A leisurely start to the day was essential. The overnight flight from Moshi, to Dar es Salaam, to Amsterdam, and finally London, combined with a weary day and late night movie combined for a definite “sleep in”.
London is like an old pair of shoes that waits, hidden, in the back of your closet. Ten years ago you loved them, so still hang on, and when you actually put them on they are familiar but still a little overstretched. The previous attraction lingers and keeps me from crossing London completely off of a European trip, but the luster has long gone.
The streets are packed like any other major international center and that seems to exacerbate the weakness of the USD by inflating prices well beyond ordinary to absurd.
My mission for the day is to find the Apple Store on Regent Street. This is quite a stroll from King’s Cross and the crowding is exceptional here. The good news is that the Apple Store is easily found after wading through the human currents to cross the street.
The issue with my Macbook is that the keyboard deck has cracked. With two days left on the annual warranty, I decide to bite the bullet and invest the $250 for another two years of “bumper to bumper” coverage. The estimate for a post warranty deck replacement was over $300, so I took the $50 discount and two year bonus warranty.
The Apple store was an absolute zoo! With the release of the new “Touch Ipod” the store was flooded with buyers and gawkers.
The staff were swamped, but I did manage to catch the saving eye of one of the floor representatives who handed me off to a Mac Genius. Rob just happened to be an American, from Texas, who took great pity on my predicament of needing a fix from the only Apple store accessible in Europe and a flight booked for Monday morning.
He promised a “same day” fix if I could bring in my computer by 5:00pm. The race was now “on”. I left the store, jumped in the tube back to King’s Cross, ...
(I looked but couldn't find the platform to "Hogwarts" in the station.)
... grabbed my computer and raced back to the store to find no Rob in sight.
A half hour wait in line discovered that he was off to lunch, so another slightly less enthusiastic Mac Genius pitched in and asked me to return in an hour. One hour! Amazing!
(The domed building is the Apple Store.)
Aside from the shear size of this Apple store, it is easily the best store I’ve ever seen. There is even a theatre on the second floor where instructors give free tutorials on every piece of software in the ilife product bundle. It was fascinating to just sit and watch as about fifty other owners practiced with the instruction in real time.
Incredibly, the keyboard and deck replacement took only 45 minutes. My machine looked like new, reinforcing the investment decision.
With an hour to kill before meeting Fiona, I headed to Borders to pick up “How to Talk to a Widower” by Jonathan Tropper.
(Walking down the street was "kind of" like being at home, just turn right after the Gap and Baby Gap stores.)
The title doesn’t hint to a book with comic fringes but it was well recommended, so I picked it up for read along the way. Reading a couple of chapters at Piccadilly Circus, waiting for Fiona’s train to arrive, this book captured me almost immediately. It was one of those time paradox moments where, lost in the book, everything else blurred into peripheral shapes in motion while my focus was still and focused.
Dinner was an incredible vegetarian experience. Somehow, in the cramped London environment it didn’t’ seem appropriate to take pictures. But, on a related but different point, eating after leaving Africa seems to be a common ailment among western travelers. The appetite just isn’t there as the gastric flora changes. (Nothing is really unpleasant, just an appetite malaise, as the microbe forces fight for supremacy or eventually decide to just “play nice”.)
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