London Trip

My roommates have left for the week and have gone to Michigan, taking my day-job with them. SO I am left with lots of time on my hands and no one to spend it with. With my newfound time I went to London to stay with D (who I met through Nick) and bum around the city for 2 days. D took me to a nice party thrown by one of her professors (she is getting her MA in dance anthropology). I met the other people in her program and some
of her professors and talked to some other who gave me good ideas of places to visit and things to see/do (for example, in Paris you can rent bicycles cheaply and cycle around the city which means you can see more of the city and pay less to see it). We also went shopping at the charity shops in Richmond and had lunch sitting next to the Thames. This morning I went to Camden Town and paid a little too much for a beat up brown leather satchel (but it fits ALLL of my requirements for a travel satchel: it can hold a sweater, an umbrella, my wallet, my sunglasses, my glasses, a book, my phone, and some papers quite comfortably and has a lot of compartments and it's a little beat up and unobtrusive). I like Camden Town for the most part, but they didn;t have any interesting septum jewelery and they were all trying to sell different versions of the same things (spiral-y hippy jewelery, vintage clothes which I love but can't justify buying at this moment (side note: when will I ever have enough money to justify buying the superfluous things that I want?), leather goth stuff, handmade leather bags, and cheaply made trendy things) and so they all kind of stepped all over each other. I also got depressed because I have been hoping that I could find somewhere one of those blazers that school children wear. Some just too small and awkwardly fitting enough but a little worn and maybe with a school patch on the breast pocket. Unfortunately, I think that there are recycling programs from these jackets, or they're used until they fall off the wearer or technically the school owns them and therefore reclaims them at the end of the school year. Humph.

While walking to the train station I saw a chicken and kebab shop called "Tennesseeland" which I thought was a funny mis-translation.

The Westminster underground station is exactly my idea of the interior of either a space ship or a post-apocalyptic bunker. It's huge, but underground and therefore made of steel and concrete and has staircases jutting out from one wall of this enormous space and shooting into the opposite side. The florescent lighting is bizarrely hidden in niches and nooks and therefore gloams from nowhere. I felt like I should be stomping the steel tiles in leather boots with unnecessary buckles and wearing gray linen pants and an army green sweater in tatters, you know, Matrix-style. Also at the Westminster Underground they have enclosed the tracks in a clear plastic case, so that when a train comes the trains doors line up with doors in the casing and they open (somewhat) simultaneously to let people on/off. This shell and the dim lighting serve to make me feel like I am boarding futuristic space trains that will drop out into the ether and take me to another planet. But it still feels like public transportation because people still grumble and politely ignore each other and are in a rush to get wherever they are going. So it's, you know, nonchalant space travel.