Continued from the previous entry:

A Stroll in Haworth

On the third day, I checked out of the Heathfield B&B on a rainy morning. Since it was a weekday, Keighley Worth & Valley Railway was out of service. The mistress took me to the nearest bus stop on Rawdon Road and told me to wait there for the bus to Keighley.

While waiting for the bus, an old lady talked to me. She asked me where I was going. I answered that I was going to London. Another lady joined us, and they and I talked a bit until the bus was coming.

On the bus, I sit on the upper front seat, and the ladies stayed downstairs. Arriving at Keighley bus terminus, I got out of the bus. The train station was a bit distant from the terminus, so I didn’t know how to get there.

Then the lady who had talked to me first at the Rawdon Road bus stop found me standing there and told me to follow her to the train station, as she was just going shopping nearby. How kind of her! I was able to get to the Keighley train station with her help.

I took the local train to Leeds, where I changed trains to King’s Cross.

I arrived at the Somerset Hotel in the afternoon. This hotel was in Marylebone, near Baker Street underground station. It was probably what had been renovated from a former townhouse owned by a nobleman. It didn’t have any standout signs outside indicating it was a hotel, so it was tough to find.

Getting into the hotel, I rang a bell on the reception desk. A receptionist who looked Indian or West Asian came in and completed the check-in process in a businesslike manner. He told me to go up to the guest room on the second floor using the stairs, as it didn’t have any lifts.

The guestroom was too narrow to spread the luggage. It had only one bed, and a simple telly was placed at one end of it. In the bathroom were only a toilet bowl, a washbasin, and a showerhead, with no shampoo or hair conditioner, but a cake of soap. This must be London, not any place in a developing country!

Having got nothing I could do in such a miserable hotel room, I got out of it to stroll around the streets of London.

I think that the atmosphere of London is very similar to that of Tokyo. The width of the streets was almost the same. Cars of similar size drove on the left side of the road, as they do in Japan. People walked on the street at the same speed. I didn’t feel anything was wrong with London. I could live there, while I couldn’t live in the US, where many things are quite different.

That being said, the hidden power of that city seemed to be totally different from that of Tokyo. Mayfair, for example, was said to be home to upper-class people secretly controlling the money markets worldwide, including the City, Wall Street in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, and more, though Mayfair looked comparably quiet. No bankers or real estate agents were showing off around there, but Mayfair looked unearthly all the more because of such quietness, for, in fact, it has the power of life and death over the world’s capitalists and investors.

Walking east through Mayfair, I got to Regent Street, one of London’s high streets. Then I turned right onto Regent Street for Piccadilly Circus.

Everything in Piccadilly Circus was bright. It was just like a scramble junction of Shibuya.

I got on the Tube from Piccadilly Circus to Tottenham Court Road, hopped on some buses for shopping, and went to Covent Garden, which was one of London’s must-see places as well. I expected to see stalls selling flowers there, but most of the stalls inside were already closed because I arrived too late.

I found actors performing a short opera at the well of Covent Garden. I thought it was interesting, so I was watching the play from upstairs with several other spectators. Then an older woman came to us with a donation box to collect our donations. I put a ten-pence coin into the box, and then she smiled at me, saying, “Thank you.”

I had dinner at a pub in Covent Garden. I ordered a pint of beer and fish and chips and paid cash for both. A waitress gave me just the beer and asked me to go back to my table and wait for the fish and chips, since it would take a while to prepare. After a short time, she brought me only a bowlful of chips. I began eating the chips and waited for the fish, thinking it was one of the British manners and that the fish would be served later, separately, in that pub. After a while, another waitress rushed to me and asked me, “Have you already eaten the chips?”
“Yes, ” I answered.
“OMG! This is not for you. I guess another waitress brought it to you by mistake.” She immediately took the bowl off the table, apologizing to me, and served a dish of fish and chips instead. It was just the same as what I always saw in British pubs in Japan, with fried cod, chips, and vegetables in one dish.

The next morning, I checked out of the hotel, took the Tube to Paddington with many commuters, and then boarded the Heathrow Express to Heathrow Airport. At Terminal 3, I got off the train and went to the Virgin Atlantic check-in counter since I had a single air ticket from London to Narita, redeemed through Virgin Atlantic’s frequent-flyer program. The check-in process was done very briefly. There were no passport controls when leaving the UK.

After clearing security, there were restaurants and duty-free shops, including an electronics store, where I got a MacBook Air with a British keyboard layout.

I ate a heavy English breakfast again at a restaurant. It was the last meal in the UK.

Boarding time is coming, so I moved to the boarding gate. Japanese high school students were going on a school trip.

I felt the atmosphere of the return flight was much like that of a Japanese airline, as most flight attendants were Japanese and many passengers were Japanese travelers. However, the flight attendant’s quality was quite different from that of ANA or Japan Airlines. When I sat in the seat, covering my legs with the blanket and fastening the seat belt over it, a flight attendant approached me and told me to take off the blanket, saying it was the airline’s rule. I found that, though there was a security information brochure in other passengers’ seat pockets, it wasn’t in mine. When I told her that and asked her to bring one for me, she gave me a curt reply, “I’ll do it shortly.” She never did it to the end, probably because she forgot.

Anyway, the trip to the UK was very fruitful for me in many ways. I know that the UK seems less powerful than the United States, China, or other rising Asian countries. Still, I do believe that this country has a lot of experience—the knowledge stored by countries with long histories that have already passed their peaks and are now in decline. It would be what Japan and the Japanese people have to learn in the future.