This morning I ran a little late getting out of the hostel, so I had to sprint with all my luggage to make it to the train station in time. The train was fine but pretty similar to an Amtrak aside from the fact that we weren't delayed horribly (it actually left a minute early). The top speed once you cross into England is 200km/h, which is a little bit faster than Amtrak, but not by much. The ride was nice but actually found the near total lack of forest to be somewhat depressing. England as a county is so completely tamed by humans that it seems nothing else could possible live there. Just mile after mile of empty fields, most of which clearly weren't used for farming and were entirely a waste of space.

Four hours later I checked into my hostel and was reminded a lot of some of the larger chain hostels I'd stayed at in New Zealand, especially in Queenstown. The Scotland hostels were both basically big houses with their rooms converted to dorms, a style I was fond of. The kitchens were usually left more or less intact and a living room or two would serve as common space, essential for meeting new people. This hostel isn't like that at all. It's more of a huge apartment building, with each apartment being a dorm room of 20 or so people in triple-decker bunks. There are at least four floors of this and the economies of scale show in the fancy smartphone based locks on all the rooms. The first floor is also a bar past reception, though once the bar is open you actually have to access it by the neighboring storefront for some reason. The strangest thing here is that there's no kitchen. There's a microwave in the tiny common room, but that obviously won't get me very far. Maybe I'll have to break out the camp stove - I found some fuel for it on the "free" shelf in the last hostel.

After I dropped off my bags I stopped by a Moroccan restaurant just up the road. I had a really nice dish of kofta, haloumi, and chicken with couscous and hummus for about 10 pounds, which I consider a great deal. Afterward, I set out to explore the city. This hostel is maybe 5 minutes walk south of London Bridge, so I walked up that way and wandered around the "City of London" neighborhood. It was overwhelming, if I'm being honest. Nothing made any sense with the layout and I felt as though I never had a feel for where downtown is. There's randomly skyscrapers next to thousand year old monuments in a way that feels very unfamiliar to me. Compared to Paris or Istanbul, London doesn't demarcate its historic districts from its modern financial ones at all. The city I was most expecting to find similarities with was New York, but it feels entirely unlike that. NYC, for as chaotic as it can be, is fundamentally built on reason. The grids are neat and make navigation easy, sure, but even beyond that, the districts group themselves in a logical way. The big buildings are concentrated in the south half of Manhattan, and the rest of the city feeds into that region. If you want more city you go towards that, if you want less you go away. London doesn't seem to have such a clear concentration of buildings and it makes things feel very uncertain. Anyway, I stopped by the Tower of London, which isn't really a tower at all (I thought Big Ben was the tower), but didn't go in since it was kinda expensive. I was happy to see if from the outside though. I stopped by a variety of the little monuments and squares in the area before looping back over the Tower Bridge and grabbing a terrible (but extremely cheap) grocery store sandwich for dinner across the street from the hostel.

My principle concern was that, without a nice common space or kitchen, I wouldn't meet anyone. This was solved by the downstairs bar's "pizza party" that they held for hostel residents. I met a whole bunch of people and spent much of the night with a few of them. We couldn't actually stay out that late since most things closed at midnight, which I found very strange, so I ended up chatting with these two Germans in the hostel lobby pretty late into the night. I was comforted to see that once again, almost everyone I met in the hostel was German. Maybe they haven't made it into Scotland yet, but Operation Sea Lion seems to have been successful down here at least. Unfortunately, these new friends that I made are all running the opposite route I am and going north from here tomorrow. This extremely talkative and much older lady from NYC has trapped me into meeting her for a tour of the neighborhood tomorrow at 9:15. I'm hoping to keep it short. I have a time booked to visit the British museum tomorrow which I'm really looking forward to and may use as an excuse to leave her early. There's a pub crawl tomorrow night that the hostel is putting on, so hopefully I'll meet a new batch of people to spend time with.