So American Airlines changed its logo. They should have changed their ground crew, too, because during our on-time pushback from the gate at LAX yesterday morning, my plane backed into another plane.
So I was in a plane crash. Really.
Apparently, the ground crew dude was on crack or busy texting his girlfriend or something because someone failed to notice the giant airplane right next to us. A nine-year-old girl on our flight, however, didn’t miss it, and was heard to tell her parent that we were about to hit that plane. Lo and behold, she was correct.
Needless to say, this caused some consternation on the flight deck and among the crew, and eventually led to our disembarkation and a wait of a couple hours while they drummed up some other plane and probably kept some other poor schlubs on the ground so we could go. Of course, I missed my flight from Chicago to Heathrow, but the tour travel agent is like a ninja and nothing can stop her, so she made it all better.
So I’m in London. I’m at a place called Music Bank Studios. It was probably a bullet factory during WWII or something, because it’s got that weird, ambling character of old European compounds that’s both charming and infuriating. Because of the late arrival of my flight (the flight was on time, it was the change that made me late), I had to take a cab that cost >$200. Couple that with the fact that London has no idea about bypasses or highways around things, and you had me riding from Heathrow to the studio through the center of London. Absurd.
I found myself laughing out loud in the back seat, though, because we passed like every major monument in London, and those were just the ones I recognized through my bleary-eyed haze. I mean, the Natural History museum, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, the Eye, the Fire Memorial the Tower of London complex, and then we crossed the Tower Bridge. It was too much. If only I hadn’t had Britain’s most taciturn cabbie, I could have been getting like the private tour of London monuments.
Anyway, now I’m here, and after the break, I’ve posted the bigger version of the picture here so you can see some details. I tried to grab a pic of the London skyline from here, but there’s nothing really to see. I have a couple things, but they all suck. I might eventually make an album here with random shots from tour, and if I do, you’ll get to see all my failed attempts at photography from this gig.
As Shang Tsung says: “It has begun!”
