[INSIGHT TRAVEL - EUROPEAN GRANDEUR] - London, Day 1

DAY 2 - AUGUST 30/31, 2000
LONDON, THE MILLENIUM GLOUCESTER HOTEL
ROOM 230 (1830H, GMT)

Back in the hotel room, replete after another Waitrose dinner. This time, pasta salad and Chinese noodles, downed with mineral water and finished with whole wheat bread and skim milk. Not bad! Tiredness is creeping up on me now, guess I must still be adjusting to the jet lag. It is, after all, somewhere around 1100H, Manila time - but then I should be awake, shouldn't I? Hm!

The morning got off to an interesting start. This person Mom and Dad met at the airport moneychangers offered to take us out sight-seeing. Calls were made to confirm our meeting place (The Gloucester lobby) and the time (1000H, so as to avoid traffic). By 1030H, there was no sign of this Mr. Mark Lizares. He probably got caught in traffic - and so far we have yet to hear from him. Tsk.

So we set off for Gloucester Road Station, bought ourselves one-day passes for the Tube, and got ourselves off to Marble Arch -- the top of Oxford Street. We walked down practically the entire length of the thoroughfare, searching for the main Marks and Spencer store of Ma's memory. We saw quite a few things - two Starbucks branches, two Principles stores, and two Body Shop stores - but not the Marks and Spencer Ma remembered.

Had lunch at McDonald's. They serve vegetable burgers here, and mineral water in pull-top containers, just like sports bottles. Next door was a Marks and Spencer that actually turned out to be the one Ma visited before. Memory plays strange tricks. Either they are renovating, or it looks positively dingy beside its Glorietta counterpart!

Must remember to note that I actually saw SoHo and that the Starbucks here serves its teas a la frappuccino - that would be so cool, if we had it in Manila!

Ma bought herself some stuff - and though we were sorely tempted, between the baggage restrictions and nicer stuff back home, all we alked out of there were two pieces of girdles. Walking back towards the station, though, we stopped by Borders and I bought myself the two other books I need to complete my Laura Joh Rowland/Sano Ichiro series. I'm pretty sure there is still one more title missing, but with any luck, I ought to catch it in Powerbooks or order it online.

(Penmanship is absolutely lamentable. A condition which should be remedied before the month is out. Between this diary and the fanfic I hope to finish, it had better be better!)

Have made plans to somehow get some Internet access tomorrow, but I'm not going to cast it in stone just yet. Plans after all, are subject to hasty revision when one's time is not one's own.

The French fishermen's blockade of the Channel ports is over - a two-day wonder that had British tourists irritated, hung up truck drivers everywhere, and even got the Chunnel stuck up for most of today. But though the blockade may be down, the new issue now is who's going to pay for all the inconveniences caused by what was essentially an internal problem for France.

One must admire the police contingency plans for events such as this. The County Kent police used a section of the M20 to park all the trucks. Everything was neat and orderly, and as of tonight, all is well at the Channel ports of Dover, Calais, St. Malo, Dunkirk, etc. It bodes well for our trip over next week.