Wednesday, February 07, 2007

London calling

It has been a while since the last post. Seems the frequency of me getting time and urge to write is correlated to the amount of work I have to do. So this must mean I have a lot to do right now, which is good. I have also been working on an article on architecture role in the organization but it is a longer post and still needs work.

So, am in London again. Firstly, let me tell you about this wonderful hotel I was staying at. And no, they are not paying me for this and this is no spam. The place really is that good, I probably had the best hotel experience anywhere in the world. The place is called Ambassador Hotel Bloomsbury. The room was very tiny but well laid out and OK for one night. It is a fairly modern place with nice design touches everywhere but unlike some places it still manages to be perfectly functional: you never have to look for anything, it's just there. To top it all up, the breakfast was astounding: very nice choice of mainly French products combined with elements of traditional English breakfast. Just perfect. The only gripe really was that there was a door close by that sent shivers through my room every time it was closed but that didn't happen that often so it was OK.

This trip has been very nice otherwise, too. The weather is beautiful with blue skies and just a little bit of frost to keep things winterly fresh. After landing in London City Airport I decided to go for train + tube instead of a taxi which takes ages and costs a small fortune due to miserable traffic in the mornings. Have not dared to do so before because of general distrust in public transport but boy was I wrong. The train arrived in 2 minutes (in perfect accordance with the posted timetable), was fast, clean and reasonably crowded. Why on earth is public transport in Tallinn slow, unreliable, smelly, always crowded to the max and you have to walk for 45 minutes before you get to it.

Anyway, the train took me through Docklands which is a mess of industrial estate, huge old residential blocks, four level junctions, playgrounds and branches of Thames. Does not sound like much but is strangely beautiful to look at. Would love to go there for pictures some time.

All in all, it has been great (Estonian Air still has a chance to mess it up but hopefully they won't) and there is a growing feeling that I need to come for a weekend and take a ton of photos.

1 comment:

Jaanus said...

trains rule, in London and the rest of Europe. Tallinn's transport system is crap from another universe and you shouldn't really use it to set expectations for other countries :-)