Allison's Adventures in the Big Apple: London Adventure Pt 1

So some of you may know that I spent the last week in jolly ol' England. I went for a business trip (awesome, right?) and to start with the conclusion, I had an amazing time. I flew in on Sunday evening, had Monday to toodle around London, was working the rest of the week and had about half a day of touristing time on Saturday morning before flying back to NY on Saturday evening. It was a jam packed week that went by fast, but I had a blast!

A car came to pick me up at my apartment at 4:30...yes that's AM...Sunday morning and my flight left at 7:30am. I got to fly business class (a luxury to be sure) so I got to board first, had a lot of leg room, and two minutes after boarding was brought a tray and offered a glass of orange juice by the flight attendants. I flew Virgin Atlantic (a British airline) and so all of the flight attendants had posh British accents, making the experience all the more fun yet also surreal.

Terrible picture of me waiting for the car at 4:30am

My plane!

6 hours is a long time to fill on an airplane, but I'll try to give you the highlights.

Nobody was sitting in the seat next to me so I had plenty of room to spread out.
The guy sitting in front of me snored the entire trip. Luckily I had my headphones on the whole time so he was mostly drowned out, but I definitely felt bad for the woman sitting next to him.
I watched the movie The Internship. It was kind of how I expected it to be, kind of stupid and predictable, yet funny and heartwarming. I also watched the first episode of the most recent season of Sherlock which was just as awesome as I was expecting it to be.
I was served breakfast and lunch on fancy trays and even had a menu to order from!
The funniest thing was when we hit minor turbulence and the pilot (in his posh British accent) came over the speaker to explain that we had just hit turbulence, but not to worry. This was all very normal until he then continued to launch into a 10 minute explanation of how flying is like sailing on a river and when you're in the middle of the river it's nice and smooth but when you get towards the edge of the river there are always ripples and that we were just heading through the ripples and that the plane was really just moving up and down like if we were on a boat. This would have been amusing on its own, but what I really thought was funny is that the turbulence was really not bad at all. I routinely get worse flying from NY to Oregon.

My fancy swag from sitting in business class
pillow, blanket, headphones, water bottle

My fancy lunch - roast beef with potatoes au gratin and broccoli

The salt and pepper shakers were little airplanes!

When I got to Heathrow a car was supposed to be waiting for me. I had a little bit of trouble when I didn't see it, so I ended up calling the company on a pay phone nearby. They actually were very nice and were able to get a car for me very quickly, which got me back to the hotel around 9pm.

At that point, I was hungry but also jetlagged so didn't particularly feel like eating dinner so I ended up getting ice cream from a cute little shop around the corner. The funniest part was when I returned to the hotel with it to eat it in my room, the concierge seemed shocked and dismayed at my choice. He stuttered at me "But...but you can't eat ice cream for dinner!" I see nothing wrong with this. I guess I'm just a crazy American!