Misbehaving in London

If you take out the annoying drizzle from the equation, London is a fabulous twosome place. I visited this city on a business trip few years back and had mixed feelings, mostly well. There are infinite things you could do there - parks, theaters, shopping, restaurants and if nothing else just walk, walk more and keep walking. The good thing is you don’t ever need to look up the map and you will never be lost, there is an underground almost anywhere you go.

Alright, this is not about London, this is about a character, the guy who was going to accompany me to the client. I met him in the hotel next morning and invited him to have breakfast before we got started. He accepted the invitation with a graceful "sure". I served myself a bowl of cereal and a cup of steamy hot coffee. And he tried almost everything. I could tell that he had a very light dinner last night. After a quite long time at the breakfast table, we were ready to go. I insisted that I pay for him (it was free for me with the hotel stay), which he again refused gracefully. We started walking, I naturally paused at the cashier's counter, but he kept walking at the same pace. Now I was totally confused, didn’t he mean that he will pay for himself? When he almost got to the hotel door, he finally looked back. His expression meant - why am I not walking with him? I rushed to him quickly and asked, do you want me to pay? With squinted eyes and in a thin voice, he said - noooooo, looked back and almost walked me out of the hotel holding my upper arm. Once out, he smiled deceptively and said – this is continental breakfast, every hotel has it for free. I couldn’t utter a word, nodded my head in disbelief and looked for a taxi towards my right.

We wrapped up an eventful day with meetings etc. My accompaniment suggested that we take the train back to the city. It sounded ok, so we walked to the nearby station and chit-chatted while waiting. We boarded the next one going in our direction. I asked him, how much it is from here to our destination. He told me not to worry about that. The person issuing the ticket walked towards us, looked at us. My comrade shook his head to him as if he already had the ticket and also mentioned that I am with him. Well, what does that mean? We are not going to pay for the ticket too? He confirmed it with the same smile he had in the morning. He assured me that it is easy to walk out of the station without getting caught. Being a visitor it really started concerning me, but somehow I just decided to go with the flow. We got down at our station and he asked me to walk with the crowd and be on the left side. I just traced his footsteps. There was a ticket collector asking for the ticket as you come out of the platform and he was standing on the right side. Of course, in the rush hour he could not check all the passengers and definitely not the ones on the left side:-). We walked passed him smoothly, looked at each other and laughed as if celebrating our mischief.

Last I heard, he joined a company which sells dental whitening product. He claims that one can make maximum money with minimum effort in that business.