First look on London, UK

One of my friend’s father once told me that when you go to Switzerland as your first onsite location, you would never find anything else satisfying again. I was not so sure about it then, for me Switzerland was my first onsite assignment and I thought that the ease with which I could be there would be the same everywhere. But not every country or city is the same anywhere, except in sleepy Swiss.

 

I arrived in London on 20 June in the evening. I had to go to Ilford where I was put up in the company guesthouse. Normally, if it is a first trip for anyone to an onshore location, the things that they would notice would be the greenery, people and all. As I travelled in a taxi from airport, the first thing that I noticed was the litter on the highways. I even saw a couple of cars break the lane rule. Well, what do you think of that! In India it is not so much a big deal since every other Tom, Dick and Harry is breaking the lane rules and all. But, it was a surprise over here for sure. The sun was shining brightly in the sky, and the time was 8 pm (yes, it was evening) London is divided into 9 concentric zones and I had to travel a long way across from the Heathrow airport to Ilford – one end of 9^th zone to other end 4^th zone. By the time I reached the guesthouse, I was dead tired. It was almost 20 hours since I had slept (you cant really count the small naps during the flight) Just got myself a burger and some fries in case I got hungry in the night, dumped my luggage and went to sleep. The sunset happened at around 10 pm, though there was light for a long time after also.

 

The next day dawned again at around 5 am (I think before that). When I suddenly got up, I saw the sun shining again brightly. Doesn’t the sun go to sleep like it does everywhere else !!! I got up, got ready and off to office. London had a lot of rail networks, its been 4 days since I came here and I still haven’t got to know all of them. Theres the national rail, then the tube, these are what I use to move around. There are others like DLR. The tube or London underground itself has a lot of networks – Jubliee line, Metropolitian, Northern, Central, Hamilton & City and so on and so forth. When you want to travel you can use an Oyster pass, which are available as either pay as you go, where in you would have to top up the card everytime, or you can take a weekly pass in Oyster card. There are also day travel cards available which you can add on to your Oyster card. Every zone has different charges, and depending on where you get in and get down, this Oyster network calculates your fare for the journey. Also, if you have a day travel card, it also checks whether to use the money from the card or to use the day travel card. When you use tube as well as national rail (like I do) it calculates how much money should be given to the tube and how much to the rail. Pretty cool, right!!

The transport here is expensive and zone 1 is the most expensive. People do a lot of workarounds so that they pay less for travelling within zone 1. I have to still get hang of all the transport and moving around, but thought of just penning down a few of the things that I do know.

 

I have not seen anything of London yet, except some stations while moving around for work. So, would drop in a few lines more maybe next week once I have seen something here.