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Mm, right, writeup time, then.
We managed to drive straight past the road to Naath's *again* (we get lost every time) but this time we managed to become found ourselves. Picked up Naath, who had two large bags - one of which was entirely filled with food. Glad to see someone had their priorities right in packing :-).
We were entertained that my dad bought a ticket at the carpark given that he was only going to be out of the car a minute or so to make sure we were heading in roughly the right direction, but he quite rightly claimed that it'd be just his luck to be parked in the only carpark that has a grumpy warden employed on a Sunday. So we got our tube tickets, and embarked on our adventure.
The tube ride in was pretty uneventful; indeed, we managed to get off at the right station every time we used the Tube. I can't remember the arrangements of escalators at every stop, so I'll just cover that subject here - I managed to trip at the top of escalators and have to be caught by Naath twice, and I slipped but caught myself a couple of times. Escalators don't like me. I think it's the same reason I can't ice-skate or roller-skate - as soon as one of my feet starts moving while still being on the ground, and the other one isn't, I go into panic mode and fall over, or almost do, anyhow.
The hotel thankfully didn't prove difficult to find, after we finally agreed on which direction to turn out of the station, with some help from Multimap printouts. The whole street was Hotelville, although ours was the poshest :-). We couldn't check in (too early) but we got to dump our luggage in the luggage room (which at that point was very full). There was a little consternation over not being able to understand a word the person at the concierge desk said when trying to direct us to the room, and the fact the guy only tagged my bag and just put it on top of Naath's, but it all seemed to be okay, so we got out of there 'cos the school parties were arriving in force.
Navigated the Tube again to Waterloo (after threatening to do very nasty things to Naath if she started singing Abba (she asked me to make sure she didn't start singing, y'see)). Some of it was along the still-pretty-new-and-shiny Jubilee Line, which has pretty displays showing what the next station is. Had a good laugh at the 'International Station' stuff due to the Eurostar, and eventually found our way up above ground through the bewildering maze of exits. Thankfully Naath vaguely knew where she was going, because I was instantly lost (the Multimap printout wasn't very detailed in the area directly around the station, and of course we'd chosen a really obscure exit).
We knew that the building we were looking for was 'near' the IMAX cinema, but the roads around there were rather complicated. Thankfully there were quite a few King's College buildings, so we found one which we weren't looking for and it had a nice map on it showing us where we wanted to be. Eventually, we even managed to work out how to get there. Naturally, we were ridiculously early at this point - we had over an hour to kill still. So we went down to have a look around the IMAX cinema, which looked extremely boring - everything showing was relying on the 'ooh, it's 3D!' effect.
Down *is* accurate, btw; the entrance to the IMAX cinema is below road level, so we had to thread our way through the subways. Subways like the Tube are okay, but subways in London *depress* me. It's not the fault of the subways - they had this nice blue-painted one, with twinky blue lights - it's the homeless people. I feel all guilty and not-wanting-to-do-anything at the same time, it makes me feel down but it doesn't motivate me to help people, it just makes me scared and non-specifically guilty about all the stuff I throw away.
I think I'll clear this subject up right now, and get on with the regular scheduled happiness. Later, when we were eating lunch, I was trying to stop Naath sitting on the ground, because I thought it made her look too much like them. (The homeless people aren't badly dressed, suprisingly.) And I was definately racist; when I was walking along being-paranoid-about-pickpockets because of all the warning signs around, a black person would count for a lot more avoidance than a white one, although tobefair I was mainly doing it on age and 'appearence' (i.e. what bags were being carried, hairstyle, jewellry) and it just happened to be that blacks failed more often on the critrea. But mainly I just avoided anyone being directly behind me. (I think Naath got a bit annoyed at times 'cos I'd cut in front of her to avoid ppl being behind me too close.) It was also 'cos I was wearing a backpack with my Psion in, which is kinda *very* valuable.
Anyway, we wandered around the IMAX cinema and adjoining subways for a bit, and then we spotted the way to the National Theatre, so we set out in that direction for lack of anything else to do. (Plus, it was raining quite bad, and too windy for umbrellas too, not that I had one, and there was a covered bit we could walk under after a while.) We finally found which way the entrance was (you had to go up some steps and around on top of the buildings) but it was closed, naturally. So we stood around under the covered bit to eat lunch out of the big bag Naath had brought, 'cos of raininess.
Eventually we decided it was about time to start back, but due to not getting-entirely-lost (although at some stage during all these subway steps I managed to almost fall down a set even though I don't have the escalator effect to blame - they were slippery 'cos of being wet tho, so I blamed my trainers this time for not having decent enough grips) we made pretty good time. We wandered into the building, and there was a sign outside saying 'physics in perspective, this way' which we found encouraging, but inside there was just this sign with directions on (in the same handwriting, which should have clued us in) which didn't say who it was for, so after looking at the (black) guards in the security office and deciding no, neither of us had the courage to speak to them, we went off in the direction 'reception' was signposted in.
Well, we found everything else on that signpost on the floor it took us to, but nothing answering to the description 'reception'. We came downstairs again, determined that we'd actually speak to the security-office people this time, only to find them gone. (At this point, I had a look in my bag and worked out I didn't actually have the tickets - I'd left them in the bag I left at the hotel. Thankfully, they weren't organised enough for this to be a problem.)So we followed the instructions on the paper, and sure enough, we found the Physics in Perspective organisers, and the lecture theatre we were meant to be in. Being my naturally cautious self, I made sure we took seats a few rows back from the front, and in the middle of a row, so that we weren't directly next to any aisles.
My instincts paid off, as we were, uh, 'treated' to some actor pretending to be Issac Newton, age 300-or-so. His 'humour' extended to: saying modern words in a stupid voice; embarrassing people from the audience; telling patently untrue 'anecdotes'; prancing around like a complete idiot; and talking in a voice about ten times louder than necessary. Oh, and we had to do that idiotic 'clap harder, he's a bit deaf' thingamy at the start. I wrote a whole set of sarcastic notes in my Psion, but I'm too hassled to connect it up again atm. I think it was one of those 'icebreaker' things which only succeed in making people like me think 'oh no, what have I let myself in for?'. Naath appeared to find it entertaing, tho.
After that, there were 'refreshments', otherwise known as a scrum for a few biscuits and some juice (there *were* bottles of water but they disappeared very quickly). I fought my way through to get a look at what was on offer, but was rather disappointed. (They were just generic individual-packet biscuits.) Drank some of Naath's water from the food bag instead of trying some of the Ribena cartons (they didn't have the light-blackberry one that I used to like). There were some posters up about courses in Physics, and some 3rd-yr project posters, but the one I had time to read all of said very little, and then we were herded back in.
The next lecture was, thankfully, sensible. It was on astronomy in general and star formation in particular, and there were lots of pretty pictures, although the person (female) doing the lecture was a little panicked at the start when the slide equipment decided to play up. She admitted that astronomy was pointless without the pretty pictures. It was quite an entertaining lecture tho, and nicely detailed, like how they model the densities in a cloud of interstellar gas, and a simulation that was run which matched real, observed star formation very well, and the difficulties with observing star formation directly. Pretty, and interesting, but not something I'd like to do for a living, I don't think.
I was going to take a closer look at the posters, but we just piled out of the hall and straight off back to the tube station. We'd already decided we were going to have pizza at a place we'd spotted on the way to the hotel, and it was, well, pizza. (Naath decided to have a pasta-ish thing. It looked scary and left orange grease.) And it was £5.50, which we didn't think was majorly too expensive but it was more than we really wanted to pay for so-so food.
Then we went back to the hotel and crashed. We watched bad TV, including The Increadible Hulk Returns, and I read Naath's Sandman book (highly entertaining, especially when Desire was baiting the other Endless). We watched more bad TV, including Martial Law, and began to watch a Jackie Chan movie, but just switched it off and went to sleep after a bit.
Phew, that was far too detailed - I'm running out of time to do the rest of the time! (I always write these in way too much detail, and every little thing that I miss annoys me.)
We managed to drive straight past the road to Naath's *again* (we get lost every time) but this time we managed to become found ourselves. Picked up Naath, who had two large bags - one of which was entirely filled with food. Glad to see someone had their priorities right in packing :-).
We were entertained that my dad bought a ticket at the carpark given that he was only going to be out of the car a minute or so to make sure we were heading in roughly the right direction, but he quite rightly claimed that it'd be just his luck to be parked in the only carpark that has a grumpy warden employed on a Sunday. So we got our tube tickets, and embarked on our adventure.
The tube ride in was pretty uneventful; indeed, we managed to get off at the right station every time we used the Tube. I can't remember the arrangements of escalators at every stop, so I'll just cover that subject here - I managed to trip at the top of escalators and have to be caught by Naath twice, and I slipped but caught myself a couple of times. Escalators don't like me. I think it's the same reason I can't ice-skate or roller-skate - as soon as one of my feet starts moving while still being on the ground, and the other one isn't, I go into panic mode and fall over, or almost do, anyhow.
The hotel thankfully didn't prove difficult to find, after we finally agreed on which direction to turn out of the station, with some help from Multimap printouts. The whole street was Hotelville, although ours was the poshest :-). We couldn't check in (too early) but we got to dump our luggage in the luggage room (which at that point was very full). There was a little consternation over not being able to understand a word the person at the concierge desk said when trying to direct us to the room, and the fact the guy only tagged my bag and just put it on top of Naath's, but it all seemed to be okay, so we got out of there 'cos the school parties were arriving in force.
Navigated the Tube again to Waterloo (after threatening to do very nasty things to Naath if she started singing Abba (she asked me to make sure she didn't start singing, y'see)). Some of it was along the still-pretty-new-and-shiny Jubilee Line, which has pretty displays showing what the next station is. Had a good laugh at the 'International Station' stuff due to the Eurostar, and eventually found our way up above ground through the bewildering maze of exits. Thankfully Naath vaguely knew where she was going, because I was instantly lost (the Multimap printout wasn't very detailed in the area directly around the station, and of course we'd chosen a really obscure exit).
We knew that the building we were looking for was 'near' the IMAX cinema, but the roads around there were rather complicated. Thankfully there were quite a few King's College buildings, so we found one which we weren't looking for and it had a nice map on it showing us where we wanted to be. Eventually, we even managed to work out how to get there. Naturally, we were ridiculously early at this point - we had over an hour to kill still. So we went down to have a look around the IMAX cinema, which looked extremely boring - everything showing was relying on the 'ooh, it's 3D!' effect.
Down *is* accurate, btw; the entrance to the IMAX cinema is below road level, so we had to thread our way through the subways. Subways like the Tube are okay, but subways in London *depress* me. It's not the fault of the subways - they had this nice blue-painted one, with twinky blue lights - it's the homeless people. I feel all guilty and not-wanting-to-do-anything at the same time, it makes me feel down but it doesn't motivate me to help people, it just makes me scared and non-specifically guilty about all the stuff I throw away.
I think I'll clear this subject up right now, and get on with the regular scheduled happiness. Later, when we were eating lunch, I was trying to stop Naath sitting on the ground, because I thought it made her look too much like them. (The homeless people aren't badly dressed, suprisingly.) And I was definately racist; when I was walking along being-paranoid-about-pickpockets because of all the warning signs around, a black person would count for a lot more avoidance than a white one, although tobefair I was mainly doing it on age and 'appearence' (i.e. what bags were being carried, hairstyle, jewellry) and it just happened to be that blacks failed more often on the critrea. But mainly I just avoided anyone being directly behind me. (I think Naath got a bit annoyed at times 'cos I'd cut in front of her to avoid ppl being behind me too close.) It was also 'cos I was wearing a backpack with my Psion in, which is kinda *very* valuable.
Anyway, we wandered around the IMAX cinema and adjoining subways for a bit, and then we spotted the way to the National Theatre, so we set out in that direction for lack of anything else to do. (Plus, it was raining quite bad, and too windy for umbrellas too, not that I had one, and there was a covered bit we could walk under after a while.) We finally found which way the entrance was (you had to go up some steps and around on top of the buildings) but it was closed, naturally. So we stood around under the covered bit to eat lunch out of the big bag Naath had brought, 'cos of raininess.
Eventually we decided it was about time to start back, but due to not getting-entirely-lost (although at some stage during all these subway steps I managed to almost fall down a set even though I don't have the escalator effect to blame - they were slippery 'cos of being wet tho, so I blamed my trainers this time for not having decent enough grips) we made pretty good time. We wandered into the building, and there was a sign outside saying 'physics in perspective, this way' which we found encouraging, but inside there was just this sign with directions on (in the same handwriting, which should have clued us in) which didn't say who it was for, so after looking at the (black) guards in the security office and deciding no, neither of us had the courage to speak to them, we went off in the direction 'reception' was signposted in.
Well, we found everything else on that signpost on the floor it took us to, but nothing answering to the description 'reception'. We came downstairs again, determined that we'd actually speak to the security-office people this time, only to find them gone. (At this point, I had a look in my bag and worked out I didn't actually have the tickets - I'd left them in the bag I left at the hotel. Thankfully, they weren't organised enough for this to be a problem.)So we followed the instructions on the paper, and sure enough, we found the Physics in Perspective organisers, and the lecture theatre we were meant to be in. Being my naturally cautious self, I made sure we took seats a few rows back from the front, and in the middle of a row, so that we weren't directly next to any aisles.
My instincts paid off, as we were, uh, 'treated' to some actor pretending to be Issac Newton, age 300-or-so. His 'humour' extended to: saying modern words in a stupid voice; embarrassing people from the audience; telling patently untrue 'anecdotes'; prancing around like a complete idiot; and talking in a voice about ten times louder than necessary. Oh, and we had to do that idiotic 'clap harder, he's a bit deaf' thingamy at the start. I wrote a whole set of sarcastic notes in my Psion, but I'm too hassled to connect it up again atm. I think it was one of those 'icebreaker' things which only succeed in making people like me think 'oh no, what have I let myself in for?'. Naath appeared to find it entertaing, tho.
After that, there were 'refreshments', otherwise known as a scrum for a few biscuits and some juice (there *were* bottles of water but they disappeared very quickly). I fought my way through to get a look at what was on offer, but was rather disappointed. (They were just generic individual-packet biscuits.) Drank some of Naath's water from the food bag instead of trying some of the Ribena cartons (they didn't have the light-blackberry one that I used to like). There were some posters up about courses in Physics, and some 3rd-yr project posters, but the one I had time to read all of said very little, and then we were herded back in.
The next lecture was, thankfully, sensible. It was on astronomy in general and star formation in particular, and there were lots of pretty pictures, although the person (female) doing the lecture was a little panicked at the start when the slide equipment decided to play up. She admitted that astronomy was pointless without the pretty pictures. It was quite an entertaining lecture tho, and nicely detailed, like how they model the densities in a cloud of interstellar gas, and a simulation that was run which matched real, observed star formation very well, and the difficulties with observing star formation directly. Pretty, and interesting, but not something I'd like to do for a living, I don't think.
I was going to take a closer look at the posters, but we just piled out of the hall and straight off back to the tube station. We'd already decided we were going to have pizza at a place we'd spotted on the way to the hotel, and it was, well, pizza. (Naath decided to have a pasta-ish thing. It looked scary and left orange grease.) And it was £5.50, which we didn't think was majorly too expensive but it was more than we really wanted to pay for so-so food.
Then we went back to the hotel and crashed. We watched bad TV, including The Increadible Hulk Returns, and I read Naath's Sandman book (highly entertaining, especially when Desire was baiting the other Endless). We watched more bad TV, including Martial Law, and began to watch a Jackie Chan movie, but just switched it off and went to sleep after a bit.
Phew, that was far too detailed - I'm running out of time to do the rest of the time! (I always write these in way too much detail, and every little thing that I miss annoys me.)
