Days 51-55 - London, Manchester, Home :(
This is a very sad blog. It’s the last one about Europe. The End. Goodbye. I’m back home, jetlagged and not just a bit confused. I couldn’t even remember which light switch in my bathroom is the one that doesn’t turn on the heat lamps. But there were a few more days in England that were fun, so I thought I’d just finish it up. Here goes.
When I last left you it was Friday night, with three more full days in London. On Saturday morning I let my parents go to breakfast without me in order to sleep a little longer. I knew we were going to have a late night and I wanted to get as much as possible. We had three tickets to see a midnight showing of Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe Theater, so we decided to make it an easy day. There were a few things I wanted to show my parents in the area near our hotel. First, after a few minutes searching, I led them to the little quaint neighborhood in Kensington and Chelsea that I’ve previously written about. I was happy to find it again, as it is kind of a small place, easily missed but worth the effort to see. Smack in the middle of the area is a pub, as pubish a pub as any pub has ever pubbed. We stopped for some Strongbows and food that was almost never brought out. On the tv was first a cricket match, and then when the barmaid got bored with that, a music channel that only shows videos of songs from movies. I sat through such classics as "Because You Love Me" by Celine Dion, from the movie Up Close & Personal, "All for One" by the trio of Bryan Adams, Sting, and Rod Stewart from the movie 3 Musketeers, "The New Pink Panther Theme" by Freak Nasty and Beyonce, and "Don’t You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds for the Breakfast Club soundtrack. "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate from the Full Monty was playing when the waitress finally acknowledged my hails and told me that my food order had somehow been misplaced. If I would just wait a few more minutes it would be ready. I asked her very politely if she could please first put my ears out on the curb and then shove sizzling British sausages into my eyeballs. She laughed confusedly and backed slowly away. My food arrived shortly thereafter, while Loverboy’s "Almost Paradise" delivered random love scenes from Footloose to an unsuspecting audience of soon-to-leave pub patrons.
How could we ask for more? I swear that I could see forever in Kensington and Chelsea. So we went in search of the Notting Hill Portabello Market. Boy did we find it. All we had to do was walk out onto the main street and follow the gathering streams of people. It was an absolute zoo of antique shoppers, so we just pushed our way around for a while until I found exactly what I didn’t know I was even looking for, an early 20th century hand-made level with brass top plate and dual axis indicators that would look great on my desk at school, for only 18 Euros. Score! Portabello Market seen, we tried to decide what to do next. Unfortunately, we were of differing opinions. On the one hand, there was an argument for going back to the hotel and sleeping and/or reading until it was time to get ready for the play. On the other hand, I had been told by an extremely attractive British girl I met on a train weeks ago that an exhibit on Modernism at the Victoria and Albert Museum was bang on. So we split up, my mom and I heading to the museum, my dad back for a well-deserved nap.
The museum was much larger than I expected, and so was the exhibit, which included some really interesting items focusing on the period between the end of the first world war and the beginning of the second, encompassing the Russian revolution as well. I won’t bore you with most of the details, but the Le Corbusier stuff was amazing, if only for the fact that there were original Corb sketches that I’ve seen reproduced in every introductory Architecture textbook I’ve ever read. There was also a really cool study of how the iconic London Underground map was developed, and it’s various iterations. Anyway, I wish I had been allowed to take pictures, because we just didn’t have enough time to see everything I wanted to. Back to the hotel went we for waking up, cleaning up, and dressing up, then off in a London cab to the theater. As I think I’ve mentioned before, it was built as much as eight years ago, using only tools, techniques, and materials available when the first Globe Theater was built mpfhundred years ago. Or so. The play was really difficult to follow at first, but as time went along (and after we found a synopsis at intermission), it became easier to understand. It was very funny, but that may have been mostly because of the actors’ performances, as I felt like every other joke written by Shakespeare went completely over my head. I was expecting an hour and a half show, but it actually was more than three hours before the riotous curtain calls, and after four in the morning before we walked through the door of our hotel.
Somehow we woke with vigor, perhaps mostly because we were all excited about our plans for the day. We got it in our heads that the day after staying out until four am would be a good one to take a long trip down to the southern coast of England, to Portsmouth. It was actually quite easy, British trains being as reliable as they are, so that we were smelling the salty air by just after two in the afternoon. The train station doubled as a ferry port, so we hopped aboard and drifted over to the other jaw of the port’s mouth, to where most of the marinas were. Once there we happened upon the very boats sailed in the Volvo Ocean Race I had seen the finish of way back when I was in Rotterdam. They were hauled out of the water and up on lifts in a dockyard, and we found that if we went around to the back side of the place we could stand right underneath them and see the rare view of them from below. It was hard to believe these things that look so fragile had sailed around the whole world. It also provided a nice bookend to my trip, seeing these at the end after watching them near the beginning.
I wasn’t feeling well for some reason, a similar set of symptoms to the last time I was sick in England, so I sat on a bench while my parents explored the place. They found out firstly that there’s no such thing as a "Yacht Club" in England, but secondly that, inexplicably, there was a "Yacht Club" down the way where we could have a bite to eat and meet some of the locals. It was situated on the aft deck of a light boat, a boat usually anchored outside of a port with a lighthouse-ish thing mounted on the bow, in case an actual lighthouse was unavailable. We had to prove our associations before they would open the gate for us, and when we walked in we were confronted first with a paunchy, pale man in a leather vest, hat, chaps, and no shirt, then by the tiniest bar ever crammed into a "Yacht Club", whose sole type of food consisted of thin potato slices fried and salted and stuffed into a cellophane bag. Not quite what we were looking for, but it did give us a chance to sit out on the deck and watch the insanity that is Portsmouth water traffic. Tiny fishing boats the size of my shoe steamed through the chop, only to be overtaken by enormous naval battleships and automobile ferries, while endless streams of large sailboats turned about in vain attempts to take their sails down in 15 knot winds and a 10 knot current. We left disappointed across the water once again, arriving at the station approximately half an hour after six in the evening. Should we go home? Should we go to Oxford? Uh huh, you guessed it.
The 7:00 train to Britain’s oldest University (I just made that up, I have no idea how old it is) lasted just over an hour, and when we arrived we found out that trains from Oxford to London left at "half nine" and "half ten". That’s a European term I had to learn early on, and it means "half PAST whatever", not "half OF whatever", something I somehow managed to avoid finding the meaning of the hard way. For some reason the phrase "half nine" indicates to me 8:30, or perhaps in the mathematical sense, 4:30 (which I used my tremendous logic to immediately discard as being too complicated). The half nine train would land us in London at about 10:45, in time to take the underground back to our hotel. The half TEN train would dump us out in Paddington Station with fifteen minutes before the whole system shut down for the night. Could we see all of Oxford in one hour? We could at least try! Except there was really no way. So after an hour and a half of seeing the incredible buildings strewn about the small University town we didn’t buy a pizza at an old, local family-owned restaurant (despite our attempts otherwise), and made it back to the station with just 3 minutes to spare, to find out our 10:30 train had been delayed by 25, then 31, then 36 minutes. Eventually they just re-routed another train that was on its way to London through Oxford, and sent us out only ten minutes late. Of course, ten minutes late meant an 11:50 London arrival, and therefore no Underground, so we hailed a taxi to take us straight home. We arrived at our hotel at precisely midnight.
That meant, interestingly enough, that from midnight to midnight, the full twenty four hours of Sunday, July 16, 2006, we went to a Shakespeare play in London, went to a Yacht Club in Portsmouth, and didn’t buy anything from a Pizza Hut in Oxford. Sleep.
The next day was our last, and promised a 7:30 performance of "The Producers" in the Theatre Royal Drury Lane that evening. There was one thing I really wanted to see/do, and one thing I really wanted to show my parents before then (yeeeeshaspiderjustranupmyleg). The latter was the place I lived for my first almost two weeks in London, a little place called Ealing. We took the Tube out west and got off at the Ealing Broadway station, the way I’d done so many times before. First we went down into the shopping district to buy my mom some socks. Don’t ask. Then I forced my parents to march up the long, steep walk to Kenton House, showing them all kinds of interesting things along the way. Ok, by "all kinds" I mean the Ealing Cricket Club. There’s not much to see on the walk. We stopped at my former abode to get some water, and then, as we were now running quite late, we hailed a cab back to Ealing Broadway and took the Underground over to the Victoria station, where we picked up no-wait tickets to the London Eye, then hopped on the tube once more to Westminster, where the big ferris wheel looms over the Thames and the rest of the city. We were treated to a half hour ride up and over in a large 20-person glass room, heating up to lethal proportions under each new minute of the blazing English sun.
Back aground, there was no time to waste in getting back and dressing up for the theeayter. We Tubed over to Covent Gardens and went through a quaint little piazza before arriving at the doors. It was hot. There didn’t seem to be any air conditioning in the place, so they were handing out "The Producers" hand fans. Later in the show the main character, played by Nathan Lane in the recent movie etc, but played by someone else I’d never heard of here, addressed the audience directly about the lack of air conditioning in the place. I don’t know if it was a clever ad lib or written in, but if it was the latter there is the possibility that they left off the air conditioning just for this joke, which means that I hated The Producers. If that’s not the case, then I loved The Producers. It very amusingly walked the razor-thin line between poking-fun-at-insensitive and being-actually-insensitive. Horribly, shockingly, dangerously insensitive. I mean, a musical about a musical promoting a world war two winning gay Hitler could really ruffle some feathers, but I haven’t heard much along those lines from anyone since Mel Brooks revived his truly awful 70s movie for Broadway. In any case, we all loved it, and after a slight altercation with a drunk and belligerent London cabbie, we made our way home again.
That was pretty much it for us, as the next morning we spent packing and getting to Heathrow, where my parents flew out non-stop to Los Angeles and I flew out non-stop to Manchester. In Manchester I had a hotel room booked, for a lot of money I didn’t have, that was right in the center of the city. It was a palatial set of rooms compared to the potato sacks I’d been staying in for most of the last two months. It had not just a bedroom but a living room and separate bathroom, and the floors were made of clouds and the sun shone through the ceiling in filtered rays of gold and, oh yeah, there was a fountain shooting out bags of iPods and laptops in the center of my balcony. Totally worth the $90. Anyway, I spent three hours on a cloud in the sun with my new laptop sifting through the pictures I’d taken on my trip, then set out to explore the city a bit. I found a place that didn’t want you to have ever heard of Chipotle to get my very first burrito on European soil, which strangely enough tasted just like the ones from Chipotle. In my later wanderings I found an IMAX theater (which I’m surprised aren’t called iMax now, given the trends) which was playing Superman in 3D, so I went. The movie was great, the 3D was not. Luckily it just happened during the action segments, so I could see Clark Kent and Lois Lane looking forlorn without the glasses on. I made the harrowing journey through the scary midnight Manchester streets back to my hotel and fell promptly asleep, knowing I had a terrible day ahead of me.
I had the front desk call me a taxi, but when it didn’t arrive for half an hour I snagged one myself and got to the airport by nine in the morning for my eleven am flight. Checking in was quite an affair, but security turned out to be a breeze, so I had plenty of time to sit and contemplate the seven hours of cramped Airbus 330 seats in my future. I struck up conversation with a nice girl from Indianapolis who turned out to be my seat mate, so at least I didn’t have to sit next to a 300lb Air Force grounds-crewman, and with the entertainment center having "16 Blocks" (a movie I’d wanted to see in theaters but hadn’t) and Zelda: Oracle of Seasons available, I barely noticed the time.
In Chicago I had approximately one hour to get through customs, get my bag from baggage claim, re-check my bag, and sprint from terminal five in O’Hare to terminal one, section C, gate 19. Terminal 1 was five very. very. slow. train stops from terminal 5, and section C began at the end of section B, which began after a very. very. long. security line. If you think there’s no way I would be able to make it, you’d be thinking the same thing I was at the time. Somehow, however, I arrived just as they were boarding the plane. I found my seat, the middle one of the middle section between two unhappy Chicagian women, and squeezed in, breathless and sweaty after my haul. The captain came on the loudspeaker. "Good afternoon folks, you’re flying the On-Time Airlines, United. We’ll be leaving the gate exactly as scheduled, at 2:55, and we have a bit of a southwesterly tail wind caused by some thunder storms over Colorado, so our trip should be much shorter than 4 hours and 20 minutes, more like 3 hours and 40. So, buckle up, because we’re heading out!" We taxied out to the runway and sat for a while. After 20 or so minutes, the captain came on the loudspeaker again. "Well, folks, as you can probably see we’re pretty much stuck out here with everyone else (a cursory glance out the distant windows revealed a parking lot of jumbo jets on either side of us). The traffic controllers have closed down our route due to thunderstorms over Colorado, which is unfortunately the type of delay that could mean minutes or could mean we need to get you on another flight to another city than LA. Sorry folks, but we’re going to be here for a while." Thanks, On-Time Airlines. 40 minutes passed. The captain again. "Well, you know how there are good days and there are bad? Well, today’s not our day. It seems our battery charger has died. At least, that’s what the little light on the console tells me. Now maintenance says that nine times out of ten that just means we need to replace the battery itself, and they actually have one in stock here at the airport, but we’re going to have to return to a gate where they will be waiting with the battery in hand to replace it as quickly as possible. They’ve opened up our route again, so as soon as we get this thing replaced, we’ll be on our way." Just-A-Little-Behind Airlines to the rescue. Taxi back to the gate, wait for the fixin’s. 30 minutes go by. Captain. "Ok, well, they’ve looked at it and are sure we need to just replace the battery. They’re just about to start on that, and they say it’ll just be about a 20 minute job." 40 minutes more. "Ok, folks, we’re back in business! The battery’s been replaced, and that fixed the problem. So once we have the 11 people back who left the plane, we’ll be good to go!" 10 more minutes. Planefull-of-Fuming-Passengers Flight 121 prepare for departure. A man walked into our cabin with a bag of McDonald’s, proclaiming happily that he knew they wouldn’t take off if his luggage were still on board, for security reasons (bombs being left behind, and all that), so he wasn’t worried about being late or anything. I don’t think he realized that I was physically restraining the largest of the two mean Chicagians sitting next to me. After taxiing back out to the runway, I began to hear gasps from the window seats. The smaller mean lady began to babble incoherently, but I understood the "13" she kept repeating was referring to the number of planes in front of us waiting to take off. We sat. 20 more minutes. The now dreaded captain. "Heh. Well. Um. Yeah, so we’ve just had a low pressure system pass through. For those of you who know, that means a front. Unfortunately, we’ve had a 180 degree wind shift, so the controllers are re-routing all traffic to the other end of the runways. Heh. Looks like we’ll have to taxi a bit. Sorry." Thank you for flying Totally-Disastrous-Airlines. Please be sure to take all your belongings with you when you run screaming back up the Jetway. 20 minutes later, we were taking off, exactly three hours to the minute after our original departure time.
I flipped through the little brochures to find out what we were getting for dinner, as I was pretty much hungry by then, having not eaten in 6 hours. I couldn’t find anything about it, but there was a Flight Attendant pushing a cart in our general direction, so I waited. When she arrived, she had the unmitigated audacity to say, and I quote (which is more obvious when writing than speaking), "Sir, would you like to buy a SnackBox(tm) for five dollars?" *SMILE*.
"Um, excuse me? Did you just ask me to pay for airline food?"
*SMILE* "Well, it’s a SnackBox(tm)."
"Is it full of a steak dinner and champagne?"
*SMILE* "Oh, haha, no sir. It’s got a bag of thinly-sliced fried potato in a gourmet cellophane bag, a fruit cup, and a cracker. PLEASE Ma’am! Stay in your seat!" I wrestled the big Chicagian down again, which I was pleased to note I was getting better at.
"Um, what about a drink? Does it have a drink?"
*SMILE* "Of course, non-alcoholic drinks are complimentary! A cart will be by in about an hour. Would you care to buy a SnackBox(tm)?" She was talking to the smaller Chicagian now, who looked at the state of the two of us and greedily snatched one of the expensive things. In about an hour I poured the contents of a 5oz can of Pepsi into a shot glass and dribbled it onto my raisined tongue. The in-flight movie started. "16 Blocks".
I was so relieved to be off that damn plane, seven hours later, that I sprinted through baggage check and into my mother’s awaiting car. After almost two months, eight flights, 16 train trips, and 35 nights in hostels, I was absolutely delirious to be home. I arrived to find my room straightened up and vacuumed, my bathroom scrubbed, my car washed and tuned up, and my dog shorn. Then I slept.
It’s been a wonderful, scary, perplexing, moving, hilarious trip. I don’t think it’s something I could ever forget, but I’m glad I have these things to remind me of the nuances. Thanks for reading them, everyone. I’ve missed you a lot.
No more later.
-C
