The churches in Europe have been around for a few hundred years at the very least. They all looked humongous, and sacred. People then must have been very religious. The sad part nowadays, every churches have been turned into some kind of commercial to generate money, and job for the locals. You pay to get around. You pay to get in to take a tour. You pay to buy souvenirs. You pay for everything. It's no longer accepting donations or some forms of volunteer paying for the service. Little that they knew, the efforts, the sweat and blood they put in to build these churches were one day became someone-else profits.
We got back to Waterloo Station a little later than 1:00pm. Heading back up, we found an eatery and grabbed a quick lunch before heading back to the station to Hampton Court Palace, almost an hour of train riding away.
We had plenty of time to freshen up, then ready to catch our train. It was 1:30pm, and the train was still staying put to collect its riders. Here's what I made a serious mistake in our plan. It was Sunday afternoon, and I was planning for our trip on a weekday's train schedules.
We finally left the station at around 1:40pm. If we had taken the right train, it would have taken us no more than 45 minutes to get there. Unfortunately, we took the opposite train heading away from it. By the time I realized my mistake, we were very close to Euston square. We jumped back down and tried to confirm our direction. Here it got all confused and we messed up. We took the light-blue train, instead of getting off at Stockwell to get back on the original Southwest trains, we got off at Westminster. It took another 20 minutes to get back to our original Waterloo Station. We then hopped on the Southwest trains heading toward the right direction, 45 minutes to Hampton Court Palace. We both now really tired for all the anxious fast-walking, and running. We settled down to relax a little just waiting to get there.
Once the train started to leave central London, more and more people got off. The farther away from London, the more people got off. Our cabin now had only a handful of riders. It's now closed to 4:00 in the afternoon, but it's getting dark quick because of the overcast weather. The rain now started to pick up heavier. I started to get panic. We planned to get there around 3-3:30pm, then to spend about 2 hours to mill around before heading back to London. It's now almost 4:00 in the afternoon. The thought of not being able to get back started to linger in my head because I had noticed that the last few stations, I saw very few people getting off, and not too many of them were around . Nervously, I told my wife what I was thinking. We decided to get off the very next station to check thing out.
My wife needed to go to the restroom first so I waited for her outside. I looked around, and there were only a handful of people waiting for the inbound train on the other side of the platform. All the offices were closed and locked. After a long 10 minutes, my wife came out, she was sweating profusely. She told me that she was locked from inside the stall, and the door had no handle. It fit tightly to the door frame. She tried hard at first to open it without success. She had no grip to pull it open. Both of the top and the bottom edges were so tightly fit. She wanted to scream for help but restrained from doing it noticing that there was nobody in the restroom when walking in. Fortunately, she could sneak her fingernail file between the gap and pried it open.
The scary part was everywhere graffiti assaulted the eye. London's suburban was very neglected. Buildings were scrawled with weeds, trash, and all kind of junks. It looked very much like a war zones. Worse of all were the electrical power lines. They were snaking all over the ground with reckless abandonment. As with the surrounding, the people here were somewhat unfriendly.
For some reasons, we were kinda hesitate to ask the people around us. They all looked incoherent and disconnected. None seemed to make any eyes contact with us. We scrambled around trying to locate the schedule posting on the wall. To our horror, now we realized that today was Sunday, and the last inbound train toward London was schedule a mere few minutes from now.
We ran back to the opposite platform on time to catch the last train back to London. Luckily for us that we had ordered our city and traveler passes in advance, or else who knew. There went our carefully planned excursion. We did not say much on the trip back. Each tried to contain one's own thought regards to our dilemma, and the precious time loss.
We got back to Waterloo Train Station around 5:30 in the evening. We concluded our visit to London by taking the Thames River Boat Excursion. It was by far the best experience we had had in London. The sights were beautiful. The only draw back was the rain, and the wind. It picked up pretty bad during the evening hours every days we were here. We got back to our hotel around 9:00 in the evening. We had to pack up for tomorrow we were heading to Paris. I have to say this, London has so much to offer for tourists. It takes more than 3 weeks to explorer let alone 3 days. But dues to its super high cost of living, who would be able to afford it. The Hilton hotel we stayed in the last 3 days, cost almost $450.00 a night. And it wasn't even any where close to the center of London. We saw many real estate ads posting around, a single bedroom flat on a high rise building for sale for 3 hundred thousand quids, more than half a million US dollars.
It won't be on my come back list unless I hit a lottery jackpot one day.
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