On Monday evening, I boarded a flight from RDU. Some seven hours later, I deplaned on Tuesday morning at LHR. I could blame the small children around me on the plane for my inability to sleep during the flight, but that would be disingenuous given my own history of not sleeping on airplanes. We took the underground into the city and made our way to our lodgings a little before 9 AM. I had harbored some ideas of sleeping for a couple of hours during the late morning, but our room wasn’t ready yet so those notions were scuppered. Instead, we decided to push through the day and not sleep until nightfall. This meant that we walked to stay awake. A lot. Miles and miles with only vague directional goals. We stopped and sat on benches in multiple parks. We ambled down some of the twisty streets in the British capital. We struggled to adjust to which way we needed to look before crossing the street (even if there are painted instructions at nearly every intersection).

We went to the British Museum in the early afternoon since it’s close to where we are staying. I even listened to a nearly four hour podcast about ancient Egypt on the flight as a way to kill the time so I listened to a lot of stories about pyramid building as I knew that there were rooms of Egyptian artifacts in the museum. The timing of the visit might not have been the smartest choice in the struggle to stay awake. Beyond the Rosetta Stone, very few of the items on display were enough to hold my attention. The museum was a good idea, but was the wrong choice for a day like yesterday when extra stimulation was needed.

We did a few of the stereotypical British things that I cannot do where I live currently but could when I lived in DC, namely eat breakfast at Pret-a-Manger and eat lunch at Nando’s. I feel obliged to say that this was the worst Nando’s experience I’ve had of the four countries where I’ve had the peri-peri chicken, which was a disappointing surprise given its cult status in the UK. That said, I still ate all of it. I wasn’t about to let it go to waste.

After the museum, we returned to our lodgings and handled work matters sufficiently to survive the day and create more time during which we could recover and come back to them today. Then we finished the day with a fancier dinner, complete with dessert as a reward for staying awake, at a restaurant near the top of one of the towers in Central London. From the terrace just above it, we overlooked Tower Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral and looked across the river at the Shard as the sun began to set and drenched the city in golden yellow. London is not as pretty from above as a city like Paris or Vienna, but its oddly angular buildings do still have a certain visual appeal.

On a related note, the weather has been glorious—cooler than it is at home currently, sunny, little to no humidity, and dry. If the weather were like this all of the time, the British would have to collectively find something else to complain about. Since the word “if” is doing so much work in that sentence, though, I don’t expect the British humor to change any time soon.