| London, England |
| Daren and I were ecstatic to get off the plane in London. We had been seated for hours. It was an overnight flight and I failed miserably at my attempts of sleep. I was however successful in my attempts to ignore the guy sitting next to me. He got the hint and left me alone after about three hours. We had our passports checked and stamped, and were finally on our way to our whirlwind trip of Europe. A look through my bags assured me that I had lost the itinerary I had spent several hours compiling. All of the train schedules, hostel adresses, and flight schedules were gone. Luckily, Daren had a partial copy that we had given our families. (It struck us as smart to have people know what country we were in at any given time- just in case the IRA decided to blow up a car while we were eating snails in Paris- No reason to stress the family unduly.) We found directions in a Lonely Planets guidebook I had brought. We were once again on our ways, with purpose and a sense of direction. We strode right into the road and were almost run over. The Lonely Planets guidebook told us that traffic drove on the opposite side of the road, but I must have missed the part saying they don't give a damn if you're in the road, they have places to go. We watched other pedestrians for a moment and realized we had to walk at crosswalks and only when the light allowed us to. (What a novel concept, eh?) A friendly construction worker sent us on our way to the hostel, where we checked in. At which point they told us where we could leave our belongings. We must've looked funny with our mouths hanging open, because the hostel manager explained we could not go to our rooms until they had been cleaned, which would be in several hours. Daren and I were exhausted, not having slept on the plane, then dragging our backpacks around the Airport and half the city of London. We decided to take our chances and leave the bags locked up the way everyone instructed us to. (When planning the trip everyone we knew who had travelled to Europe made it sound as though every person was out to rob us. We'd better lock our bags every chance we got and god help us if we didn't wear money belts.) Our attempts to find breakfast were a dismal failure. Apparently Londonites don't eat breakfast at a restaurant. We found a little shop called "Pret A Manger" and ate there. It was nice to have something to eat even if it was a salmon sandwhich on wheat bread. Daren and I wandered around the city looking like bums and found a tour bus. It was a big red double decker bus that took people to all the attractions of London. We paid our money and hopped on, snapping pictures dutifully of the things they told us about. Looking back at the pictures, I have no idea what the hell they are of or why I took them. I guess I was just excited to be there. Since we were dead tired with no where to go, we rode the tour bus several hours until we knew the spiels and could say them better than the tour guides. At which point, we were finally able to go to our room at the hostel and clean up. Our room mates ended up being two Asian girls perfecting their English and a 70 something year old woman who had been given up for adoption. She currently lived in Australia, but had traced her roots to a grave site in London. She was there to pay her respects. Later that night, we went to see my favorite comedian, Eddie Izzard. It was at the Soho Theater about 8 blocks from where it was shown on the map. Daren was wearing high heels and had huge blisters by the time we found it. It was a tiny little dumpy building, and the room itself was pretty tiny and dumpy although I prefer to call it intimate. After travelling across the bloody ocean to see my favorite comedian, it had better be damn intimate. The show was decent. There were a few kinks in it, but that could be expected of a workshop tour. At one point Izzard was referring to a book, and everyone in the theater laughed. Daren and I just sat there feeling ignorant. Neither one of us had ever read the book. So much for our wonderful education at OSU. A transvestite comedian who never attended college seems to have a better education. After the show Daren and I walked back to the hostel. Along the way we found a giant brass statue of a man who we felt compelled to hump on film. While we're taking turns posing an alarm goes off. Half drunk we wander over towards it and realize a jewelry store had been broken into. We take off running, scared we'll be arrested for it. At the hostel we eat odd things from the vending machine. My favorite was the Aero bars, which you can find at the World Market or something here in the US. They're chocolate bars with bubbles in them. The kind I bought was a mint Aero bar- the bubbles were mint flavored. We also had some sort of Beef Walkers- potato chips that were packaged and looked exactly like Lays. (Slap me around a bit, they're called Crisps not chips haha.) They really tasted like a pot roast or something. It was revolting. I spit it out all over the place. I'm glad we didn't try the shrimp flavored ones, I probably would've done something horrid. When we were done eating everything of interest from the vending machine we stumbled in the room trying to be quiet, giggling as we're changing by the sink and crawl into our bunk beds above the 70 year old woman. The next day we had Pret A Manger food again, and went off looking for the train station. We were due in Paris later that day. |
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