Strangers in a Strange Land

Gentle reader, I write to you from my sofa in Palo Alto, having just returned from a 9 day trip to the UK. The trip was unusual in a lot of ways, with a lot of firsts and some strange feelings as we returned to our country of birth for the first time.

Notice I didn't say "home" there, because one of the things which became almost impossible through the trip was to define "home". As one of my friends (an NZ expat) advised me, when you're an expat, the meaning of "home" has to be qualified by a timescale: if we're talking about a timescale of years, "home" is the UK, but on a timescale of days or weeks, home is now Palo Alto. And oddly, when we flew back here yesterday, it did feel something like home. As Helen more succinctly put it, "home is where our bed is!"

In the UK I was lucky enough to stay at the Renaissance St Pancras Hotel, the hotel attached to St Pancras station. It's a really good hotel, and I love the architecture of the building. The folks that own the place are keen to celebrate its heritage:

In some ways, I prefer the St Pancras I remember from the early 90s (a shabby, diesel-stained station, under-used and well past its best), but it's easy to get used to the amenities available there now. The hotel has a pretty decent restaurant in the old Booking Office:

... but I didn't sample the British Cheese:

So carrying on from last week, what was it like to stay in London as a visitor? Most of the changes I noticed were work-related. The new Google office which is being built in King's Cross has made pretty good progress since we left (although it still isn't expected to be ready until 2023). It's also easy to forget just how unbelievably busy Central London is, although it has the infrastructure to cope with the activity, which you can't really say about California. And finally: cherish BBC Breakfast while you can. It's possible that I woke Helen up shouting, "IT'S DAN AND LOU!" on Thursday morning.

Soon it was time to set off on the long journey home; the hotel staff called us a taxi, and there we were, on our way to Heathrow.

We must have gone at most 200 yards when the taxi started making a noise like a steam engine. It turns out this wasn't intentional; we went over a bump, something broke, and the engine started sounding a lot more agricultural than even a black cab should. After a small amount of confusion, our apologetic driver turfed us out and sent us back to Euston Road to hail a cab from the street.

Yes, we'd actually managed to break a London taxi. Another first! Even Steve's very knackered car, which took us to San Francisco airport, managed to survive the journey.

Before long we found another cab and got going again.

Unfortunately the day turned into a further series of minor irritations. We were given seats which weren't together on the plane, and the check-in staff really weren't that excited about helping us. But fortunately there's no problem Google can't solve. Having so many Googlers travelling the world at any one time, particularly between two centres like London and San Francisco, means you're pretty likely to meet a fellow Googler on any plane you happen to be taking. In this case, as I approached my seat and started to talk to the person there about possibly swapping seats with Helen, I happened to notice a very obviously Google laptop. Yep, I was seated next to another Googler, who was only too happy to swap with Helen and put us together on the plane.

Third minor irritation - the at-seat power didn't seem to work, so my laptop battery ran out halfway into the trip, and I couldn't get all my work done. Fortunately it came back on at some point and I could charge it up again.

Helen managed to get some decent sleep on the flight, which was good, because having landed at around 3pm, she had a choir concert to do that very evening, despite crossing 8 timezones and being up for about 24 hours straight. Her choir does 3 concerts on consecutive nights when they perform, the first of which is in a town called Campbell, about 20 miles South of Palo Alto, and if you're going to do one, you have to do them all. She got a cab down to the venue, allowing me to have a snooze before picking her up later on; concert number 2 is in San Francisco later today.

And so it was that we got to sleep in our own bed again - if home really is where your bed is, we're home for now. Next week: Thanksgiving!