I was in London

An unlikely chain of events, rather unlike my past experience, brought me to London.

Before departing from Israel, I was pitied because I chose the wrong time for a vacation in London. Large part of my luggage consisted of clothes meant to defend me against the arctic cold of London.

The friends, at whose home I planned to stay during my London stay, had their own plans for Valentine Day (plans of the kind which merits “Mazal Tov” from everyone who knows them), so I stayed in a hotel for the first two nights. My hotel room had a radiator which could not be turned off by the room’s tenants, so any cold, which the London weather was supposed to inflict upon me, avoided me instead.

London also turned out to have several sunny hours, and not to be as cold as feared, so I did not use some of the warming clothes which I brought with me.

Anyway, I had the fortune to visit one of the offices of European Relay as it was starting its operations in Israel. Hopefully, they will at last provide the deaf in Israel with adequate relay service.

My hosts and me also saw the congestion in the Chinatown part of London, as the Chinese New Year was being celebrated.

This was also my opportunity to experience, at last, Terminal 3 of the Ben-Gurion Airport.

No account of my trip to London can be complete without a mention of the big surprise, which awaited me at its end.

When I was in the Heathrow airport, preparing to check in my luggage, I saw an head, which I dimly recognized. I approached the head and it was very similar to the photo, which I see frequently in my MSN Messenger chats, as belonging to an English girl with sharp tongue and teasing sense of humor. When I came nearer, I said the nickname, which I use on her in our chats (an Hebrew translation of her real nickname). She was so startled that she almost jumped out of her skin. It was her! She explained to me that she came to the airport to see off one of her friends. We agreed to have a proper meeting next time I come to London.

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.

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