Days 4-10: March 29-April 3
The plan: Take the train to London with Emma, meet Katherine and stay with her until we both head to Paris (she by Chunnel train, I by plane). Explore London solo while Katharine finishes a paper but simultaneously solidify plans for the rest of the trip.
The result: Failure on the "solidifying plans" part, but otherwise, success. This train reached its destination only 5 minutes behind schedule (as opposed to 6 hours) and gave us a lovely, comfy tour of the Scottish/English countryside. (Read: naptime.) And if you disregard the fact that I wasn't able to text Katherine at first because I'd forgotten that she'd lost her phone and now had a different number--which required me to go to Emma's cousin's house with her so that I could use my computer to look up Katherine's new number, which in turn required a long and fraught search for Emma's cousin's wireless key, and which culminated in me being able to contact Katherine long enough to arrange the vaguest meeting spot imaginable ("Just call me when you get to Waterloo Station"...which is like saying, "Call me when you get to Virginia")--then, yeah, everything went off without a hitch.
We successfully navigated the Tube and managed to find Katherine despite the mammoth size of the station, which was just a hop/skip/jump away from her housing. From then on it was smooth sailing.
Lies, you say. And yet, I can't think of anything that went wrong while I was in London. I didn't lose anything (this time....Did I neglect to mention that I left my birth certificate in Stansted Airport at the end of my previous visit to this lovely city?); I didn't get lost during three and a half days of trekking all over London alone (because the city is an idiot-proof Mecca of arrowed signage); and I successfully decided what to do, figured out how to do it, and proceeded to do it. (If these seem like unimpressive accomplishments, I refer you to the records of numerous politicians.)
I won't go into too much detail because it's been brought to my attention that I leave Ireland in less than 48 hours, and I want to have time to churn out a few more posts before I say goodbye to this hemisphere. So suffice it to say that I spent a lot of time walking and Tubing around the city, hitting up the places I missed (or didn't see enough of) last time and just generally enjoying the vibrancy of my surroundings. I've never been to New York City or anything else that comes close to London in scale, so it was really cool (and far less overwhelming than I would've thought) to be in the midst of that.
It was also tremendously empowering for me to be able to navigate a place like this and feel as if I was getting the most out of it. Before I started this trip I dreaded the prospect of having to travel alone, but once I was fending for myself in London I was able to appreciate the freedom that came with it. I could go wherever my fancy took me, stay someplace as long as I wanted, and indulge my nerdy side to my heart's content, all without worrying that I might be boring or irritating my travel companions with my whims. That said, I did find myself getting lonesome by the end of a long day of exploring, especially when I felt like the only lone visitor in a place that was inundated with tourists; everyone else seemed to be attached to a group of friends or a family. But it was impossible to be depressed when I was geeking out at the British Museum or gawking at Saint Paul's Cathedral or crushing on the costumed, role-playing tour guide at Hampton Court. And seeing so many families actually made me rather happy; I was glad that parents were taking their children to see things like the Tower of London. I kept thinking, "Lucky kids!"
Of course, I kept thinking that about myself too, in singular form.
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