London

What a crazy trip. And yet, not the craziest trip I’ve taken in the last six months. Anyhow, I went to London.

I think the only person who reads my blog that would appreciate the difference between 11-year-old Cydney and 21-year-old Cydney is Lizzy. Or my mom, but I don’t think she reads this because I tell her most everything as it happens. Anyway, I was an awkward kid at 11, and as awkward kids are wont to be, I was poorly dressed, lacked social skils, and read at a level far and above anything demanded of a fifth grader. I think I read all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings in about three months, which becomes more impressive when you remember that a) Tolkien, much as I love him, did not write that book for kids and thus it's pretty dense and b) at this age I was still reading bedtime stories with my parents, but at this age I would read to them as much as they read to me, and they were actual novels. My dad and I were working on Harry Potter if I remember correctly, and I’m pretty sure my mom and I were slogging through Little Women. Plus whatever I was reading for school, that’s four books I was juggling. Being the voracious little reader I was (a trait I’m sad I’ve lost, and blame the internet), I ran into most of the classics pretty quickly and it quickly turned me into an Anglophile, as American literature bored me. So I’ve wanted to go to England, specifically London, for ten years. That’s little less than half my very short, mostly uneventful and still somehow strange, lifespan. So when I started budgeting for Prague (ha!) the one major trip I wanted to take, regardless of cost (ha…) was to go to London. Well, about half way through October, I had no reason to stay in Prague for any given weekend anymore, I was in a bad mood (always cured by massive purchases), and I found out one of my favorite bands was playing in London on Halloween. The decision was clinched – I booked tickets for a five day trip (really four, I’m spending all of Sunday in the Geneva airport. Side note: I can now say I’ve slept on a hard wooden bench under my coat like a hobo), a little later (last weekend) I booked a hotel since I was traveling alone and hostels give me the hebbie jebbies even when I’m with people, and tada! I was going to London.

So Wednesday I took a ridiculously easy midterm, Sara dropped me off at the bus stop (“Be safe, eat well, take lots of pictures!”) after class, and I spent literally 12 hours traveling. I flew into London City Airport, and my hotel was by Heathrow, so by train it would have taken me at least 2 hours to get there. It took longer because fuck trains and tubes and metros and subways and any other variation of underground public transport, and I got lost and had to backtrack a good ways. I flew in on Wednesday specifically for the Katzenjammer (apparently that’s German for caterwauling), but the doors opened at 7, and I didn’t even get to my hotel until 7:45. I was ready to give up, but Jeff (kid I worked with over the summer, is studying abroad in London) was gently insistent and had already bought the tickets, so I dumped my stuff and jumped back on the tube. Fuck the tube. Fuck it. We got to the concert venue just as they were taking the stage, and then it didn’t matter that I’d been traveling for half a day. It was amazing. The lungs on all four of those women, and just how talented of musicians they are! God, it was great. I also got a signed t-shirt, which I am wearing right now in the Geneva airport, looking for all the world like I snuck into the airport because it’s warm and I’m homeless. I have plans tonight, no way am I showing up looking like this.

Thursday was probably my least favorite day, only because I spent a lot of time waiting and being surrounded by obnoxious British kids. I went to the Museum of London, which would have been cool if it was not so damn kid friendly. And me being me, I insisted on walking through the whole damn thing. It’s also in the London banking area, and I walked around there for a bit. Nothing but grey suits and scowls as far as the eye could see, and just people watching it became very clear to me that this is not the kind of life style I actually want to lead. Don’t get me wrong, I like nice things, specifically nice food, but if the cost of that is suits and scowls, I’ll take a pass. And I say this is my least favorite day, but that’s misleading, I think. It was still awesome because I was in fucking London. And the museum was still very cool, just a little loud for my taste. The coolest thing, by far, that I saw Thursday was The Rain Room by rAndom International at the Barbary Art Museum. I waited in line for an hour and a half, and spent maybe fifteen minutes in there. But it was still really cool. The room is called The Curve because it’s a large, single room that curves so when you walk in you don’t actually see the instillation. You can hear it, the sound of falling rain, and smell it, that wet concrete smell, and certainly feel the temperature drop, and you can even see the silhouettes of people waiting to play in it lit against the wall in front of you. What “it” is, though, is the best part, and when you round the bend, your breath stops for a minute. Hanging from the ceiling is an 8’x15’ board that is raining in the middle of the room. And people are standing underneath, perfectly dry. The way it works is that there are 3D MoCap cameras tracking everyone inside the rain rectangle, and as you walk and move the rain stops directly above. It gave me, at least, a pretty wide radius, and I found that by stretching my arm in one direction and my leg in the other as far as I could, I could cut the rain in half, spanning the whole eight feet. Oh, and the whole thing is lit by a single flood light. It makes it easy to see the rain, except in people’s shadows, which plays some funny tricks with how you perceive the rain looks. If you look at some people’s shadows just right, it looks like the rain is bending. Also, it’s a pain in the ass to take pictures of because of that strobe light. I took a video, but I don’t know if that works better. Also, I got rained on because I walked out to grab my bag and then back in, and someone had already replaced me. I think the cameras can only track about 15 people, and I made 16 or so. I got AMAZING Korean food (I love Czech food, I do, but I miss other types of food beyond Czech, Italian, and Thai), and back on the tube.

Friday was my favorite, but again that’s a silly distinction. I went to Camden Town, which I had never heard of before but googled it on a recommendation. So how do I describe it? Have you ever been to a really massive farmers market? It’s like that, but instead of fresh produce and beeswax soap or whatever the hell else, it’s the kind of stuff you’d find in a Hot Topic, and also a Forever 21, and also a flea market, and most of it’s made by hand, and most of it’s weird, and all of it’s AWESOME. I just hemorrhaged cash because I wanted everything. I think I spent over $250, but I intentionally didn’t track it. What did I get… A pair of white tights with glitter paisleys over the ankles and lines down the back of the thigh, a frumpy grandma sweater with a malformed skull and crossbones that reads “live fast, die young” which is HILARIOUS if you know me, a couple charm bracelets that are just colored string and small bronze star charms, loose leaf tea for Max and Sara, and a dress that I more or less have to pour myself into and won’t be able to wear when I stop walking five miles a day. Then I popped over to Piccadilly Circus to meet Jeff for dinner, and while I was waiting I bough myself a tin of Golden Syrup for home (I have a caramel recipe that calls for it, I’M SO EXCITED) and saw an anime store. I stuck my head in out of curiosity, and what should they be selling but Naruto themed cosplay contacts, specifically sharingun contacts. If you don’t know what that is, I’m not going to explain it. But it’s nerdier than it sounds, and it sounds nerdy as shit. I had to buy a pair for the Czech gentleman (we patched things up last week), I can’t wait to see the look on his face when I give them to him. And I’m pretty sure I got the ones that look like his favorite character. So Jeff arrived, and led me down a very nice street to a very nice courtyard to a very nice restaurant. We split a bottle of Bordeaux, I had butternut squash soup, he had mussels, then I had braised beef on papradelle pasta, he had steak, we got presseco with dessert, I had crème brule, he had sticky pudding. It was a nice night. So anyway, that was Friday.

Saturday started unpleasant because you know who told me he’s leaving me (again). I can’t really stop him. I can be mad at him, and I probably will be when I come down from my London high, but if I learned anything this summer, it’s that at some point kicking and screaming doesn’t get you want you want. I’m sad, I really am, because I really like him. And it’s hard not to think that this is a reflection of me somehow. Maybe if I was better I’d be worth fighting for. But that’s not a healthy way to think, and even as much hope as I threw into him, maybe it was always just a fantasy anyway. I hope he misses me.

Anyhow, this is all the long culmination of a very pensive day walking around London. I walked through Green Park and past Buckingham Palace, chain smoking a pack of Luckies and listening to Ray Charles because I’m more beatnik than hipster, I got lunch at a nice restaurant and watched foot traffic out the window, I went to the Tate Modern and spent a while being pensive in a Surrealist exhibit (including covering the map I bought with my crazy illegible scrawl), read in a Starbucks, and then saw Twelfth Night at the Apollo in Piccadilly Circus. It was actually just ok, which is mildly disappointing considering I went specifically because Stephen Fry played Malvolio. I love Shakespeare, specifically the interpretive Shakespeare I run into at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The last production of Twelfth Night I saw was there, and it was a riot from start to finish. This wasn’t even a little interpretive, it was historical. All the actors were men, and the men playing the women often resorted to high pitched shrieking for laughs. And they were so focused on keeping their voices high that their lines were very flat. Stephen Fry was his usual dry self, and I don’t think that necessarily lends itself to Malvolio because it’s just such an over the top role. Also, it wasn’t visually exciting because everyone wore black and white except for The Fool, and the stage was a uniform light wood color. The actor who played Sir Toby stole the show for me, with The Fool and Mary coming in close second. And something in me shifted during the play so I stopped being “What’s wrong with me that I keep getting left for other women? Why am I the one who has to foot the bill for the happiness of the men I love?” to being “Fuck it. There’s nothing I can do about it anyway, no point getting too worked up.” We’ll see how long it lasts, I’m sure it’s just a high from being in London.

So I got back to the hotel (fuck the tube) and skyped Mom and Dad while I packed, then facebooked Sara for a bit, and got maybe two hours of sleep before I had to be up. I look like a hobo. I made my flight just fine, though the Underground office wasn’t open so I have 10 pounds sitting on an Oyster card I can’t get back. Oh well. I slept from the instant I got to my seat on the plane to the moment we hit the tarmac in Geneva, where I promptly found the non-denominational and totally empty chapel and slept for another hour on the hard wooden bench, got lunch, bought chocolate (I’m in Switzerland, it’d be wrong not to), and now I’m sitting on the plane about to start our decent into Prague. I’ve got to rush back, change because I look like a hobo, and then I’m getting dinner and possibly a movie.

Bonus Observations:

I wear an awful lot of black and grimace a lot on public transportation. No wonder no one wants to make eyecontact with me.

It's funny, I didn't realize how much I missed being hit on until it happened Friday when the waiter was blatantly hitting on me.

Thank god for tube signs and announcements being in clearly enunciated English. I missed that.