Houston, we have liftoff

nobody@vox.com(Lynne) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:12:12 +0100

My name is Lynne, I'm a college student in the northeastern United States, and I'm studying in London for the semester. Those are the basics. The other important thing to note is that I'm horrifically slow when it comes to doing things that ought to be done, sometimes, which is why I'm setting up this blog a full month after I regained internet access, and two months after I left home. This first flurry of entries is going to be made up of material from my notebook, covering 1 September through 17 October (look at the way I wrote those dates; I'm assimilating already!), with the eventual goal being that I catch up with current time so that I'm not blogging in the past anymore.

1 September, 2007

And we're off! Or I am, anyway. Months of planning, weeks of frantic packing, and hours of teeth-gnashing while on hold with Virgin Atlantic have culminated in this: me sitting on an Amtrak train on my way to New York City.

Maybe I should start at the beginning.

I applied to Goldsmiths University in February of this year, and found out in late April/early May that I had officially been accepted as a visiting student for one semester. My friend Andrew also applied and was accepted, and the second that we found out that classes don't begin until October, we knew what we had to do. The summer was spent e-mailing back and forth about hostels, airfare, train tickets, and general plans for a three-week Travel Extravaganza around continental Europe.

Today, I'm finally on my way.

My parents woke me at the crack of dawn (okay, 5:30. that sounds dawn-cracky, right?) and we piled my suitcase, backpack, and laptop case into the car. I promptly put a pillow up against the window and slept the whole way from Portland to Boston. We sat in South Station for a few hours, until I could finally board my train around 9:15. Hugs were exchanged, goodbyes were said, and I bolted for the train and my reserved seat.

Once the train had left the station, I settled down to serious business: taking notes from Europe for Dummies (thanks, Mom! your confidence is appreciated, as ever) and watching my fellow travelers. A number of people (including a group of women headed to Foxwood's, a girl who looked like a college student, and a blind man) got on in Boston and off in Connecticut, but I'm still holding down the fort. Or the car, as it were.

I've made friends with my seatmate. He's an older gentleman who got on in Connecticut with no visible luggage and a book in hand; it's fun to see someone who actually dressed up to travel, in the day and age of the yoga pant and flipflop. He sat down beside me with a nod, and he saw my Europe book and asked if I was going. It turns out that he's flying out of New York later today, headed for points Prague and Vienna, where he'd been stationed when he was in the service as a young man. We had a pleasant conversation, and chuckled later over fellow passengers, as a little boy tried to shove past a man waiting for someone else to pass in the aisle. The man made the most hideous 'good GOD' sort of put-out face at the kid.

We laughed. "People in this world need to learn to tolerate each other," my seatmate said.

"Or learn to be patient," I added. It's a nice thought, a world where people tolerated each other and each other's differences rather than causing conflict because of them.

About an hour out of South Sation, as I raised my head and looked out the window for the first time, it finally hit me: I AM OUT OF HERE! I'm on my way to Europe. It's a crazy feeling. I couldn't stop grinning at the window. We were crossing a bridge; the blueblue water sparkling as far as I could see, a number of small boats zipping past underneath, a Coast Guard sailing vessel in the distance in front of several islands, sea grass -- beautiful.

New York, here I come!

P.S. - Writing on trains is an acquired skill.

I don't think I've acquired it yet.

/12:30 PM

* * * * *

I reached Penn Station early in the afternoon. I said goodbye to my charming elderly seatmate, whose name I never caught, and he kindly helped me with my overwhelmingly heavy luggage, and we wished each other safe trips. Andrew met me at the station, and we took the subway back to his aunt's apartment in Soho. I knew the second that we stepped onto the subway car that we weren't on the subway I'm most familiar with, Boston. The trains and stations looked the same, sure, but when you sat down in a car -- I've found that in Boston, a lot of the time, all of the other passengers are white. That certainly wasn't the case in New York, unsurprisingly, given the city's diversity. This entire trip is going to be a serious departure from my norms, which I'm very happy about. I've lived my whole life in Maine, the whitest state in the nation, and study at a college where the student body is largely white. It's incredibly unfamiliar for me to be in environments where I'm not in the racial vast majority, and it's -- This is difficult to articulate without coming off as A) really weird, and B) sounding like I'm saying I HAVE BEEN OPPRESSED I TTLY UNDERSTAND RACISM NOW, which I'm not trying to say; I haven't been oppressed or anything of the sort. I feel like being in the minority somewhere, even if it's only for a short time, is something that people who are used to being in the majority should experience at least once in their lives. It makes you a little more conscious of how you conduct yourself when you're back to the environment that you're used to, and it's changed my point of view in some ways. More on that later, though.

Once I'd dropped my things at his aunt's apartment (tiny, adorable, and covered in all kinds of fabulous world travel souveneirs), Andrew and I met up with his friend Jessi and her friend Tal, and the four of us walked up to Washington Park. We wandered around and took an incredibly long walk through Soho toward the financial district. I don't know how long we'd been walking in the sun and the heat when we saw a huge, fenced-off construction site, and an Asian tour group standing on the steps of the Brooks Brothers store across the street, taking pictures.

It wasn't a construction site, of course. It was Ground Zero.

I didn't figure it out until I turned to Jessi, puzzled, and asked why the tourists were swarming all around us. She told me that it was the World Trade Center site, and I belatedly understood why there were enormous American flags flying. It left me with a funny taste in my mouth. This is how we memorialize? Fence it in and drape it in the flag? And all those people taking pictures of the site where people died, where people spent their last horrible minutes having to decide whether to burn or to leap from a window -- it felt vulgar. It felt disrespectful. [Note: Looking back at this is both strange and hypocritical, after I took pictures at Sachsenhausen. More on this when catch-up posts reach Germany.]

We continued on, and I wished I'd brought my camera. It was so strange to be fenced in on all sides by buildings, to have to crane my neck to see the sky. It was strangely beautiful, shafts of light streaking through gaps between buildings. We wandered past a few New York University dorms, where students were moving in. I was and remain very excited for Europe, but I was jealous that they got to have their stuff, their friends, get settled, while I was leaving behind all of my things, all of my friends, the possibility of a fall in my favorite place in an apartment with my favorite people. We made our way through the university section to South Street Seaport.

New York was something of a surprise, in that I was expecting diversity, but I wasn't expecting to hear so much not-English. It seemed like every other conversation was in another language. I heard Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and multitudes of others that I couldn't even place. We walked through the Seaport, me listening to the conversations going on around us, watching the tourists watch the street performers and duck in and out of shops. The Brooklyn Bridge was visible from that street, and we walked to and onto the Bridge.

The view was absolutely incredible. I can't believe I didn't bring my camera. Brooklyn ahead, Manhattan behind, the harbor and Governor's Island and the Statue of Liberty to the right, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building rising out of the skyline behind us, the setting sun reflecting in the shining city, the iconic spires and cables of the bridge surrounding us, cars below -- amazing. We walked all the way across and back. It took an hour or two, and by the end, I hurt from my hips to the soles of my feet, but it was worth it. We hopped the subway back to Soho, and the four of us and Andrew's dad went to dinner at a tiny Cuban restaurant. It was set down just below street level, with low lighting, the windows and doors thrown wide open, the hip regulars at the bar. After dinner (the best chicken soup I've ever had in my life, chosen thanks to how sick I was feeling by that point), we said goodbye to Jessi and Tal and went back to the apartment to sleep.

It was strange, listening to all that noise in the street below, when the only thing I'd heard all summer at night was the sound of my own breathing, the fan, the crickets, and the occasional car coming down my eleven-house dead end street. Laughing, shouting, music, cars -- it was fascinating, but also not conducive to my headache and nausea. Sleep didn't come easily, and it was fitful.

2 September, 2007

Woke at 4:20 AM, got dressed, gathered my stuff, came very close to puking my guts out, sweated out the ride to JFK International Airport and again came very close to throwing up, but didn't. My 'almost got sick but didn't' skills are getting a serious workout. New York City at four AM on a Sunday morning is a strange place. There were lots of drunks, lots of people still staggering home, carrying bottle in paper bags. We said goodbye to Andrew's dad at the airport, got inside -- and boom. I immediately felt better. Maybe it was nerves.

Either that or the aspirin I took at the apartment.

Either way, happily feeling better, I got all checked in with Andrew, checked our bags, and got into the line for security. There were big groups tearfully hugging and waving goodbye. The saddest was a young woman, tears streaming down her face as she kissed a baby in a stroller on the head, and then let a woman who looked to be Grandma wheel her away. Dignified and heart-rending.

Once we (finally; it took ages) cleared customs and were onto the concourse, we were home free! Early morning in an airport always feels like home to me. I am eternally grateful to my parents for having given me the opportunity to travel early and often, and for having taken me on planes all the time. I'm really comfortable with flying, whereas Andrew is (and was) a little more nervous. We didn't have long to wait before boarding, and off we went on Virgin Atlantic flight 26 from JFK to Heathrow. It was a good flight. It took off late, but the flight was smooth as glass and the seat backs had those mini TV monitors. I watched Hot Fuzz (forgive me one moment of capslocked incoherence but OH MY GOD SO GOOD) and the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie and The Office, and the time flew, forgive me the pun. The adorable four-year-old girl sitting in front of me and the games of peekaboo that we played between the seats also helped pass the time.

Upon landing, after circling Heathrow for a while and making me increasingly nervous about the amount of fuel left, Andrew and I spent an hour in the longest ever customs line from hell. Adding insult to injury, it took approximately 15-20 seconds for the people at the desk to deal with us. How was the line possibly that long if they were moving people through that quickly? It was interesting being in that customs line; there were only a handful of other whites (this is going to stop being weird to me eventually, I promise) and we were the only two Americans, from what I could tell. I haven't heard a single other American accent since I've gotten here; it's fantastic. Post-customs, we got ahold of our bags and I spoke to my friend Marthe's parents, Tom and Jo, and worked out where we would meet Tom. We moved on to the Underground.

I love the London Underground. The 'way out' and 'mind the gap' signs are iconic to me, and I love how huge it is, and how cool and cosmopolitan I feel being on it. (Also, 'mind the gap' makes me smile every time, now that I've read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, with the gap-monster that lives down there and grabs people's legs when they're too slow getting on trains.) We hopped on the Picadilly line and in a few stops were at Acton Town. Up a few flights of stairs--and seriously laboring, at this point, as there had been enormous stretches of ground to cover in Heathrow, and my bags were heavy--and Marthe's dad was there with the family van. We introduced ourselves and piled our stuff into the car, and zoomed off through London. The family lives in an area that isn't in central London (and while I know how to get there on the Tube, don't even ask me where exactly in London it is), and it was night. But I still grinned madly for the course of the entire ride, watching Tom drive on the left side of the road and the lights streak past on either side.

The family house is fantastic. It's been in the family since the '30's and it's literally right on the Thames, so much so that the river comes up to the top step at high tide. There's a nearby railroad bridge over the river built in the 17th century. The view from the back of the house is stunning, especially at night, as Tom showed it to us. The area didn't feel like we were in London. It was gloriously quiet. Tom and Jo were great; they fed us, talked to us, set us up to sleep in Marthe's empty room, and were generally amazing. As for the house, as I was saying before I distracted myself with discussions of how much Marthe's family saved our lives, it just -- it's one of those houses that feels like it has history to it.

Andrew and I repacked for the trip, and crashed hard and happy, because -- finally in London, baby.

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Stranger in a Strange Land

Houston, we have liftoff