To London

On Monday, September 5th, we had breakfast with Ivana, who wasn’t leaving until 11:00, then went out for a last look at Ljubljana. We went to the market, where we bought some cheese and some sandwiches, for the flight. Then we had an early lunch (good) right at the fish market, at Ribca, known as Ljubljana’s best seafood restaurant.

We had ordered the airport shuttle for 1:30, but ended up with a taxi all to ourselves. EasyJet check-in was uneventful, and eventually, we were off to England.

We arrived at Stansted around 5:30, collected our luggage, and did not get pounds from an ATM. We had around thirty pounds left over from the last time we were in the U.K., and all the ATMs were Moneycorp, the exchange bureau that has the contract for Stansted. We already had tickets for the Stansted Express, so we got on the train and rode it to the end of the line, Liverpool Street Station. We found the Underground station and there bought two Oyster cards, paying five pounds apiece as a deposit and putting fifteen pounds apiece on for use. Two days later, we added another fifteen, but we ended up getting more than nine of it back, along with the deposit, when we turned the cards in at the Heathrow Underground station. What is an Oyster card? It’s a stored-value transit card that allowed us to use the Underground or buses at a substantial discount, without having to buy tickets. You just slapped the card on the reader at the turnstiles when entering and leaving the “Tube.”

We took the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road, and there changed for the Northern Line. Most tube line transfers involve going up and down stairs, and this was no exception to the rule. As I was carrying my suitcase down a flight of stairs, Mary Joy was apparently having difficulty getting hers down, behind me. A British woman, tall and strongly built, just picked up her suitcase for her and carried it down! “I saw you were have trouble,” she said, and continued on her way. How very considerate!

We caught the train and got off at Goodge Street. We walked the four or five blocks from there to the Arosfa Hotel, one of a line of hotels in townhouses along the west side of the street. We had stayed there before, in 2011, and liked it. It is very pleasant, quiet (with two sets of windows working very well to shut out the street noise), has a very good breakfast and is well located, in Bloomsbury, a few blocks from the British Museum. The only negative was that Room 12 was one of the smallest hotel rooms we’ve ever had, even smaller than the room at the Legend in Paris. But it worked.

We decided to go out to a well-reviewed pizza place on Tottenham Court Road. Franco Manca did indeed make very good pizza, and the atmosphere, even out at a table on the street, was pleasant. And the bill ended up being less than my thirty pounds!