Walk into Town

After lunch, I took the conference bag - all 2.5kg of them - back to my hotel room, FaceTime Anita and the boys before heading back out. Destination, Central London.

From Canary Wharf, I took the Jubilee Line - in Zone 2 - straight to Bond Street, changed to Central Line to Queensway and had lunch at one of the kebab house there. Just like the good old student days. There, I heard in the background a lady talking to her children in Malay. Sure enough, you would more than likely bump into Malaysians around here, being one of the hub for Halal food. I chatted with the husband later on, and they had been here for almost 2 weeks and would be flying home tomorrow evening. A nice school holiday treat foe their children I must say.

After lunch, I went to Whiteley's, where my favourite cinema from the student time stood. It has since changed company but it was still going strong. After lingering around for a while, I doubled back to Central Lie alighting at Oxford Circus, where I really started my journey. It was a nice sunny day and without the breeze, it was warm enough that I had to lose my jacket.

I had to make a confession here, amongst the first shop I walked into was the Apple Store, located at Regent Street. We were talking about a proper shop here, not the pretenders like Machine back home. I'll blog about that later maybe.

I walked further down towards Covent Garden where I got most of the shopping done for the stuffs to take back home. mainly shirts and bits for the boys. I stopped over at the Haagen Dasz for coffee, where during my student days, I went usually on the final night before returning to school with my friends, to more or less drawn our sorrow. None of us were really looking forward to return to our boarding house especially after a couple of weeks away, having a great time in London.

That was actually the first half of what I did, I after that, I returned to Marble Arch to further remember my student days, as well as dinner at Edgwere Road.

Day 1

So, the first order of business today was to get the registration out of the way. Luckily, after woken up in the middle of the night last night, I was able to get back to sleep after a couple of hours. Woke up this morning, and was full of energy. Unpacked, got the ironing done, answered the emails and headed down for breakfast.

After congregating with the rest of the group, we took a cab to the exhibition centre, 10 minutes away.

The exhibition centre, dubbed the ExCel, was a typical converted warehouse building, impressively big and was more than suitable as a venue with its huge hangar-like hall. Walking from one hall to another took a good 5-10 minutes, but the good thing was everything was under one roof and we did not need to go outdoors at hall.

The registration included discount cards for travel to Central London, as well as a delegate bag which included the abstract book which weighed easily 2 kg. It has a companion CD ROM dual as well, so the 2 kg documentation package would head straight to the bin.

The rest of today would be filled with satellite symposium. I planned to stay until luck, before heading back to the hotel to leave the bags and Mac Air. I would then head to Central London to do some shopping as I was not able to yesterday or the rest of the week. Will blog later then.

And yes, we get free fast Internet at the Conference Center as well!

Jet Lagged

Oh! Dear! It happened before and I think it was happening again now. I got one of those jet-lagged session where I was wide awake at the moment and it was 1 am London time, 8 am back home in Malaysia. One of the major drawback of being a morning person was, your natural rhythm was attuned to be hyper in the morning. I was suffering now.

What happened was, I got back to the hotel room at around 3.30 pm, took a shower and planned a nap for a couple of hours since we planned to go out to Covent Garden that evening. The next thing I knew, it was 1 am in the morning. And I was starving. Luckily I bought some food earlier from a corner shop nearby. Some biscuits and drinks. That tied me up overnight.

So, planning to get back to bed as I can't really be bothered to unpack yet. I would probably get up early for the hotel breakfast and head out to the Convention Center tonged myself registered. Today was the satellite symposium day, where the Pharmaceuticals would have sessions promoting their products. I'll probably stick for a few hours then head into town after lunch to sort out my shopping list!

Shall I Go Out?

After breakfast, we ventured out, armed with a two-zone travelcard - off peak of course. We finally figured out that you just needed to do a bit of walking across a quay, then hop onto a Jubilee Line into Central London.

We decided to go all touristy today, and got ourselves tickets for the hop in hop out bus ride. That included a cruise along River Thames as well. It started off bright and sunny, but halfway by noon, dark clouds started rolling in. We managed to do the obligatory visits to Downing Street, Trafalgar Square and the Big Ben before it started pouring heavily. Luckily, we were on the bus en route to Marble Arch when this happened, so we decided to skip the planned lunch at Edgware Road. Instead, we dis a full circle towards Piccadilly Circus, had pizza there before catching the ride home.

We were planning to go out again for dinner in Covent Garden, but to be honest, the chance foe that happening with me on board were slim to nil. It was half eleven in ye evening Malaysia time, I'm knackered and by the time I finished with the shower, I know I would crash. If I woke up later this evening, I might as well just order something from the room service menu and take things from there. Good Night!

Touch Down

The flight in was very comfortable indeed. It was full of students actually, in suits with a 1Malaysia pin on their lapel. They must be the top few who was awarded scholarship to fly off early for their A levels. All so young. Still teary eyed. Just like when I first touched down in London back in 1990.

One thing about MAS was their service. MH flights to London, being their flagship I suspect gives the best service because of it being such a lucrative sector for them. I had flown on KLM business class before, and it was worst than coach on MAS in terms of service and food. I better say too much about business on MAS then. It would make you jealous!

Anyway, I skipped dinner on the plane and managed a six hour nap, and starving when I woke up. Luckily, there were some snacks and drinks on offer. After chatting with some of the students and colleagues flying in for the same meeting, I felt asleep again, this time for a coupe of hours, just in tine to wake up for breakfast. The nasi lemak the cabin offer was actually very good.

We landed on time. Immigrations was straight forward as we were the first international flight in onto the Terminal 4 that morning. When I was writing this blog, I was on the transport to the hotel we would be staying in for the rest of the week. No free wifi unfortunately, and I couldn't be bothered to activate data roaming as it would cost a bomb. I would wait until I reached the hotel. Hopefully there would be free wifi there.

I would be free foe the rest of the day and the troupes were discussing the plans for the rest of the day. In the end, we settled for hop in hop off city tour, then dinner tonight at Covent Garden. Looking forward to that!