Our Brief Stopover…

We started our trip with a stop over in London for a two days and three nights. A very expensive place to be for an American. Everything is exactly the same price in numeric terms, but after conversion, it all doubles. So, for example, if a sandwich costs $5 in the US, it will cost 5 pounds in UK. The problem is that 5 pounds is actually $10 dollars.
After getting over the conversion shock, it wasn’t such a bad stayover. We stayed at the Sheraton Park Tower located in Knightsbridge Area of London, almost adjacent to Harrod’s. It was a very nice Hotel, a 5 star, and we got it because of my points from traveling. It was amazing to find that almost all the people that stay in the hotel were Arabs and on TV, they had 10 out of the 30 channels being Arab. They even had a qiblah pointer in the hotel room!!!! It is very amazing to see how diversified London is. Living in America, especially Bellingham, we still feel the “minority complex” where people don’t look like you, behave like you, etc. In London, it is completely different. I was walking in the Subway going from one line to another and there was a billboard for Shadi.com. It is a marriage website for Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, etc. What I find amusing about the sign was not that there is a website for this type of thing. They have many in the US also. But I could never even imagine that a billboard advertising, for example, zawaj.com would be in the US, because it wouldn’t get much traction. In London, however, it is a different story. Apparently the owners of shadi.com find it worthwhile to advertise in such a public place…….

The other thing that I noticed while in London, which I have noticed before, but considering the current global situation, it was much more pronounced: the size of most of the cars there. I always find it interesting that when they interview people at gas stations complaining about how much they pay to fill a tank, inevitably the car (or truck) behind them is a large SUV like suburban. Gas is so expensive in London that it probably would cost to fill a small car. But interestingly enough, the three auto makers always complain about the difficulty of building cars with good gas mileage and are coming up with hybrid SUVs. In London, all of these same manufactures are building small cars that get great gas mileage. Why not just introduce them in theU.S.?

So we toured London and since I was with family, we didn’t see everything, but did hit the best spots. Its tough traveling with three kids. And although many times I was frustrated at the way they were behaving, wining when they were tired, etc. I am proud of them cause they did enjoy themselves and overall were very good sports about the various spots we were visiting and, at least Abdallah was interested in some of them. For example he was very excited to see Big Ben and to ride on the double decker buses and I was pleasantly surprised when he took interest in Westminster Abbey and House of Parliament. Of course, with such magnificent architecture, who wouldn’t, right? (I guess that’s what happens when you home school) ;)

We took a very early flight to go from London to Tel Aviv, via Zurich. We got to Tel Aviv in one piece and then proceeded to the immigration lines where we were stopped and were questioned. I was held for two hours, but more on that later……