My goodness, they don’t even care about security here! If you leave the Schengen Countries in the EU, you have to go through passport control, but they never ask you questions since you’re leaving. Last time they gave me a departure stamp, but this time she didn’t even do that. I would swear she didn’t even look at my passport…
Note to self: Take EasyJet since it’s cheap, but do not make plans for 2 or so hours after the expected arrival times. 3/3 times I’ve taken it, it’s had some delay – I didn’t have any plans this time, but I would have if they hadn’t previously fallen through. I was supposed to crash at the BU dorms in London but after a rather lot of effort, it turned out I couldn’t. Good thing, though, because I didn’t get to the airport until 11:30, London proper at midnight…there was some huge hubaloo at Victoria Station on the Tube line I needed to take (I asked Jayne later and she sad a girl had been stabbed – eep!), so I had to take a different, more roundabout way. I managed to catch the LAST one to my hostel (which was not my normal hostel :( Since I booked last minute, it was all full!), and so didn’t get checked-in and to bed until 1 AM, 2 my time.
And te check-in man/security guard looked at my passport photo, looked at me and said, “You were chubby then. Now you’re thin.” Thaaanks??
Apparently going to England for a week is more convincing than for 3 days. They didn’t ask to see my return ticket. Or maybe it was because I said I was going to Hull, and no tourist would ever think of going to Hull, and no tourist pretending to be a tourist would say that. Of course they asked if my friends were American again, but this guy gave me the benefit of the doubt and said, “Are these friends American or British?” And then, of course, asked where I met them. But that, at least, makes sense.
I had an okay sleep, but I had really weird dreams – something about work, and I had to do some errand for the mailroom in London. No idea where that came from. Maybe since I was meeting a mailroom coworker the next day.
In the morning I chatted with a lovely old Englishman who was staying in the hostel. He said good morning, I returned the same, and he said, “American?” Then he talked to me for a bit. Old men who stay in hostels are adorable.
I didn’t have a map since they charged at the hostel (geeze, they may have been nice, but not very poor-student friendly!). I’d done some google mapping though to find the hostel, and the Natural History Museum was very close. So I wandered in the general direction, hoping I’d find one of those nice poles that point in the various directions of tourist sites. I didn’t find one, and though I knew which direction I needed to go, something drew me back in the opposite direction to the Tube Station I’d come in the night before. Something was saying, “Go in the opposite direction from where you need to go…come on…it’s a smart idea…”
If I ever had to live in London, I would want to live in this area.
Turns out my inner sense of direction is tuned to the TARDIS, which was just kind of chilling on the street at Earl’s Court. Fantastic!
I managed to direct myself to the Natural History museum almost fully on memory of general direction. One time I started to worry and found a bus stop, which said I was on the right street and had just prematurely worried.
The museum is absolutely gorgeous, and it has the absolute best gargoyles.
There was a ridiculously insane long line, and I still don't know why...
It’s also amazing inside. I wrote this about halfway through – “Oh my gosh, the Natural History Museum is, I think, one of my new favorite places. It’s amazing! Whenever I go to natural history museums or zoos, though, it makes me want again to be a paleontologist or a zoologist.
It’s so gorgeous outside and set up beautifully inside. I’m just wandering around in awe. If you’re ever in London, go here.”
I suppose, if you don’t like fossils or skeletons or shiny rocks/gems, then it’s not for you, but I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven. Possibly very strange, but I think my heaven would look like the Natural History Museum with an addition of a gigantic library and outside there’d be lots of dogs. How can you get better than a place with dodo birds and dinosaurs, though?
KEVIN!
The worst part of the museum
Mary Anning found this! Aunt Mary sent me a book about her and ever since I've wanted to see her fossils...(Remarkable Creatures - interesting book).
Dodo bird!
All the marble the Romans used
I like rainbows
This is my absolute favorite color
Rock from Mars
Hey, Charles!
Awesome ancestor of the armadillo
They even had fun mirrors!
And cute marsupials!
DINOSAURS
I want one of these in my room
I do not want these in my room
The only sad thing was they didn’t actually have a T-Rex skeleton. I was so surprised, because they have such a good dinosaur section. They did have an animatronic scary T-Rex.
One of the brilliant reasons why dinosaurs may have gone extinct
After I left, I still had about three hours to kill before I was going to meet Lauren D. for dinner. I went back to the hostel to get my stuff, and along the way, it decided to rain for about ten minutes. I ran inside to the hostel, though I was already pretty wet, got my stuff, put my waterproof jacket on – which I had smartly brought to England but not so smartly packed for the day – went outside, and marveled at how it could still be raining when all the clouds in the sky had disappeared. The rain stopped after about five more minutes.
I went to Starbucks to hang out there for several hours and do some editing, but editing was not to be. It seems it was a day of talking to random strangers. I had just sat down and become settled, when a man tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me?” He asked if I had been at the hostel the night before, and said he had stayed there as well. He was from Belgium and was practicing his English. He was a little hard to understand, and I also don’t keep up conversations very well, so it was kind of weird but I guess cool.
Then, I finally went back to editing when a man asked if he could sit on the other chair at the table. The Starbucks was completely full since people had run in to escape the rain, so I said sure. I went back to what I was doing for about five minutes, before the man asked me what I was editing. (Actually, he asked if it was an essay or a thesis). I get really antsy talking about my writing, I really don’t like it, but I also can’t lie very well, so I said it was a story. Thankfully, he didn’t go on too much about it, but he started talking about how I should edit with the story double spaced because it was easier…and how he’d written two theses. And he had one of them with him, for some reason, so he showed it to me. Then he asked me where I get my sources, and he began this huge talk about sources and how they can come from anywhere and how there’s a group of artists, called Dadaists who use collages of things and try to make meaning out of it. It was kind of interesting, although I can’t find really anything of what he said in this article. He also said the origin of the word was from South America…He then asked what I was studying, and got very distressed when I said I studied history. Well, actually, no I said I studied history, and he went on about his sources, and then five or ten minutes later came back to the fact that I was studying history, got honestly and seriously distressed, saying, “WHY did you choose history? Why didn’t you go into something like business?” He himself did sculpture and then architecture, so he said it didn’t make any money either…it was odd. At the end, when he had to go, I learned that his name was Felix, and he told me my name was a very beautiful name, which I fully agree with ;-D Hence the no nickname thing. And to show you the way he talked, when he left, I said “nice to meet you” and he said, “No, it was my pleasure. It will have been my greatest pleasure to have met you, I promise you.” Ahhh, random encounters with talkative strangers are always interesting. This goes down in my life book as an interesting moment. And, coincidentally enough, gave me an idea for one of the stories brewing in my head.
I was finally able to do some editing when he left, then I met Lauren at King’s Cross, and she took me to a nice, reasonably priced restaurant, and we had a nice time catching up. Spent a good deal of time talking about the mailroom and Lost. And how expensive both Copenhagen and London are.
From there, it was back to King’s Cross and on the train! That was the longest three-hour train ride. I was tired but I couldn’t sleep, and then my iPod ran out of battery (luckily only with about half an hour left), and I just wanted to get to Hull. I was so excited! And then I was finally there, and Jayne was waiting for me…it was so amazing to see her again! Everything just felt so natural – it was interesting. It just felt like it hadn’t been 7 months and that we were back at Brodsworth again, except without the dirt…and a few new people.
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