The London Post

Friday: 5 AM

I fall out of bed. I do breakfast kamikazee style, with much enthusiasm, too much speed, not enough coffee and no regard for my health and well-being. I take the tram with my roommate who has also willingly volunteered to be out at this godforsaken hour. I find my coach at the train station; I ask if I can board, but since the thing doesn't leave till 6:15 he's got a half an hour break. But I may put my bag in the bus, if I like. Jolly good. I go get coffee. I wonder why I was positive it had been a 6:05 bus. I came back, and discovered it was indeed a 6:05 bus, and I had just helpfully stowed my baggage in a bus that leaves 10 minutes later bound for Switzerland.

Curses.

But I got my bag back and eventually my bus, having picked up a somwhat lost American grad student doing the same thing as I. We rode the bus together to the airport, took the same flight, and took the coach to Victoria station where C. met me.

It took a bit of effort for us to connect; we headed off, happily munching krispy kremes, for the tube and spent much of the afternoon trolling Oxford street and looking at all the shiny pretty things. I bought a purse. Which is good, as I had otherwise been carrying my stuff around in a fanny pack, and people made fun of me.

After dropping my stuff at C.'s flat we headed off to a pub for dinner, where I had a very sad and lonely looking sandwich with some excellent chips--with vinegar, of course. And of course we lost track of time and almost missed.....

....our Jack the Ripper tour! That was so much fun! OF course it is cheesy and touristy but that is the best part! The conclusions we came to by the end of the evening were: a) London in 1888 was a hellhole for anyone not rich, and slightly less of one for those who were; and b) it's a Freemason conspiracy involving prince Edward (?). The tour guide was hilarious and managed to surprise us a couple of times while revealing to us the sordid past of the city as if unwrapping a christmas present. After the tour we ended up wandering down to SoHo, eventually ending up at a pub called Shakespeare's Head, whose ceiling beams were painted in too-oft quoted quips, "to thine own self be true" and such like. It'd been interesting if they'd have put shakespearean insults up there: "’Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish! O! for breath to utter what is like thee; you tailor’s yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing-tuck! (1 Henry IV) or " Thou sodden-witted lord! thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows." (Troilus and Cressida). But no, twas not to be.

Saturday I slept in, surprisingly, to 9 AM London time, 10 AM German time. C. lives in a flat with 8 other people, guys and girls, Brits and Americans. Freshmen, who don't do the dishes. The flat is accessed by climbing in through the front window, as that is easier than unlocking the door. Egress, however, takes place by means of the pedantic portal. We wandered on down to the Tate after breakfast, appreciated the Warhols, Klimt, Duchamp, Kadinskys, and other famous and trippy pieces of art. Apparently the thing to do now a days is to go sliding at the Tate at the huge slides they have there. Go figure. The afternoon we spent at the Portabello Markets in Notting Hill, where the posh people live and the tourists shop. But if you go far enough you stumble on a food market with excellent prices and equal quality. Everything we bought was perfectly ripe.

Dinner consisted of guacamole, eggplant and noodles, fresh market bread, and pineapple for dessert. It was fantastic, if I do say so myself. I've never made Guacamole with Marmite before, but trust me, it works.

After dinner we went for a night walk along the Thames, starting down at Westminster bridge and Big Ben, heading up towards Strand and on to Leicester (pronounced Lester) square, Coven Gardens--where we found mulled wine and a very drunk and scruffy American being scared of fake snow blown from a life-sized gingerbread house--until we found a cozy pub of our liking, and settled into the upholstered leather corner seat (much better than the crowded Shakespeare pub from the night before, which insisted on playing irritating music with an insistant drum beat).

Sunday we tried to go to the Tower of London, but as it's not a museum it is free to charge what it wants, and what it wanted was 12 pounds so we didn't do it. We tried in vain to find a show or a play with a sunday matinee, also with no luck, so we walked from the West End up to Buckingham Palace, where hordes of tourists were watching dudes in furry hats march around. Deciding to spend the afternoon in a worthwhile manner we dinked around at the British Museum, saw the Rosetta Stone and a whole bunch of really cool other medieval, egyptian, greek, roman, and etruscan stuff before heading back for dinner. I must say, an electric grill makes fabulous sandwiches.

After pretending to be C.'s roomie so I could use the university library we went to trya nd find a theatre playing "stranger than fiction," but alas--poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio!--we ended up seeing Children of Men. That movie is i.n.t.e.n.s.e. It's about the world in 2027 will be like if everyone is infirtile, and somehow a miracle woman pops up, pregnant, and Clive Owen's character has to escort her to safety, of course plagued by both the rebels and the police. Besides the sheer graphicness of the violence, I was particularly disturbed by the thought of England as a war zone, and that what was so horrifying me on the screen is what is currently happening in parts of the world as I type this.

Instead of going back to crash at C's for the night I instead take the tube to Victoria station and take a bus to the airport. My flight doesn't leave until 7 AM, but 7 AM - 1 hour (check-in and security time) = 6 AM - 1.5 hour (coach ride from Victoria to stansted) = 4:30 AM - 45 minutes (travel from C's to Victoria) = 3:45 = night bus, as the tube doesn't run. So I slept at the airport. And by slept, I mean I lay on the marble floor for two hours until I got cold and stiff. And I wasn't the only one: When I arrived, the place was full, and there were no places to sleep either remotely comfortable or even private. But I suffered through it, soldiered on into the morning, checked in reeeeely early and got my Marmite confiscated at security because it's apparently a li quid, though I could debate that.

My bus ride to Freiburg wasn't bad, except for the fact that I was trapped in a bus for two hours with a really loopy english lady, who has never voted in her life yet complains voiceriferously and copiously about politics, who believes war could be ended if all mothers threatened to disown any kid who joins the army, who believes that the only thing man has ever accomplished is war, and who has a compellingly (compelling, like the sore in your mouth you can't stop tonguing or the scab you insist on picking at, furtively, because you know you shouldn't) paradoxical combination of pessimism and running-naked-through-the-woods-hippyism. I was happy to get off.