Yesterday night I picked up my yellow(!) Citroen DS3 at Gatwick, headed straight on to M23 and then A23 out of London, towards Brighton. Learning by doing; this is my first attempt ever to drive a RHD car in traffic. No crashes yet, but it really feels weird to drive on the “wrong side” of the road, specially in roundabouts.
I normally bring a GPS when driving on new places, in new countries, but I couldn’t find the damn TomTom before leaving Oslo, and using my iPhone wasn’t really an option yesterday, as my provider, OneCall, charges me NOK 25 / MB for roaming. (That is just pure crazyness.)
I just followed the signs, and after a small Brighton tribute tour along the seaside parking, I found Brighton Marina House Hotel in Charlotte Street. The small hotel is located just a short walk from the famous Brighton Pier, in a small street where it was impossible to find a parking space. Staff at the hotel was very friendly, and showed me my own bathroom, my bedroom and where the breakfast is served. Great!
Took a short walk, after parking the car at the sea side parking lot, the Pier was closed, as well as most restaurants except from Burger King. A quick BK burger let me use their wireless before shopping some beverages at a Tesco, and walking back to the hotel for some rest. Day One was a success!
Woke up just in time for breakfast, which wasn’t the ‘whole English one’, but a nice breakfast with salmon, scrambled eggs and toasts today. The English breakfast was available, but I didn’t feel like eating a lot this morning.
After breakfast I packed up my stuff and left the “non valuable’ things like clothes in the car before my hunt for a UK simcard started. I wanted a prepaid micro sim with the largest dataplan available. This wasn’t just easy, 3 couldn’t even give me a prepaid micro sim, and O2 as well as T mobile could only give me 500 MB of Internet trafic on the prepaid cards.
I paid GBP 5 for a T mobile card, and then the clerk told me ‘it is 30 days free Internet, you will not be charged if you use more than 500MB’. Why didn’t he tell me that in the first place?! They will probably throttle my connection after 500MB, but that shouldn’t be a too big problem
With my new sim card, and hence Google Maps I was ready to hit town. I love to just walk around on new places, taking some pictures, find some good food and just relax. But I had to visit the famous Brighton toy museum first:
And then I just walked around in the beautiful city of Brighton:
Just loved this sign!
Very windy today, guess this is what you have to pay for the sea side beach.
Cassette Lord in Brighton must be very active, I saw this everywhere!
NOTE: I find it hard getting good colors on this rather small laptop screen …
Music played while writing: Visa från Utanmyra, Jan Johansson
