched on through. I don’t know if she was being apologetic or sarcastic, but in either case she was really the only rude or snarky Brit I’ve encountered so far.

After figuring out a train to King’s Cross and then a change to the Cambridge Express was the way to go, we bought our tickets and hauled all our crap on the train at about 11am (GMT, which is about 5am by our Madison-adjusted body clocks, very sleep deprived). Our arrival was actually at a sort of King’s Cross annex station, which involved carrying all our stuff up 2 flights of stairs (no elevator) and across 2-3 blocks to the actual station. There we learned our train left in just a few minutes from platform 10, though we stopped long enough to attempt a run to Hogwart’s en route:

At the Cambridge train station, we just hired a taxi to get us to Churchill College, where we are staying. After checking in and getting our keys, we hauled our things another several blocks to the flats and collapsed for a few minutes. I think we brought too much stuff. Keith thought he didn’t bring enough. So on the average I suppose we’re fine.

We then headed into town for some dinner (at 3pm local time… which was 9am by our body clocks, but felt like 9pm). A nice Italian joint whose name I forget. I had the gnocchi. Yum. Then we stopped at a convenience store to pick up some cereal and milk because we didn’t quite know where the groceries were yet, went home, and went to bed.

That was nearly a week ago. More to come on what’s happened since then in a bit.