For the sake of time and bandwidth, I have to split a post – which would normally be a single entry under normal circumstances – into many.
After a long solo trip through the Middle East and the Balkans, taking me to Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Serbia, I finally began the third part of my world travel – I left Bulgaria for London to meet my friend Paul.
London…is a massive city. It makes the Chicago CTA look like a toy train set under the Christmas tree. The web of subways and trains snakes its way throughout Greater London. While the city itself lack an iconic skyline like New York or San Francisco, the city is littered with innumerable monuments, relics, and globally recognized buildings that all play a role in the British psyche.
Anyway, Paul and I flew into separate airports – Heathrow from Boston for him and Gatwick from Sofia, Bulgaria for me – but we managed to meet each other on the same Tube train to our hotel. We spent the day seeing some of the more famous London sites, like Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey. London is an incredibly dynamic city, a melting pot for the world. Women completely covered in the Islamic burka buy clothing from an Indian shopkeeper while chatting with a Singaporean businesswomen on the street. Every corner reminds you of this multiculturalism, whether it be a group of Chinese schoolchildren crossing an intersection or the United Bank of Qatar.
The pictures do a better job showing the day…

Lunch at a Turkish restaraunt called Sofa. I got the lunch special, 9 little dishes of their best items.
Great start on the 2nd leg of your world journey…wish I was there!