An American Girl in London – Day 1
Or:
How London Chewed Me Up Like a Game Day Tortilla Chip and Threw Me Up Like a Frat Boy’s Friday Night Dinner

My body woke me up extraordinarily early again on my first official day in London, as it has on pretty much every morning since I got back from Edinburgh. Have come to the conclusion that my body doesn’t care what time it is when it wakes me up – it responds instinctively to the sun’s appearance in and disappearance from the sky. That would explain why I’m getting tired later and waking up earlier now that the sun is rising at frakking 4 o’clock in the morning. Crazy British sun. I can only hope that my body will still want to get up so early two weeks from now.
I showered at about 7, using the soap I bought at ASDA when I went with Ali and washing my hair with the hotel’s provided shampoo (I was leery about using it but it did the job well enough). I have come to the unhappy conclusion that Scottish life has been harder on my hair much more than American life ever was, and that I will probably have to put my dream of growing my hair long on hold and have several inches cut when I get back home. Or probably after my internship, so that I can wear it curly over the summer without it looking poofy.
I had myself ready for breakfast at exactly 8:30, and descended the 98 hotel steps to the Barry House’s small dining room. It was not buffet-style as I had expected – there was toast and jam set out on the table for me and a wee menu to order from. The staff was quiet but obliging, and the food (except the odd-tasting sausage) was very good.
My first impression of London, in the warm sunshiny-ness, was that it seems like a very academic place - all of the streets I walked on that morning felt like they could be right outside a university ("uni") campus. Later on I simply got an impression of absolute massiveness. The buildings are bigger than the ones in Edinburgh, and there are a lot more of them.
My first stop in the morning was the Sherlock Holmes Museum on Baker Street. I got there at roughly 20 past 9 and was dismayed to find that it was closed. However, I soon realized that the museum doesn’t open until 9:30, so I was contented to wait. Two women showed up right after me, and one of them took a picture of me knocking on Sherlock Holmes’s door. I was surprised when in a matter of minutes there were suddenly a dozen people waiting around with us to get in.
The souvenir shop was amazing, and I saw so many things that I may have bought if I had unlimited money and unlimited space in my suitcases. They had Masterpiece: Sherlock on DVD (which I couldn’t buy even if I had talked myself into it, because I’m not sure how UK DVDs differ from American DVDs), little Sherlock teddy bears (which I would have gotten Mom if, again, I had money and space, but they were £25 and in an awkward-to-pack box), all kinds of keychains (one of which I did buy), handcuffs (both full-sized and keychain-sized), tiny hand(or rather finger)-cranked music boxes (including one that plays “Love Me Tender”), chess sets featuring famous characters (3 different sizes, painted and unpainted), a test tube with a cigarette and a match inside (“In case of emergency, break glass”), tiny compasses (which later in the day I wished I had bought), etched whiskey bottles, many many books and trinkets and pens and all manner of other things.
I bought my ticket for the museum and went next door, past the constable and up the (17) steps to the famous Baker Street sitting room, with Dr. Watson’s room adjoining. Up the stairs on the third floor were two rooms that held plenty of late 19th century items as well as artifacts from Holmes’s various cases, while the fourth floor had life-sized characters from the Holmes canon with brief descriptions of the scenes depicted. It really freaked me out at first to walk into one of the rooms and find the lifeless faces and motionless bodies of Sir Grimesby Roylott, James Moriarty, Neville St Claire, Violet Hunter, and others. The massive, mounted head of the Hound of the Baskervilles hung over a book that held several amusing real-life letters written by people, mostly children, just to say hello to their favorite consulting detective and/or ask for his help with some weird mysteries that were stumping them, or, in at least one case, to offer consulting services of their own.
As everyone is well aware, I cannot think ahead or strategically remember anything to save my life, so of course my camera battery died before I had taken all the pictures I wanted in the museum. I made for the exit, speaking to the constable at the door about whether I would be allowed to return without buying a new ticket as long as I came back before they closed. He said yes, so I started back toward my hotel ( a half an hour walk) with the intention of charging my camera for two hours or so, returning to the museum, then making my way toward the Thames to see the many touristy places there. When I got back to my room, however, I discovered to my dismay that I had brought the wrong converter with me… and the 1600-watt one was too powerful to use for my battery charger. I worried and hesitated, then decided to go back out with my charger and find a lower-wattage converter. The ones in the States were only a few dollars, after all; I could find a random restaurant that had outlets for customer use and charge it for a while before exploring some more.
*WARNING: RACIST-SOUNDING BUT HONEST SENTENCE APPROACHING*I had wandered the streets around my hotel a bit the day before and found it to be on the edge of a very heavily Lebanese part of the district, so I thought for sure I should be able to find an electronics store that could help me out.
*END OF RACIST-SOUNDING BUT HONEST SENTENCE*
After a bit of searching I found a place called Maplin Electronics that had converters. However, the £14.99, 100-watt ones were out of stock and the 45-watt ones were f%#&ing 25 quid. The girl that helped me was really nice, however, and recommended a few other places I could try. I walked into two SONY stores, a luggage and travel center, a Boots Pharmacy, at least 3 random electronics stores and an Argos (a store that keeps all its stock in warehouses and has you check catalogues in the store, check computers to see if they’re in stock, then pay for them at the registers and have them retrieved from the warehouse. They had like 500 majillion items in their catalogue, and not one of them was a power converter for low-voltage handheld appliances). Alas, Edgeware Street failed me.
I wandered back to Maplin, dejected and frustrated. After staring at their stock (or lack thereof) hoping for some piece of this predicament to miraculously change in my favor, I bought the bloody converter. From there I went across the street to a Café Nero to find an outlet and something to eat for lunch. The sandwich could be called decent, but the frappe thing was like slurping up an almost-coffee-flavored marshmallow puree, but not as sweet. I sat for around 45 minutes, scrutinizing my map and deciding for exactly how long to let my battery charge. I decided to return to Baker Street once more, then make my way toward Kensington Palace and Hyde Park with what battery power I had.
I got very confused when I cut through Hyde Park, as it seemed that the map I had didn’t exactly correspond with what I was seeing. When I thought I was going west to Kensington Palace I was in fact going east toward Buckingham. Very well, then, I thought. I’ll see Buckingham, and maybe go all the way to the Thames if I felt so inclined.
A Boots Pharmacy on Oxford Street had great deals on bottled water, and I got two 750 mL bottles of Evian (only because they were cheapest) for £1.80. That’s a good deal on regular bottled water – on Evian it was darned fantastic (I thought). And, even though I have scoffed at expensive bottled water in the past, I have to say, in all honesty, that I will continue to scoff at expensive bottled water in the future. It didn’t taste like anything special. It just tasted like bottled water. And only one of them was chilled. Slightly.
My battery died around the time I made it to Big Ben, just before Westminster Abbey. I think the last picture I got was of a statue of Abraham Lincoln (I wandered toward Westminster Abbey thinking, “Hey, that looks like Abraham Lincoln!... hey, wait a minute…”).
With my camera once again not playing along, I began mapping a route back to my hotel, expecting to find a random restaurant along the way at which to find dinner. Oh, sweet Chan alive it was a long walk. And I mean a LONG WALK. I don't know how far I walked, but I feel like I could have gone through 3 Eastern European countries in the time I spent walking around London. By the time I was a third of the way back I felt like collapsing, and had to keep looking at the next landmark and thinking, “Just to there, then I’ll be at [blank], then I can turn at [blank] and it’ll be just… oh, GOD IT’S SO FAR!!”
I stopped at a small newsstand-style place for a bite of candy because I suddenly felt like I needed something fruity, and I apparently was entertaining to the cashier there, what with my involuntary head-bobbing to music I didn’t know and taking so long to decide on a candy. I tried something called a Curly-Wurly, which is like a stick of caramel coated in chocolate, and loved it, and I bought some British Starburst. Of course, it tastes nothing like real Starburst.
Later – it’s impossible to tell how much later, as the passage of time was suddenly impossible to guess at – I came upon a Sainsbury’s store (the chain I used in Edinburgh to buy food for a homeless man and his dog) and thought I’d buy some food cheaper there than at a restaurant and just bring it back to my room. It was cheaper, by at least 3 quid, and would have been cheaper had the self-checkout lane honored the “Buy 2 Pastries, Get 1 Free” promotion that was plastered all over the pastry aisle. And before you go thinking I just got junk food, you should know that I also bought a tomato and cheese sandwich, which was pretty good, and a little basket of grapes. So there.
After that it was more walking. Walking, walking, walking, walking. Then after that there was a brief period of sitting, then more walking. And walking. And being tired and achy and frustrated with the events of the day. I felt like London had pushed me in the mud, then pointed and laughed at me and made me walk home without offering a ride. Well, actually there were rides to be had in the form of buses, but they didn’t work the same way Edinburgh buses do and I didn’t want to risk ending up in Wales.
At one point on my trek back I swear to Chan a bug flew up my left nostril.
Also, I am clearly allergic to London; the closer it got to dusk the more I found myself sneezing, which didn't help my loathing and self-pitying one bit. I wonder if I might be allergic to the brown fluffballs littering the sidewalks, which I'm assuming come from some menacing English bush or tree or possibly an urban woodland creature. Whatever it is, it's TRYING TO KILL ME.
And there were SO MANY PEOPLE. Oh, so many people. Most of them paid me no attention, some were blatantly self-centered in either taking up the whole sidewalk and walking like diseased livestock in a peat bog (*snerk* I accidentally spelled it “livestonk” and Microsoft Word got angry) or in walking straight toward you, looking straight at you and not making a single move to avoid a collision, forcing you to quickly sidestep to the right, directly in the path of another pedestrian, who scoffs and rolls her eyes at you like you’re an ignorant street urchin. On the plus side, the cabbies seem to be a more or less polite lot, and there were several times when they stopped to let me cross a street even when they clearly had the right-of-way. Great chaps, those cabbies. Except the ones that poison people for money by offering them poison and then threatening to shoot them with a gun if they don’t take it. But that was just the one.
When I opened my second bottle of Evian in my room, my first sip went straight into my trachea.
I swear London is trying to kill me.

Last day in Edinburgh
Angela called Doug on Saturday evening to ask him if he was going to be over for a cookout, because he’d said the last time he was here that he’d have to grill me some hamburgers before I leave to go back to Oatridge. I went out for a little while to buy something, and wandered about the Royal Mile and Princes Street and George IV Road and Chambers Street. I got back at around 1:30 and Doug was already there. I told Angela that I wished I could go up to Hollyrood again since the weather was beautiful and the sky was crystal clear, and she surprised me by saying, “Sure, we’ll drive up there!”
Angela, Doug, Vanessa and I left for Hollyrood in Doug’s car only to find that the park is off-limits to cars on Sundays. If we wanted to walk we were perfectly welcome to, but I think I was the only one in the group that was up for a little bit of climbing. No way I felt like going all the way to the top due to time and energy and hunger constraints, but I might have taken a stab at it. It really was a beautiful place.
Instead we headed up to a place called Prestonfield, where I got to see a male peacock erotically (if you’re a female peacock) flashing his beautiful tail feathers at us, as well as a pair of Highland cows and a young man in a kilt, with whom Angela insisted I have my picture taken. After that we went to a place called Dobbies (the house elf?), which was like a furniture store, café, deli, produce stand and seasonal shop all rolled into one. It was pretty neat, and all the food looked amazing! We stopped in the café for scones and tarts and juice and lattes and hot chocolate (between the four of us), then headed over to the foodmart area. They had a special area set up to sample various flavored olive oils with bits of bread, and I’m pretty sure I sampled the garlic oil at least 6 times, maybe 7, just to be sure. It was good every time. Angela and Doug each bought two cute little glass vial things full of oil while I took some pictures of the place.
We dropped Vanessa off at her friend Sadie’s house, then stopped at Tesco for some ingredients Doug needed for couscous and burgers, plus some Bailey’s (nom nom nom) for me. After that we went off to a place called B&Q, which I suppose is kind of like a Lowe’s or a DIY sort of place, and got a small grill, some charcoal and lighter fluid (we were apparently not nearly as prepared for barbecue-ness as I had imagined we were). After we got back and I changed, I brought my laptop down to the dining room to play some Irish tunes and helped Doug put the grill together (unlike a lot of men, he both welcomed my help AND followed the directions).
I worked on a blog (this one, as a matter of fact) while listening to Irish music colored by the sounds of Angela and Doug bickering like best friends in the kitchen. I giggled more than once.
We had a delightful dinner – Doug’s couscous were way better than the stuff that LEC gives us – and I spent some time sharing pictures with Angela and Courtney, mostly from my laptop’s “Hawtness” folder, because I figured we could all use a boost in morale, you know?
After Courtney and Angela went to bed (it was only 9:30 or so) I stayed up and talked to Doug about being an American in Scotland and finding cheap transportation. I also filled him in on what the Hanson brothers have been up to since their “disappearance” from the “scene” in 2000. He needed to know.
I miss the softness of the bed, and the fact that it’s a real mattress and not a plastic one, the awesome shower (it’s amazing compared to what I’ve been dealing with at Oatridge) complete with detachable shower head, the full-length mirror, the feeling of having a surrogate family, the convenient buses, the beautiful views, the plethora of nooks and closes to explore, the ease of locating a T-Mobile, and, more than anything else, the AMAZING home-cooked meals.
I missed my Heritage peeps, but otherwise I did NOT want to come back to college.
WAAAAAAH!!!
♥
SM