I hope so.
Let's talk about London. My biggest exposure to London prior to this mainly involved the Friends season 4 finale, The One With Ross's Wedding, as well as reading Harry Potter. (And let's face it, the odds of me finding The Leaky Cauldron were slim to none. London's a big city and I don't have a wand. SO ANYWAY.) Beyond that, I didn't know what to expect.
We flew in on the bumpiest Ryanair flight I've taken yet - and that's saying something. It felt like were were flying in the rattle of a very energetic and colossal baby. But we made it, and coasted through back streets past billboards and storefronts until we pulled up in front of the County Hotel. If you've been to the castle before, you know the deal with this hotel. The lobby is sparsely furnished, with crumbly wooden tables and padded chairs; the concierge desk is large, wide and unfriendly - which nine times out of ten could also go for the concierge sitting behind the desk. The rooms, for their part, are tiny and cramped like shoeboxes, brown bunk beds that are about as tall as I am. There's no bathroom attached to your room, just a sink that sticks haphazardly out of the wall; you have to turn the handle four, five times before a feeble stream of water will trickle out. One late night, a fire alarm rang through the halls at four AM - eighty bleary-eyed, VERY unhappy Emerson students crowded together on the sidewalk outside the hotel, puffing anger in our breaths.
The streets of London are both familiar - bright lights, loud noise and brick sidewalks - and unfamiliar - bright red double-decker buses teeter along on their four wheels, and they look do delicately balanced on the road that half the time, I expect them to tip and tumble like toddlers taking their first steps. People kept comparing London to New York or Boston, and I disagree. It's certainly not New York - the buildings are too small, the lights aren't as glaring, and the streets wind and coil. It has Bostonlike qualities, to be sure, but there are too many people, too much happening, and it is just so uniquely London - so old and new at the same time, a city of white stone, so much brighter than Boston, the buildings firm and strong.
We were led on tour after tour after tour in London. Big Ben clambers into the sky and glimmers like gold during the day, bathed in the sun. Trafalgar Square, made of endless white stone, features fountains with statues of stone and bronze that spew water like geysers. The fountains sparkle, the water a crisp and serene blue; white patches glow on the top of the water as evidence of the sun that glows overhead. The entire square seems to glow with an ethereal light, the stones themselves shining bright. Westminster Abbey - sprawling stone floors and soaring vaulted ceilings, with windows that stretch from floor to ceiling, shards of rainbow glass fitted together to create a dazzling display illuminated from the outside in. It was loud in there, surprisingly loud; everyone talks at full volume, and their voices clamber and bounce like restless children through the halls and paths of the Abbey. Tower of London - stone towers connected with winding white paths, the crown jewels sparkling behind thick glass, a field populated by cackling ravens with clipped wings and bills like knives.
I spent time in more museums than I can count over this break; British Museum, National Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum - all in London. One thing I notice - they all smell the same: old and musty, like a book with yellowing pages. I think my favorite museum was the British Museum: cascading tile floors, with an ocean of a ceiling made up of interlocking white triangles. The artifacts found in these museums are insane - ancient jewels and jars, statues older than the city they live in. I feel like it's redundant to say everything, but the sheer amount of beauty sculpted in white marble still blows me away.
Katherine and I went to see Billy Elliot the Musical one night in London; it was hands down the most wonderful show I have seen in a very long time. I'm by no means a good theater critic, but god, almost everything about Billy Elliot was absolutely astounding - the music, the dancing - I was left with chills and a permanent slackjaw. So beautiful. Wow.
We went to Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford upon Avon, and it was a refreshingly quaint little town, bathed by the sun with buildings of white and brown wood. Shakespeare's garden was very nice, with a gnarled and knotted tree at the center, grown from a cutting of Shakespeare's tree. A calm brown canal slithered around the town, with boats floating on the surface that functioned as ice cream stands and restaurants.
The next stop after Emerson released us was Dublin - it was unimpressively dank, to be honest. Very urban, very modern, very dirty. Trash was scattered on the sidewalks, and the entire city smelled of car exhaust and bacon. One long canal filled with brown water that sluggishly lurked through the city - a chair and an old shopping cart stuck sorely out of the water like miniature Titanics sinking into the murk. Gray clouds smeared themselves across the sky almost the entire time we were there, allowing almost no light to shine through except at the horizon, where a few strings occasionally peered through, feeble and small.
In Dublin, we met up with a girl from Chicago named Brittany who was bright and cheery to match her bright complexion and shiny blonde hair, with a twang to her speech. She was traveling on her own, and joined our group for the two nights we spent in Dublin. We went to the Jameson Distillery and sampled whiskey at eleven in the morning; we stopped by the Guinness Storehouse - the rest of our time was spent wandering through Dublin's winding streets and hopping from pub to pub. The pubs were wonderful, even if the city itself was dank -
stretching wooden floors and walls and ceilings, all of it illuminated by bright lights. There was music in every pub, high-pitched and cheerful, infectious; it put us all in good moods.
The thing about both England and Ireland is this - they speak English. I should have no problem understanding them when they speak.
Yeah. Right.
A combination of different inflection, different accents, and different speeds makes the language I allegedly am fluent in sound like a foreign tongue. It is only when someone articulates that I can understand them if they're simply in passing. If they talk directly to me, so long as they don't speak at the speed of light, I understand them.
We thankfully didn't spend a long time in Dublin - we flew out after two nights. We'd barely gotten into the air, when an announcement crackled into our ears:
"We apologize for any inconvenience, but we've got a warning light on in here, so we've been asked to return to Dublin so we can check this out - we'll alert you when we're about to land."
PERFECT. About five minutes later...
"Folks, the warning light has gone off, but we're still going to
We rolled to a stop back in the Dublin airport, and had to switch airplanes after about ten minutes on the ground - we trudged from one blue tube to another, the Ryanair airplanes crunched, looking like midget planes in comparison to full-sized airplanes that land and launch around them.
I love flying - especially the first few minutes, right after you've launched into the air. The ground lies down beneath, green and patchy; you can gape at the view for just a moment, before it's gone, washed away by a white blanket that obscures the windows entirely, and you feel yourself moving up, up, up, and the plane bursts like a volcano out of the clouds and you find yourself above them. They spread out in all directions, father than the eye can see - like any classic depiction of heaven. The only things missing are winged babies and gold halos. The sky is blue again, and more clouds hover far from you, just out of reach. Peer down through a break in the clouds, and the ground is so far away - a deep ocean of white, not blue, and it's a long way down. The sun is nothing but a hazy yellow blur, and you feel like Icarus - don't want to get too close.
We rolled to a smooth stop in Paris - but that's a blog for a little bit later.
I don't know if it's at all interesting, but my first assignment for my ridiculous Travel Writing class was to combine word and image in some way, so I went and made a website from which a lot of this blog was ripped directly. You can see it here if you're at all interested, but the words might be similar to you, and if you've seen my facebook, so are the pictures. But consider it a preview for the Paris blog, if anything. Yeah. ANYWAY.
We're swathed in midterms here at the castle, and next weekend I'm off to Germany to meet up with the one and only Bonnie - should be interesting.
For the record - unlike Mallory, I did not discover famous ancestry in London - but the trip is young.
:)
