London, England

I was very excited to hop over the pond and go to this country. My grandmother is from Wales and I was very excited to see some of the things that she told me about when I was a child visiting her. I wish that I would have been able to visit her home town, but this trip was for business and I was very limited on time. My first impression when I opened the window as we were landing was, “Wow, it’s a lot larger than I had envisioned”. From the altitude we were at I was expecting the be able to see both coasts, but such was not the case. I landed in Gatwick bleary eyed from no sleep. I thought it was a good idea to get 3 hours of sleep the day prior to travel so I could sleep on the airplane and wake up when landing that morning. TERRIBLE idea. I did not sleep on the plane at all. So I had 3 hours of sleep the night before travel, then I travelled through overnight, then stayed up the whole day running around England.

There was 2 very interesting realizations I had while in England:
1. Most of the buildings there are older than my country
2. Though it’s an English speaking country, it is absolutely nothing like America

Tower Bridge

When I thought of London, the Tower Bridge is exactly what came to mind for me! So it was a real pleasure to not only walk the bridge, but to take a boat under it.

I’ve visited a fair amount of places as a foreigner. I enjoy visiting the places that are not for tourists. So one of the next unusual things that I noticed is 5:00pm (17:00) on Friday… I tell you what, if you want to be rich, open a pub in downtown London. I have never seen so many pubs packed beyond capacity! I thoroughly enjoy going out to the pub/bar with my buddies and grabbing a beer, but the English take it to a whole new level. In my opinion, American’s even up to 30 years old or older still go to the bar to get drunk, but what I saw was a bunch of work colleagues going to the pub after work to chat and hang out.

I sincerely wish I had more time to visit and explore this country. I spent most of my time in a hotel at product development and marketing meetings…

Art & Architecture in England

The painted hall is an exquisite site to see. Painted by British artist Sir James Thornhill between 1707 and 1726, it’s not the oldest painted hall in the world, but it certainly is amazing. Then there is the building in which the paintings reside… Another exquisite example of art in architecture. You can find these paintings and buildings in these pictures at the University of Greenwich: 51.483650, -0.005888

It seems silly to say this, but in America where so many buildings and homes are built to APPEAR nice, they are garbage and fall apart within 20-30 years and these buildings in England were built to last and have been there for HUNDREDS of years. I was in the basement of a building in downtown London and I was awed by the structure holding up this building. To think that bricks in a certain formation holds up millions of pounds of stone, marble glass and people.