Harlington Hotel, London. Day 3.
I awoke to the sound of sweeping, as of leaves and dirt on sidewalk, and got off my bed to peak out of my closed-curtain window to find a lady cleaning the street. The oddness quickly turned to mere amusement. In the next hour I had a very English breakfast, as it was advertised in this bed-and-breakfast hotel. Again meat-dominated, the meal was good, especially with the black tea with milk (apparently the common morning British tea). Amy invited me to seat with her as breakfast winded down. The rest of the morning took place in transit until our group reached the Tower of London. The tour was brilliant.
After the seventy-minute tour, the 900-year brief history lecture was efficiently done, thanks to our beef-eater (oh, that is the Tower of London tour guide’s title; in fact, all guides live with their families in quaint houses in the Tower—just in case you are confused, the place is really a castle with roughly ten (*CHECK*) towers—and all guides must have first served in the British military for a number of years. So the position is actually prestigious and highly respected.). Since our group had free time, we split off into smaller groups and checked out the Crown Jewels—and the ages-old, kingly gold-not-silver-ware—along with the White Tower and the Bloody Tower (a.k.a. torture chamber! One of the favorites for the torturers was the “rack”, in which the human body is stretched beyond any sense of comfort). I became rather fond of these metal modern-art-esque figurines, even posing with one of them with a spear trained on the outside wall. I was also particularly proud of a motivic joke I kept up about the abundance of “Norman”-titled places: i.e. a few of us (Reeanne, Bri, Jami, Amelia, and myself) were amused by the Norman toilet, the Norman fireplace, the great Norman window, and the “Great Norman Staircase”. Yes, all but the toilet were named exactly like that. The toilet had a more proper but archaic name that I cannot remember.
My first trip on a red double-decker bus was to Covent Gardens, a place of street performers, tea shops, narrow streets and various pubs and lunch places. Reeanne, Amelia, and I decided on a cheap but quality half-supermarket, half-lunch bar place. The bags were quite funny: their paper design was of woven basket mesh. We next all bought cheap-cheap phones—I must say, after having a smartphone for three whole months (yes, a long time, I know), it feels bizarre to degrade down to the lowest tier, a £2.95 phone with a pay-as-you-go plan (very, very popular in Europe, unlike the American crappy version of it). The ironic thing is my phone has a feature I have never seen before: the “Fake Call” application. I type in a caller’s name, a call duration, and a ringtone (this I’m not sure why) and wham! You have a made-up call in your call history. I instantly saw the use of this as a good tool to create an alibi for a crime…why that was the first thing to come to mind is beyond me. But I probably will never use it anyway.
The day’s schedule kept going and going: now we had the across-London scavenger hunt. I was in my UEA-bound group (those going to the University of East Anglia): me, Sierra, and Rebecca. Yep, there are only three of us out of the ten going to UEA, the others are off to Kent. Luckily, for the scavenger hunt, there were two groups of Kent. The hunt was actually quite elaborate: there were upwards of 16 questions and many more objects/places to photograph alone or with two people in the group in the background/foreground (to justify that we were there, I guess?). As holder of the map for the three-person group, I recall that our two-hour, fast-paced, foot-sore journey took us from Covent Gardens to the National Museum of Art (free admission, amazing) to Piccadilly Circus (a place of neon lights and shops) to the gates of Buckingham Palace (God save the Queen) to Westminster Abbey (utterly beautiful) past Big Ben (it lights up wonderfully at night) over the Westminster bridge and finally ending at The London Eye (which I recognized from the first episode of Doctor Who of a recent season…2006?) (*CHECK*). Dinner at Strada just outside the Thames was great—we all swapped phone numbers and I ate a lot of the girls’ unfinished desserts. Well, except all the tiramisu. Just not my thing, coffee and chocolate.
Watching the comedic play Noises Off! at the Old Vic Theatre was brilliant. I laughed so hard at times I thought I’d fall off the balcony. The only unfortunate event was afterwards when we were missing one of the group. We found out that she had been in the bathroom for the last two hours—she had food poisoning. As our program manager took care of her, the rest of us headed back to the hotel to recoup and get ready for the night at the pub.
A disappointing fact pierced into the bubble of my glamorous view of London nightlife: at least where we were, in the East End, most of the pubs closed at 11, or sorry, 23:00. We all finally found one on Euston Street and had a round of cider. Again, specifics are not coming to mind. It was fun, though, and I got warmly buzzed. The night ended in jolliness.
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