Tuesday EuroBlogging: London

Interesting times in London these days, as you can imagine. I was stopped by a British Transit Police officer from taking video of Victoria Station's fascinating architecture, but for the most part, we managed to narrowly skirt all the real excitement. Safely in our hotel room, we saw on TV that one of the terminals at Heathrow was being evacuated because of a suspicious package, after we'd arrived there without incident earlier in the morning, and that someone had been stabbed outside Victoria Station about a half an hour before we came through there. We had fish and chips (and a couple of pints) in a pub off Leicester square, where -- again, as we found out later -- earlier in the day, the new Harry Potter movie had made its European debut.

This trip hasn't done anything so far to diminish my hatred for commercial air travel. I paid almost $1,700 so that the two of us could be shoehorned into one working and one broken seat (a different pair of seats than I meticulously chose when I booked the flight months ago) on an Air France Airbus 340 -- a glorified cattle car with wings -- and endure service that ranged from perfunctory to indifferent to rude. Never mind that it was an overnight flight, and not being able to sleep on the plane basically burned part of a precious day of a short stay in London, as we were forced to regroup before doing anything.

A well-executed, accessible, and efficient public transit system is a measure of how much respect a nation or city has for its citizens. In America, we not only lack that respect, but we have insult added to injury by having the most wasteful and expensive transit system possible -- individual private vehicle ownership -- forced on us, for the profit of the automobile and oil industries and others whose political clout prevents the development of decent transit options.

But, with the air travel over (until it's time to come home), this will be a car-free, train-intensive trip. With some help from information desk, I got all set up on their payment system, and we whisked our way from Heathrow and around town on the Tube (London's subway system). The longest we waited for a train all day was about 90 seconds.

Between the London Tube, Eurostar, the German rail system, the panoramic scenic trains in the Swiss Alps, and the overnight sleeper train to Amsterdam, we're going to sample some well-thought-out, well-run, working transportation systems (and visit some interesting places as a fringe benefit), and that will be a real vacation.

Mind the gap as you alight!