I don't do well with mental transitions. You know how some people feel all rested and refreshed and ready to spring back into work after the weekend? I am not that person. I am the person who is in class glaring at everyone with red eyes on Wednesday because she can't process that it isn't still the weekend and stayed up to watch BBC iplay documentaries before realizing, at around midnight, that she hadn't done the reading because there was class tomorrow because Tuesday isn't Friday. Who knew? Thursday is, in fact, my only productive day of the week and then any show I watch on TV ever comes on Thursdays so after 8pm I'm useless again and then it is Friday so why bother? It's amazing I am even alive with how lazy I am. So that's kind of my explanation as to why I have not updated this in eighty-nine million years.
I am even worse after a vacation. I come home, unpack, draw up a list of what needs doing for the week...and then buy some chocolate, pull out an old novel I have already read three thousand times, and get nothing done for two weeks. My brain just absolutely refuses to accept that it is no longer vacation. So tonight I have decided to indulge it and actually write about my vacation. I kept a journal while I was traipsing around Europe because I am twenty-one and very, very white so a lot of this will be paraphrased from that. Also please imagine me as this guy while I am talking about traveling forever after this:
(note: “gap year” is a year between high school and college a lot of British students take off to travel around and backpack and become insufferable and never shut up about)
London
I took a bus to Leuchers with a dozen or so other St. Andrews students heading to the train station but my friends Claire and Kathleen in particular. We sat on the platform all out in the middle of nowhere, perched on our suitcases, having the sort of truncated, nervous conversations people have when they're wondering when their train will come and where their seats are and whether they've left anything at home. At one point I went to buy a little meat pie from a stand and the man behind the counter insisted I say hello to the Queen for him, “Tell 'er Frank says hello! That's Frank! You want diet coke? You don't need a diet! There's a smile! What a nice smile! Have a good trip!” This began a trend of everyone being incredibly effusive everywhere I went all Spring break.
The train from Leuchars to London was about six hours. I sat next to morose looking high school age boy who never looked up from his phone on which he texted furiously until getting up and walking away and then...never returning (wherever you are morose teenage seatmate I hope you have cut your hair and did not throw yourself off the train or something). I debated anxiously over whether to scoot over to his window seat for about half an hour, weighing the better view against the possibility that a conductor would suddenly appear, scream “THAT'S NOT YOUR SEAT” and chuck me out the window. Eventually I braved the inching over and watched out the window as we sped past hills and lakes and the sea until we were passing little suburbs with their neat boxy houses and gardens and then, finally, London. I hadn't thought much about London. It was mainly a way-station to Paris and Italy in my mind, a chance to start out with friends from St. Andrews, but as the train pulled into King's Cross and I looked up at the slightly shabby, stolid brick buildings of Islington I remember thinking: Oh, this is somewhere I could live.
King's Cross was smaller than I imagined it and more open to the outside. Pigeons flew and strutted everywhere and a news stand outside sold magazines in German. Fast food and ominously named “pirate” bookshops surrounded it and there were no street signs to be found. Nevertheless we eventually found our hostel, Clink Youth Hostel, which occupied a renovated jail a couple blocks away and settled in. (picture of bed)
The rest of the day is something of a blur. We wandered around guided by Kathleen's twin sister Elizabeth who is studying nearby before heading to the Tate, a museum of modern art in a building that Elizabeth described as “the ugliest thing I have ever seen” where we met up with our friend Tim and looked at surrealist pictures. Here is some advice: if you are really tired and out of it definitely go to a surrealist exhibit. Suddenly it all makes sense. After Tate we continued our surrealist kick by going to a restaurant called Sushi Yo! where you took a seat at a counter with a conveyor belt that ran around the whole garishly lit restaurant. Different meals whizzed by and you grabbed ones you wanted off the belt as they passed. More advice: if you are bad at decision making and want to lose weight eat all your meals here. I was so paralyzed by indecision I ended up eating almost nothing. After that we finished the night at a pub and then dragged ourselves back to the hostel to pass out. Just before I went to bed I switched in my American sim card and found a text from the day before saying my friend's water had just broken: as I was reading the message she'd delivered a baby girl all the way back home and across the ocean.
The next day was another blur as we rushed around the underground trying to see Important Things. The impression of London as somewhere livable remained though. I would live there if only to visit the lovely St. James park (right by Buckingham Palace) on sunny afternoons. Though the red-eyed ducks are a bit terrifying.
My last full day in London was spent with a friend from elementary school, Maxine, who is studying at University College London. We have a more relaxed, meandering day catching up and riding double decker buses and I'm struck by how different it is to travel with someone you know well enough to forget, if that makes any sense. I didn't have to think about what I was going to say to her or what impression I was giving off and so I was free to concentrate on what was around me like, oh say, the mugging and seizure I witnessed in the touristy shopping district. Yeah, violent times in London! Otherwise the day is sedate, pouring over ironwork in the Victoria and Albert museum, buying a jacket at Primark, and finishing it off in an Irish pub drinking Guinness and catching up with one of my oldest friends.
The final day I have a couple hours to kill before I board my train and so I spend them in the British National Library where I look over Freudian manuscripts, learn about Chopin's strange burial, visit the magna carta, smile at an original manuscript from Charlotte Bronte, trace the history of Alice in Wonderland in illustration, and accidentally commit petty theft. Yeah, uh, apparently no one notices if you walk out of the gift shop still holding a pen. Or cares really. When I noticed what I'd done I sprinted back inside, thrust the pen onto the counter, and apologized profusely. The cashier raised his eyebrows, nodded silently, and placed the pen back in the display. I slunk off to be embarrassing somewhere else. Somewhere else like McDonalds because oh my God you guys, do you what they have there? Cadbury Egg McFlurries. They are so, so good. I ate at least three while I was in London and each one sent me into a euphoric haze unmatched until gelato in Italy.
My new addiction satisfied I then boarded the train for Paris which I will write about tomorrow.
So there you are, I'm still alive! And writing about London rather badly because I just want to sleep! Better entries to come, I swear on the memory of Cadbury McFlurries.
Pictures: are on facebook. I am too lazy to put them here tonight, sorry!
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