Day 127, 13 May: Bus Tour, Harrods, New Jeans, Mom's Dinner

Anne of Cleves, London, Day 127. Bus Tour, Harrods, New Jeans, Mom’s Dinner

We spent the morning orienting ourselves to our new place, using our store-bought food to make breakfast—I was pleasantly surprised that the Biscuit cereal, despite Mom’s teasing that it looks like turd, did well with milk. I crushed the weird bars of cereal with my spoon and voila! decent-looking cereal. Then Dad and I took turns showering and shaving, and finally a little after noon, we made our way down the pier and toward the Tower of London. I ran back to get my Oyster card, baffled by the identical sequences of courtyards for minutes on end…it was like a spy mission somehow, so many hiding places.

          I came back to my dad having bought Golden Bus Tours—strangely the bus was blue, not gold (but still Cal colours, unintentionally)—and it was actually a very decent bus tour. Well and cheaper than the Original Bus Tour or the Red Bus tour. Whenever the female voice in the headset had nothing to say, passing business buildings, there was filler music—first classical but then inspiring guitar music. It made me think about getting better at it…

Harrods Food: So Good.

      We hopped off at Hyde Park corner, took pictures in front of a statue—me mimicking the statue and then Mom correcting me on my imitation—and we walked over to Harrod’s, one of the most famous department stores in the world. It does have everything from luxury (i.e. Luxury Room I…Luxury Room II…Egypt room?!? [Marie said this place was like a museum and it kinda was.]) to FOOD. There was so. Much. Good food. We decided to browse from the multiplicity of options and ethnic foods and settled on East-inspired foods I think it was. Pizza too. We ate it just outside Harrod’s. While we decided to go back in to look at the Jeans Lab downstairs…£200-jeans just weren’t going to cut it. Ridiculous price. On the way up I caught sight of a familiar quote on the wall: ‘My name is Ozymandias…’ The famous Egyptian statue inscription that poet Percy Shelley used in his poem ‘Ozymandias’. I smiled. We left in the direction of Carnaby Street, known for its shopping and what my flatmate Charlie recommended as a North Londoner. However, H&M was good—my new jeans were bought…

      Oh yeah, the story of why this was necessary: On the train to London, I raised my leg under the table so as to adopt a new leg position and then…oh, god, the rip was terrible. There had been a pre-existing crotch hole in my jeans for weeks but it was discreet. This was a freakin’ canyon but the trip went along the back, not the front, and every time I sat down, a sheer sensation of cold bench hit skin…I was glad to get new jeans (good idea to rip them when I was with my parents too!). Additionally, my mom bought a blouse and my dad a polo shirt.

At Trafalgar Square, my mom saw this
guy and said, 'That is the worst dancing
I have ever seen.' He was that bad.

While Buying Jeans....I almost couldn't
 resist. What if I had bought these
 shorts too? (Even my pants/boxers match.)

      Back on the bus tour, making a loop around the places we mostly just walked, we made it off near Trafalgar Square and that was when it first hit me, looking at an empty spot near the fountain. Katya and I had taken a picture there. And also at the Marble Arch I saw earlier and a pastry shop a few blocks away…unfortunately, all those pictures of us in London were erased accidentally, so…here I was recreating a visual of what had happened there: Both of us smiling while the American but not USA—South American (Colombian)—guy told us to move a little to the left to get a good shot of the sea creature in the background. I had felt her shoulder in my palm and felt myself naturally smile at the flash of the camera.

      Out of my reverie, we decided to head back to the Tower Hill flat and cook dinner. I had planned a skype date with Johnathan and it worked out pretty well, 9pm us—1pm him. It was odd seeing him while seeing the small screen of my camera illustrating me with my parents beside me. All semester it had been the other way around.

(My plan to do a timed photo shot
wasn't the best idea...but good dinner!)

      Dinner was fantastic. Nothing replaces my mom’s cooking (well I did help out with cooking, kinda habit at this point)—and the product: toast with a light cover of butter of peanut (as my mom jokingly put it), tortellini with bolognaise sauce (my mom, allergic to tomatoes, cooked up an orange-peel olive oil stir-fry (my idea with the orange peel) and since Dad and I envy what mom’s sauce is, we had some too). Afterwards, my mom could not get over me insisting that there was a spy museum in London…I finally had to face the truth: The International Spy Museum is in Washington, D.C. There is no spy museum in London (or is there? Tomorrow had more in store than I thought…).