Observations on travel (to London)
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London is a fun city to visit, but don't go if you're hungry; with the notable exception of Indian cuisine, the food is lousy.
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Londoners don't know which side of the pavement they should walk on. This is probably due to the tourists who don't know whether they should walk on the left or right, leading to Londoners not knowing how to do it either.
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Don't bother investing a lot of technology and stealth in industrial espionage: a visit to your nearest airport, or a ride in a train, suffices. Overheard at Heathrow:
Hi, here is [full name] of [company]: please put me through to [full name]. Hi [name]; just spoke to [other fullname] of [organization], he's the [title] there, as you know. They are willing to sign [description of deal], but want us to go down [percentage] to [full amount], because [other company] is doing so as well…
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I recognized the seats on the BA Airbus that drove me from DUS to LHR: sat on them 20 years ago, on an Avianca flight from Cartagena to Bogota. No complaints: the seats looked better than the stewardess.
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LHR's Terminal 5 is beautiful. And huge. Strangely, bathrooms use warm water only, but hand dryer is cold.
You were lucky in the Terminal 5 bathroom: Last time we were in the U.K. a front-loader ('Bagger' in German, pronounce: 'bugger') cut through the main cable supplying electricity to the airport. There was no hot water, no hand-dryers, in fact you couldn't FIND the bathrooms for they had no emergency lighting anywhere. Complete bedlam. (admittedly it was Gatwick).