London Bound

As I mentioned before I recently had a very busy few days with a couple of short plane trips to various parts of Europe. The first was a very pleasant albeit short trip to London. Q, Sissi and I took a bus from Madrid to Valladolid and waited at a incredibly small airport for our RyanAir flight to London Stansted. As a budget airline, RyanAir does things a bit differently than most other airline, but the procedure wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, while airborne we were able to purchase tickets for our train trip into the center of London from the airport – and at a bit of a savings.

Once in London, we headed to my aunt’s place to drop off our bags. No one was home, so we just headed straight back out. Down to Oxford Street, where Q was keen to purchase a team England jersey with the name and number of footballer Michael Owen. Sissi and I accompanied him on this task, but I was really keeping my eye open for a place to eat dinner. After three stores we found one which still had a jersey and decided that it was finally time to eat. Returning to a place called Deep Pan Pizza which had an “All you can eat” pizza buffet, I managed to eat myself into a pizza induced coma. It was great to finally get a good fill of decent pizza after living in two cities that lack it.

We returned home and chatted a bit before heading to bed. Err… bed isn’t exactly accurate… couch and mattress maybe, but in any case it was comfortable and it wasn’t long before we were asleep. In the morning we had our first “English” breakfast in quite a while. Of course we it was all too soon when it was time to take off again and head toward the airport. The trip was uneventful (but I’m not a fan of Baker Street Station) and we stood in another long queue to check in. Once we landed in Valladolid again, we had the chore of figuring out how to catch the bus back to Madrid. We met up with another Canadian named Lindsay who was also going to Madrid to visit a friend. Ironically perhaps, she was attracted to Q’s England jersey and figured he spoke english. Once we realized we were both headed in the same direction, she joined us for that part of the journey. We caught a shuttle from the airport to the main bus terminal in Valladolid and activated our return tickets (and bought one for Lindsay).

The return trip was uneventful as expected and when we finally made it to Madrid we parted ways with Lindsay in the bus station. We made it back to the residence shortly before 22:00 and was able to get dinner, which was much needed. I then had only a few short hours before leaving once again for my next flight, but that is another story…