After another day of meetings, we spent Friday night in London near the airport.  My coworker was meeting his wife at a different hotel near there, so we said that we would drop him off.  Well, it turns out that it wasn’t that close.  In fact, it was more in downtown London – not a place that I would ever want to drive, but fortunately my coworker was driving.  The traffic is pretty crazy and the roundabouts are insane (have you ever seen a 4 lane roundabout?!?!?)  Well, we got him there eventually (it took a GPS and a blackberry together to get us to the right place), and then safely back to the hotel.  I’m told that most people that live in London don’t even dare drive there – everyone takes the Underground, or subway as we would call it.

We left in the morning for Amsterdam and had a quick flight there.  We took the train downtown and spent Saturday afternoon and evening there, walking around and taking pictures like good tourists.  Amsterdam’s train system could put the New York subway to shame.  There are larger trains that cover the entire metro area, and there are “trolleys” that cover the entire downtown area, appearing every couple blocks. And if you aren’t into trains, there are bike lanes on every street and canals that run through downtown every 5 blocks or so.  We considered catching a ride with the “river bus” system – a fleet of boats that takes tourists around downtown at a leisurely pace – but the price was a little inhibitive.

There’s a small section of downtown right around the train station that seems to be quite old and completely devoted to tourists.  There are definitely a few places to get in trouble if you are looking for it, but we didn’t ever feel pressured or endangered while we were there.  It really didn’t seem nearly as crazy as people make it out to be (although we weren’t there late at night…).

The area surrounding downtown was more residential.  We found row after row of beautiful row houses, all made of brick.  The land there is low-lying so we noticed that many of the buildings had a lean to them (some more than 5 degrees!).  However, everything seemed to be well-taken care of.  The houses all seemed solid enough to last for a few hundred years, and most windows and door frames were decorated with stonework.

For dinner, we visited a local pub.  I ordered the chicken sauté and was about to start eating when my coworker told me that the brown sauce on top was typically peanut sauce.  He offered to trade for his shrimp pasta and I gladly accepted, thanking him profusely far saving me from an allergic reaction.

We meandered back to the train, got a good night sleep at the hotel, and caught a shuttle back to the airport the next morning.  Security takes forever in Amsterdam.  They have a checkpoint right before you get on the plane, so the boarding process for a big plane (like we were on), takes nearly two hours.  After you’ve gone through, there’s no going back, so all you can do is wait for everyone else to get there.

Eventually we were airborne and found our way back to the Minneapolis.  Upon disembarking, I fought my way through incredibly long customs lines, and found my beautiful wife patiently waiting for me in the car.  It feels good to be home!

Five coworkers and I left Minneapolis at 3:30pm on Tuesday and arrived in London around 9am on Tuesday.  We drove to the inn where we are staying, which is about an hour outside of London in a very rural area.  We checked in, got a little rest, had some lunch (aspargus and salmon crumble – kind of like a hotdish with breadcrumbs on top) and then went to see Stonehenge.  It wasn’t nearly as tall as I thought it was, but it’s definitely a site to see, being 3500 years old and whatnot.  I’ll make sure that I get some pictures from the others to send you all (I left my camera battery at home, grrr).  Then we had some delicious dinner (trout) with the some of our clients.  After dinner, Janelle and I tried out Skype, which worked wonderfully.

In the morning we had a quick breakfast and headed over to our client’s building.  They tried to give us a tour, but it was raining.  There’s a 30% chance of rain this week.  We didn’t understand that in England, the other 70% percent of the time it’s foggy or misting.  The humidity makes it quite chilling to be outside.

After spending the entire day in meetings, we went back to the inn.  The inn is a quaint little place in the country with a thatched roof.  Inside, there’s a front desk adjacent to the pub, a dining room where we eat breakfast, and two floors of rooms.  Most of the time I use the hall, but there is also a glass door that leads directly outside, providing me with extra sunlight and a beautiful view of the forest that surrounds the inn.

Tonight we were invited out for a game of Skittles at a local pub.  It’s a game similar to bowling, where some wooden pins are arranged at the end of the lane and a ball is rolled down the isle to knock them down.  The ball is typically wooden, although ours had some padding on the outside make it last longer.  You really can’t count on the ball rolling straight, since the ball is quite beat up and the lane is composed only of a standard wooden floor (not polish like a bowling lane).  There are only 9 pins, arranged in a diamond, and there are smaller and spaced further apart than in American bowling.  After you throw, you had to go down to the other end of the lane and re-setup the pins for the next person.  The scoring is simple – each pin is worth one, and you get to throw three balls per turn.  If you knock down all nine pins and still have a ball or two left, the pins are set up again, allowing you to have a turn score over 9.  It was a very social game and we all had fun together, although everyone’s scores were fairly abysmal (it gave us great comfort to know that the Brit’s don’t seem to be any better than us).  I’ve also been informed that there is also a table-top version of Skittles with a wind-up top.

The driving here is a beautiful terror.  The area we are in is beautiful countryside with lots of farms, fields, trees (some of them older than the US), and pastures for sheep and pigs.   We rented some nice cars (two Mercedes, to be exact) because they were about the same price as everything else.  We knew that they drive on the left side of the road here, which takes some getting used to, but what really threw us for a loop was that they have roundabouts at most intersections.  They are apparently great for traffic flow, but terrible for giving directions.  For example, when your original directions are to “go to the second roundabout and take the third exit”, it brings up questions like “what do you do at the first roundabout?”, “do i take the inside lane or the outside lane in the roundabout”, and “how do I get home?”

We would most certainly be in some remote part of Scotland right now if it weren’t for having GPS units.  Of course, even they have limits.  Out here, everyone’s address is a 7-digit number, but the GPS units sometimes don’t seem to give you the right location for these addresses.  Country roads are often named descriptively with a letter and a four-digit number.  I think the letter tells you what kind of a road it is – “A” is a decent road with a 6-inch shoulder and barely room for two cars to pass each other going opposite directions.  “C” is a narrow road without a shoulder – in many places, cars can’t pass each other unless one slows down and pulls over.  The speed limits are 70 on freeways (which are indicated by “M”), and 60 on most country roads (of any class).  One of our clients told us that the reason for this is that “if anyone is stupid enough to got that fast, they won’t be doing it for very long”.  Let’s just say that it’s terrifying to have two cars coming at each other at a combined 80mph and realizing that you don’t have room to pass each other (usually due to the hedges which border every road, but sometimes because the road has sunk down into the ground and has a dirt (or cement) curb along the edge.  In one place, they had actually put out metal posts in the road every half mile so that it’s not wide enough for two cars to pass – apparently solely for the purpose of slowing down traffic… yikes.

I have another busy day of meetings tomorrow.  We are staying in a hotel in London tomorrow night, doing a little sight-seeing on Saturday, and then catching a flight to Amsterdam where we are staying Saturday night.  Daylight savings time takes effect that night in Europe, which means that I lose an hour of sleep.  Funny how that doesn’t seem nearly as bad after dealing with jet lag…