Day 1. Apparently i dont get to pick a title anymore; maybe this browser is broken. Also the shift key is horribly inconvenient to use on these european computers. so i think i'm just going to be lazy and not capitalize appropriate letters.

i also call this day one because yesterday started in indiana (where i woke up). i spent all that day travelling, and not sleeping. our plane arrived at 6:30 london time. first ted and i waited 5 hours for kim and rachel in the airport. then we spent all day trying to book our hostel. that was a gigantic pain in the ass. they kept telling us to come back because their computers were down; so another five hours later we had a room. we also went on a two hour bus tour of london; holy crap this city is cold. anyways, so the end result was that 35 hours after waking up i finally went to bed at 10 london time.

now that its day one and i've had sufficient sleep, am dressed warmer, and am well-fed, i'm a little more coherant and can type my first update. nothing spectacular has happened thus far, but i might note a few things:

1. urinals in the uk are far superior to those found in the usa. i've always wondered why in the usa the urinals have flat backs. then when you use them, you'll get splashed unless you move to the side and aim at a great angle. i always wondered why they werent shaped like an egg? well, in london they are. you'd think such a simple engineering design would be pretty easy to get right, but apparently americans cant do it.

2. people in london really like fish and chips. chips are actually huge french fries and not thin slices of fried potato as we know them. in fact, people in london take their 'chips' very seriously. i ordered a plate of chips with cheeze and bacon. i'm expecting thin little french fries, with tiny bits of bacon and a little bit of melted cheeze. no. what i got instead were massive partitions of a whole potato. there was a big thick square of melted cheeze over the entire top of the wedges. and instead of bacon, i got a huge rectangular slice of pork underneath the cheeze. good stuff. too bad their ranch dressing sucks =0. but their tomatoes are better than those in the us.

3. the american dollar isn't worth that much. prices in london are numerically about equivalent to those in the us. a big mack goes for 4.5 pounds and about 5 dollars, for example. but 2 dollars only gets you about 1 pound at the exchanger. which basically means everything is twice as expensive as it is in the states. granted, some of that is probably because london is a big city, but whatever.

4. red bulls are relatively cheap in london. a red bull in the us costs roughly 4 times what a can of coke costs; 2 bucks vs 50 cents. in london, a red bull is only 2 times what a can of coke is.

5. the us isn't very good at football. and by football, i mean soccer. it really makes no sense that we call american football football. you never even use your foot unless you're kicking off. we just lost the world cup game to ghana; luckily us citizens wont care. the economist magazine had a really funny comment about the world cup though. all of the nations in the world are obsessed with the world cup because its a chance to show their nations' domination over the rest of the world. the us doesn't care about the world cup then, because its too busy with the real thing (ie world domination).

6. london has about 50,000 statues involving either an angel, a lion, a soldier, or some permutation of the above in different orientation and number. they're still all really cool, but there are just lots of them.

well as its really only been one day thus far, thats about it for now.

nick