Europe 2023, August 14th

Last run at Hyde Park for now. Had some light rain but it wasn't cold, then back for the same hotel breakfast menu.

Had to take the underground over to London Euston, and was about an hour early for the intercity train. The waiting area was full of people staring up at the departure board waiting for their platform numbers to be announced, but had nowhere to sit. In most cases the update would come through 5-10 minutes beforehand, then there would be a mad rush to the platform.

The train was delayed by about 10 minutes then spent another 10 minutes at Northampton not moving, but still arrived almost on time. The final stop was at Birmingham New Street which left about a one kilometre walk to the hotel at Snow Hill. I was going to drop off my luggage at 2pm but the room was ready early.

I went back in to the city centre to walk around, but found an incredibly confusing layout of streets going in all different directions, nearly worse than Sydney. It also didn't help having various shopping centres with irregular shapes and many exits too. I spent a long time going around in circles before coming back to the Bullring and Grand Central shops and finally finding somewhere for lunch.

Afterwards walked out to the west side of the city, past Victoria Square and found an impressive library building that looked a bit like lego. The library building also includes lookouts on two different levels, and an outdoor garden on a third, much better than our state libraries I think.

Came across quite a few signs around the city that were still celebrating the 2022 Commonwealth Games, which was good timing with the Victoria (not Melbourne) event just being cancelled. Then back to the city centre, stopped in at a Sports Direct store and just got a few pairs of socks. The plan is to slowly accumulate more clothes and have to do less laundry, rather than carry a heavy, packed suitcase from day one - not that socks weigh much.

Just out of interest I noted the Nike Vaporfly 3 was being sold for 235 pounds (460 dollars) compared to about 330 dollars full price at Rebel in Australia. Similarly the price of unleaded fuel is around 1.50 pounds (3 dollars). The exchange rate had been around 0.60 last year, the best in a long while, but now it's close to 10 year lows at 0.50.