Let me now introduce my travel companions.

Ian

Coryndon

Brandon

We stayed the night in London en route to Hyderabad, which offered us some fun opportunities. We intended to go into town and find a pub with good beer and bar food. Coryndon made the possibly wise decision to stay in at the Yotel inside Heathrow Airport, where we had cabins for the night (more on that later) and revise our workshop materials while he had Wi-Fi. We had to pick up Ian’s bag at baggage claim and later check it again to get it to Hyderabad. After that and getting through customs and making our way to the Yotel to check in, which was a surprisingly time-consuming trip, we were ready to head out into town around 9:30 pm.

We took the tube to Piccadilly Circus (I am curious how it got that name*) and wandered around. The ride took forty-something minutes. Coryndon had advised us that the pubs close early on Sundays. We arrived hungry at 10:30 in an area reminiscent of Times Square.

Here, all the pubs stopped serving food at 10 pm. Some were closing entirely at the time we entered. I think we got a fair sampling of the pubs because we walked into at least seven in order to discover that we had missed our opportunity with each of them. There were plenty of McDonald’s and TGI Friday’s locations around, but we were trying to avoid resorting to that. We walked through the theatre district and were relieved to find a 24-hour restaurant in a district called Soho, which our tour guide claimed had gotten its name because it used to be the siting of many shops that sold goods for Small Offices and Home Offices, although Wikipedia cites a contradictory reason for the origin of the name.

After observing our waiter’s impeccable grooming and listening to a few conversations, we realized that we were probably the only three straight men in the place. Tables were packed close, and the place had a communal feel to it. A young woman from a boisterous group that had left earlier came back and asked if she had left something behind. The waiter handed her a pack of cigarettes that she had left on the table. Another waitress laughed and made a joke with her and wiped off a table with a sigh and a smile after the woman left again. It was the kind of place where people seemed to come for the social interaction as much for the food and drink. It made our American ways of going to a restaurant and only interacting with the friends with whom we came while shutting off all other people seem silly.

A couple of chatty young guys sat next to us. They seemed approachable enough, so we struck up a conversation which ranged from CRM (constituent relationship management) software to the animal names that represented various gay male body types (I learned about the bear, wolf, and otter) to the practice of vajazzling to the style of pubic hair we preferred on our partners (none of us could avoid answering this). Brandon was trying his best to make them as uncomfortable as one of them seemed to be trying to make us. These fellows were both Americans. One, named Chris, had been living in London for a bit. The other, Joey, was visiting for a few days before he went to a sex toy trade show in Paris for work. I tried to capture his unmatched flamboyance on video, but he got camera shy every time.

Joey was planning on going to some more clubs, potentially meeting up with someone he had encountered earlier and trying unabashedly to get laid. Chris was trying to gently reign Joey in for most of the time we saw the two of them. We walked around for a bit, and Joey decided to head back to Chris’s flat while Chris gave us a nickel tour of the immediate area.

Our nickel tour included Trafalgar Square

and Big Ben, which Brandon had earlier expressed interest in seeing because the only time he had seen it was a disappointing view from a bus.

In case you missed it, it’s the floating illuminated clock face in the distance. Needless to say, Brandon was also disappointed about this view. He expected the entire tower to be lit up.

We saw the London Eye from across the Thames.

Brandon tried to true the wheel.

And since it was 12:45 am at this point and the tube was no longer running, Chris helped us find a bus back to Heathrow airport. We then had to take a taxi from terminal 5 to terminal 4 since no other transit was operating at that time and more than one airport employee told us that it’s not walkable at all. I found it hard to believe but later believed it – we would have most likely gotten lost at 3 am.

We all could have done without the long ride back, and it might have been nice to not have spent about one third of the cash I brought for the entire trip, but otherwise, it was exactly the authentic adventure I was seeking.

* In this context, a circus, from the Latin word meaning “circle”, is a round open space at a street junction. ^[1]