I'm in London England for the week with 3 of my co-workers; Jason, my boss Mark, and our head marketing guy Paul. We are here doing some work and trying to expand our relationship with our customer here. While here though we can't be all work and no play. In order to make sure our play time is maximized we took advantage of our yesterday and today to see as much as we could.

We left West Virginia on the Friday evening but didn't arrive at Heathrow until around 10am on Saturday. Our flight from Charleston was delayed getting out so we really had to hustle through Dulles to catch our flight across the pond. Both flights were pretty smooth though on the longer flight I had planned on sleeping but I kept waking up because I was so thirsty. The stewardesses pretty much ignored our section of the plane for most of the flight. Flying coach really sucks.

Once we arrived in Heathrow we bought "oyster" cards for the London Underground (the tube) and hopped a train to the Holborn district. Once leaving the station we had to figure out where our hotel was. We were already on the right road but we didn't know if we had to go right or left. So we looked across the street and saw that the building numbers were going up from 110 as you moved to the left. We needed to get to 232 so we took a left. We walked about a mile or so towing our luggage behind us until we finally came to an area where High Holborn road seemed to no longer exist. I asked for guidance from a local music shop (where the Stones recorded when they were young) and we were sent back toward the tube station we emerged from. Mark was lugging two heavy bags so we caught a cab to go back while Paul decided to keep walking. The cab picked us up and ₤ 10 later we were at the Hotel just as Paul walked up. The hotel was about 100 feet to the right of the tube station. Clearly our American logic was insufficient to understand the London numbering system.

After checking in we headed out to see the town and kept going to the right (east) and saw a bunch of interesting buildings, pubs, and small cafe's. We also ended up finding St. Paul's basilica which was really, really big. There was a couple getting married in the basement of St Pauls and they had an old white Bentley outside to take the couple away in. Later that day we saw another similar wedding car on the street (this one was brown). We didn't go into the main worship hall because it was ₤ 10.

Cheap of us? Probably. However, ₤ 1 = $1.75 and I personally didn't think it was worth $17.50 to see the inside of a church. In general our entire group is pretty frugal which, overall is good, but at times may become annoying if we don't actually spend any money to see anything. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity in general so it seems pointless to being overly cheap.

After walking around St. Paul's we headed across the River Thames via the Millennium Bridge and ended up at a huge factory looking building that is actually a massive art museum. UBS (our client) is sponsering a huge exhibit which was free to enter so we checked out the art. None of us, it appears, are big fans of "fine art" and none of the art really impressed any of us even though we saw works from Monet (Lily Pads) and Pollack. After going to the museum we wandered along a meandering path back to the hotel, changed and then headed out for drinks and dinner. We stopped at the Cittie of Yorke pub on High Holton and then moved on to the Ship Master pub near the hotel for dinner.

After dinner Paul and Mark went back to the hotel to sleep while Jason and I headed out to experience some of the London Nightlife. It was only around 8pm so the nightlife wasn't really that great yet. We went to a few different bars near Soho (Picadilly Circus) and Leicester and then, sometime around 10 we were lured into a night club called "Club 49" where we chilled out and had some drinks and watched some people dance. It wasn't very crowded when we were there though I imagine it probably gets crazy later on. Eventually we left the club and headed back to the hotel to cap off a very busy day. I wasn't particularly tired but I didn't want to sleep day 2 away as it was going to be our only full day in London.

I've uploaded a bunch of photos from day 1 you can check out.

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