Day 41, 17 Feb: Last-Minute London

Palmer’s Lodge, Willesden Green, London, Day 41. Last-Minute London

Norwich Railway Station

I have been in the UK for over a month—4 days in London and 36 days in Norwich. This weekend I couldn’t just keep up this lopsided tally: I needed to travel and not go stir-crazy in my room, on campus, or just around Norwich. There had to be a momentous shift in setting, and the answer came through Marika’s offer for me to join her and Alex on their weekend trip to London. After the indecisiveness Wednesday night, I made the resolution to go and come Thursday morning (yesterday), I bought two £16 tickets (to London and back to Norwich) and a one-night £15 accommodation at Palmer’s Lodge hostel in northwest London, a fairly quiet part called Willesden Green. The second night would’ve been significantly more expensive and I wanted Sunday to write the blog, skype back home, and try to catch up on reading. Come Friday, I shouldered my backpack and headed out to the Norwich Railway Station by bus. I was ready.

Since this will be a long entry, I have devised sections to divide up the length.

I.              Snow Drops and Societal Red-Tape: Conversations on the Train

On the National Express East Anglia train (which I took alone, since I found out only much later that my friends were taking a coach—oh well), I read a bit more of Jane Eyre, but about halfway through the two-hour ride, the lady seated across from me in those 4-seat table arrangements (two seats, table, two seats facing the former) began talking to me. In the awkwardly silent stage of any unfamiliar encounter, there can be little questions (I asked her, “Can we eat on the train?” She asked me later, “Do you know if the train stops at Stansted station?, etc.) that build up until a fluid conversation occurs and this is what happened. She pointed to a picture of a small white, naturally lilting flower in her Norwich magazine, saying “Snow drops. You must see them while in Norfolk. They’re in Walsingham. Think ‘waltz-in-ham’” The conversation soon flew into her recent travels to the US and then to my studying abroad at UEA in Norwich. She smiled and said, “Traveling broadens the mind.” She talked of her daughter doing one more year of preparing for A-levels (high school) in order to retake a few tests and try for university after being really sick for most of a year. She got into Leeds and now so many years later is living with her boyfriend in Australia for a year, and flying to California for the snow and skiing.

One story of hers actually helped me reconsider my oppressive image of dealing with all of society’s “red-tape” (security precautions, queues, conformity): her daughter was on a really slow bus to the Stansted Airport and was going to miss her non-refundable flight. The mother, the lady on the train, called the airport to tell them of the situation and asked if her daughter could go straight to the departure gate. After giving the airport correspondence all the details of appearance, name, and travel details, the mother gave her daughter all the directions and in the end, she flew through the airport and made the flight, with barely ten minutes to spare. “Sometimes, you just have to cut through the red-tape that society puts around you,” she concluded.

Upon leaving, she admitted, “It was nice to have met you,” and I returned the cordial remark. In the last minute, I asked her her name, wondering if that would at all matter after she had basically told me a summation of her life story (went to college near Norfolk, lives there now, worked as a teacher, retired and went off traveling, was on the train to a female Rotary club (public service for women and children) meeting in London). “Thorp”. Strangely, it didn’t affect the correspondence, for me. It was merely a name.

II.             In His Armchair, With his Pipe, Wearing His Hat

I looked up at the Liverpool Street Station’s metal-railed ceiling as high up as a cathedral’s vaulted arches, and felt a surge of refreshing freedom and bliss. I was back in London, amidst the organized bustle and teeming movement. I topped up my Oyster card for the Underground train system (“top up” is a very common British term for adding more money to an account) and headed off to Baker Street. Oh, you can guess why.

"You know my methods, Watson."

221B Baker Street. I found it: The Sherlock Holmes Museum, a place that would strike Sherlock as an unimpressive attempt at gathering authentic guns and pens and fires in fireplaces all mixed in with stuffed dummies, the Baskerville Hound’s head (a mantelpiece), and glass exhibits of only plausibly accurate items from his cases. Maybe the place would still amuse his inherent arrogance, nevertheless. For me, the self-guided tour was worth seeing, for the sake of Sherlockian fan loyalty, but the experience was far from moving. Still, I enjoyed it. The best part was dressing in “Sherlock’s” hat and pipe and having a woman dressed in an 1890s maid outfit (a Mrs. Hudson character) take my picture in “Sherlock’s” armchair. Unfortunately, I don’t think Sherlock would wear a blue checkered shirt with a half-zip up the front. 

III.            The Tube: London’s Labyrinth; Palmer's Lodge

I found Marika, Alex, and Morgana (another friend who joined last-minute) at the Victoria Railway Station and after an hour of orienting ourselves (going through long queues to get Oyster cards, topping them up, me buying all of us London maps), we navigated our way through the Underground, labyrinth of London, until we found our way onto the grey Jubilee line that led us to Willesden Green. While watching the trains weave out of dark tunnels and into the stations, I could not help but see them as mechanical worms navigating below the earth’s surface, eating and spewing people each time they stopped. 

Nautical Barracks of Palmer's Lodge

After being spewed onto Willesden Green station, we walked the quiet, predominantly residential streets and found Palmer’s Lodge, a backpacker’s hostel. It turns out that Marika, Alex, and I were all in the same 20-person co-ed room: the expansive room held 10 wooden bunk beds, each bed equipped with light, linen, and a bedside curtain (I felt as if I were in a submarine or some other nautical barrack—the place had a musky, wet dog smell about it too).

IV.             Reading Faces and Alternative Realities

Good Strawberry Cheesecake

         After a good cheap Chinese dinner, we agreed to appease Alex’s craving for cheesecake by sitting down at Mezzorama, a bistro with glass displays of cakes at the counter. Three of us had strawberry cheesecake, Morgana had tiramisu. The cheesecake had a less rich flavour than a NY-style one would, but the shortcake taste made it all the better. We took pictures of our food and the place—the ambience was exceptional: glittering jades on the ceiling, exotic walls, dim lighting supplemented with a warm firelight. After our dessert, I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked behind me to see a harmless, smiling face ask me where we were from. Our picture-taking had given us away. We told him California, Boston, Colorado, and Oregon—America, he concluded. 

       Soon his other two friends joined the conversation and all seven of us felt at ease with one another. The interesting part of the whole thing was an artistic reluctance to tell each other anything directly: we had to guess all their names, guess their careers, guess their ages, and guess where they were from (the last one actually came up first, since we had started with being from America). Marika actually was almost spot-on in her evaluations: she saw the hat on one of them and thought artistic but also in a leadership position and some banking or accounting career (he actually worked for himself as an IT consultant for investment bankers—very close); she saw the more reserved guy in the corner with his bulky frame yet mellow face and thought teaching or law (I thought law too since I had admitted my interest in law school and he had brightened at the comment; but he was a high school teacher who had almost done law school except for a family bereavement recently); lastly, Marika saw the first guy who had spoken to us and saw a job with computers (the guys laughed since it implied that he was a geek; I perceived his bright-coloured shirt to represent his artistic side being suppressed by his black coat; he was an architect, who inevitably worked with computers but not as a geek). Their names were David (architect), Jeff (teacher), and Maurice (hat guy, IT consultant)—all around mid-twenties and only David I know was Jamaican British.

            They evaluated us too: Marika looked like a Jennifer, I was just the surfer dude, and then others. Marika looked artistic so her majors were almost guessed correctly (film and art), Alex blew them away that she was a math major (and not something design or art-related), Morgana’s major and name stumped them—she answered as an anthropology major. I had told them mine earlier, as one of the first questions David had asked me before the discussion had extended to all seven of us.

Left to Right: David/Trevor, Jeff/Samuel, Maurice/Linwall

            The next part got interesting: we had names and majors/careers, but now we asked each other what our alternative ones would be. David was a Trevor of another artistic field; Jeff was a Samuel of executive business; Maurice a Linwall the Gospel singer (that was my notion). Marika a fashion designer, Alex a sculptor (Maurice had just instantly thought this), Morgana an owner of a PR company. At me, Maurice again just said surfer dude, but Jeff said there was much more to me than that. He saw musician. Lead guitar. Then he mentioned how I had this benevolence that would put me in a service field of work, helping others. I was glad I was no longer a surfer, since I’ve only done it twice and the California stereotype gets old quickly.

            Thus two hours flew by, but this chance meeting was one of those events that surprise all involved, remove any sense of expedient or hurried time, and attest to the eternal feeling of the possibility of human connection that can occur anywhere in the world.