Day 15 - Eurostar and Swiss Cottage

Breakfast #1 was a rushed affair on our Paris-London transition day.

We hustled downstairs to savor our last baguette sticks, and fondly bid the guidebook loaner shelf goodbye.

Goodbye good 'ol spiral staircase...

...that left us breathless...

...for five stories.

Keeping with tradition, after a bit of strolling around looking for casket-but-not-caskets, we stopped for a quick Breakfast #2, using up most of our remaning Euro.

And I stopped to document what I thought was the most brilliant on-the-go offering I'd seen in a long time - the three-headed sandwich. We'd had one at the CDG station, before catching the train into Paris. It was the perfect bite-of-everything snack for the indecisive.

We managed to get to Gare du Nord and roll back and forth between wrong platforms/wrong lines long enough to just miss the Eurostar to London. While taking the train across the bridge between Sweden and Denmark had been as easy-breezy as getting on the London underground, the check-in process for this cross-chunnel train was very similar to airport check-in - queries from immigration, the scanning of luggage, etc. The ladies at the counter suffered my non-French request to rebook for the next train, and we sat and drank coffee till it was time to run upstairs and check in.

Check-in and boarding went smoothly this time, and soon we were speeding through some French countryside. It's sort of hard to see in this picture, but I swear the underbellies of the clouds just outside of Paris were bluer than anything I've ever seen in the U.S.

Sadly (or maybe gladly) we weren't able to see what was floating around in the chunnel. We popped up in England and made it into St. Pancras station in no time.

Straight to Swiss Cottage - an area north of Regent's Park, nearish Camden - for a night of hostel. We could tell what the place was about when we rolled up the driveway past a bus of Swedish teenagers and into reception, where bad euro dance music was pumping. For some reason, the guy at the desk reminded me of salespeople that I've been accosted by on my first Gold's/24 Hr/LA Fitness gym visit. Maybe it was the polo shirt. Maybe it was the way he expertly walked us through the nth generation xerox of hostel proceedures, circling key words as he read off items. I think his collar was popped, even!

We'd booked a double room, ensuite. It was in the basement, the carpet was damp, and there was mold on the wall. I imagined our lungs filling up with flakes of mold.

We ran off for some food and ended up around the corner at a Thai restaurant where we were the 3rd and 4th customers in the room. The man and the lady working the front were really nice - they gave us a free pot of tea, and when I asked the waitress what there was to do in Swiss Cottage, she laughed and said, "Nothing." I think she felt slightly sorry for us.

There was some time between dinner and going out to meet Gareth & Co. We used it to switch rooms. Because it was slow, they assigned an entire room to just the two of us. Eight bunks were all ours! We climbed up and down ladders, checked out the view, and freshened up before heading out for some London nightlife.

Here's the hostel from the outside as we left to meet the dudes at the Old Street tube stop. I ended up hastily jumping onto a train going in the wrong direction and getting us to the meeting place via the scenic route and u-turns.

Gareth was a ball of energy when we finally got to the station. He walked and talked us to the bar so fast, I hardly noticed where we were going. We all agreed it felt like months since we'd been marching around the streets of Stockholm.

It was good to see the guys again. Gilles Peterson played some records. This little weekly event at a very Japanese sushi bar/jazz club cost about three quid!

After some drinking, some swaying, and a little bit of bootie-shaking, it was time to figure out the night bus home. Our fearless guides walked us around in search of our bus, and just as Gareth sent Jonas around the corner to see if he couldn't find it, one pulled up a little behind us and we jumped on, without even getting to properly say goodnight or goodbye to Jonas! We got off to transfer lines in Camden somewhere, and I think we must've shivered out in the cold for more than an hour. Of course, just as I was about to try and buy an A to Z and start walking back to the hostel, our night bus showed. We found some good Indian take-away on the walk from the station, and snacked it in the hostel common room while watching some BBC show on personal space, finally passing out at 3 or 4 a.m.