In August 2008 me and my team went to Lon­don for a Web Ana­lyt­ics train­ing. Dur­ing that time we had much fun, got really good insight in the lat­est wa tech­nol­ogy and I also the the oppor­tu­nity to take some pic­tures of Lon­don. This one I like best.

Stansted is as far away from Lon­don as Lübeck is from Ham­burg. It’s a shame that it’s called London-Stansted as you might think it’s just another air­port near Lon­don. Instead you have to take a bus or the Stansted Express to Lon­don. That’ll add another £24 for an open return ticket (valid for one month to Lon­don and back to Stansted, can also be bought dur­ing the flight for £22) or £13.90 for a cheap day return ticket (valid only one day) for the Stansted Express to your fare. The guy sell­ing me the tick­ets was nice enough to sell me the open return ticket instead of the cheap day return ticket, thus dou­bling the price on my credit-card bill. So watch out what they’re doing when you buy your tickets.

We arrived at Liv­er­pool Street Sta­tion at 12 o’clock. I reserved a table for lunch at the Fif­teen for 2 o’clock. The Fif­teen is located near Old Street Sta­tion, just two sta­tions away from Liv­er­pool Street Sta­tion, so we had plenty of time and decided to head right south to the River Thames and the Lon­don Tower. Just then, we heard the bad news: No tube today. The whole tube staff was on strike the one day we where in Lon­don. Thanks a lot guys!

Nev­er­the­less we headed south by feet and had a very nice walk through the city to the Lon­don Tower and the Tower Bridge. I really like the bridge’s archi­tec­ture and it’s impres­sive bas­cule mech­a­nism. If you ever spend some time in Lon­don, you should take the guided tour and view it.

Have lunch at the Fif­teen…

We started our tour early in the morn­ing on wednes­day going to Lübeck Blankensee Air­port (LBC). Wow! What an air­port! I’ve never seen such a small air­port in the mid­dle of nowhere.

We arrived there at about seven o’clock as RyanAir asks you to check-in two hours ahead of sched­ule. Well, at Lübeck you don’t really have to — the main hall with the check-in desks was lit­er­ally deserted.

After a futile hour of wait­ing we could finaly check-in and pass the pas­sen­ger con­trols to get into the fully RyanAir branded depar­ture tent. This really is a big tent, one of those you’re used to from fun fairs or street mar­kets. Filled with some alu­minium camp­ing chairs and tables and a small coffee-bar on one side it resem­bles some kind of a hol­i­day atmos­phere. There are also sev­eral exits labeld with RyanAir’s des­ti­na­tions from Lübeck. The Stansted exit is on the other end af the tent seper­ated by cus­toms and pass­port check where sud­denly a large queue arose — one hour before the sched­uled take off. I’ll never under­stand peo­ple que­ing up in such sit­u­a­tions instead of wait­ing a cou­ple a min­utes for a less crowded moment to pass such a bot­tle neck. It was easy calculations:About an hour of time until take off, a max­i­mum of 130 pas­sen­gers to go through cus­toms. We relaxed and had a cof­fee. After that, pass­port check was vacant again.

Next up was the ugly part of fly­ing RyanAir: The call to arms! When the atten­dant showed up at the tent’s Stansted exit every­one ran to that exit to get on the plane fast and to get some good seat. Well, the seats are all the same I think — so…

Flight time was from 09.20 to 09.45. Dif­fer­ent time­zones make up for very fast flights!

Head on to famous London…

Lonely Planet Lon­don (Lonely Planet City Maps)

Lonely Planet. Lonely Planet Pub­li­ca­tions 1999, Land­karte, 672 Seiten, € 4,97