So I wrote this for my school blog, and I thought that since it was already all written up, I thought I would add it to this blog! I will blog about everything else I've done in the next few days - because I've done a lot! That said, enjoy!
Part One: Dragging our Damn Heavy Bags All Over the London Tube
My friend Caron and I left Oxford this morning bright and early (meaning, I slept through my alarm so Caron woke me up by knocking on my door!) not so much mourning our last moments in Oxford as wishing that our bags were not so heavy! Finding ourselves in Gloucester Green was a blessing, and our student tickets to London on the Oxford Tube were expensive, as usual. We successfully navigated the tube system in London (after a few embarrassing topples of our bags! WHERE are all of the elevators in this country?!) and found ourselves in Morden – or as we fondly call it, Mordor. We are staying with my friend Siobhan for the weekend, and decided that we’d deposit our bags at her house and then head back into Central. We suffered the mile or so from the tube station to her house (looking miserable enough for a man to slow his car and ask if we wanted a lift! We politely declined… no kidnapping for us this summer!) and finally – finally – found ourselves at her house. We knocked, waited… no answer.
NO. Oh come ON, this can’t be HAPPENING to us. Nobody’s in – we have a schedule, we have all of our possessions with us, and we are sweating from climbing that damn hill with our heavy bags.
Of the five people who live in that house… nobody was in. What are the odds of that? Honestly.
Part Two: Breaking and Not Entering with Caron. Caron’s Lessons on How Not to Pick a Lock
Finding ourselves in front of a house empty of all but the cat (Meg, who mocked us from her vantage point on the windowsill), Caron and I stood in awe of our own situation. We had no way to contact anyone in the house (everyone was at work and I only had Siobhan’s phone number), we had no way to get into the house, and there wasn’t even a way to get into the backyard, without scaling more than one fence! We ate a few cookies (emergency cookies are never a bad idea) and surveyed our options. As I saw it, we had three. One, pick the lock. Two, scale the house and enter through the open window (also taunting us from up above!) Three, ditch our bags and head into London as we planned, hoping that nobody rioted in sleepy Morden.
The fourth option was to cry quietly on her doorstep and wait for someone to come home, but we refused to acknowledge that.
We opted for option one, because I wasn’t comfortable with leaving our bags out in plain sight for anyone – literally anyone – to come and snoop through them. Or steal from them. I sacrificed a few bobby pins for the greater good of our day, but to no avail. Caron, in fact, can’t pick locks. She looked pretty good while she did it – bending in funny ways, screwing up her face, sticking her tongue out, and cursing quietly at the door. Actually, while all of these things might HELP pick a lock, none of them actually work without the proper equipment. Bobby pins painted blonde aren’t that.
After considering scaling the wall, we ran into a neighbor who was leaving his house, and we asked if we could hide our bags behind his car. He very nicely agreed, and we covered our bags with our raincoats – we were NOT chancing the weather – and then put all of our valuables in our backpacks and set off to London.
Part Three: London in Under Five Hours – The Marriageability of Men in the National Portrait Gallery
Having stashed our bags behind the neighbor’s car, we dragged ourselves back down to the Morden tube station, where we collapsed onto the tube, ready to ride the Northern Line as far as we could. Caron promptly fell asleep (I was jealous) and I pulled out my kindle and thanked God and any other deity that was listening that I could read exactly what I wanted to. Having been entirely unsuccessful at going into the British Museum last time we went into central, we headed there first. Caron named me Queen of the Underground, because I navigated seamlessly (and she was thankful that she didn’t have to navigate herself), and we walked around the British Museum for about an hour and a half. We saw plenty – whizzing through historical eras at a speed only capable by two twenty-somethings already half dead on their feet. (“I really could have used a hover-round. And I wish I were blind so I could go on the blind tour and touch things!” –Caron) Even though there was plenty of security in the museum, I was a little nervous about the backpacks… You see, we were carrying around two laptops, an iPad, two iPods, three phones, and two kindles (not to mention our wallets) and being so tired, I was not as alert as I could have been. There were no disasters, but I hated to turn my back on anyone. Or anything. Those mummies were suspicious.
We decided to go to Trafalgar Square (Caron, in her exhausted stupor, called it “TRAH-fall-garr square”, immediately realized what she said, and said, “That never happened. Never repeat that to anyone.” I made no such verbal acquiescence, so here it is, fodder for this blog.) We stopped for pizza near Leicester Square, and wandered into the National Portrait Gallery, where we were immediately blown away by the number of portraits that we recognized. There was a gallery of Tudors – we recognized Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth right off the bat, and tour brief tour through the rest of the museum involved a lot of scoping out of handsome men in portraits. Caron thinks that there’s something about a man in tights that just works. I liked seeing very Darcy-like men with messy hair. And the wigs, well, they were fantastic. We left the museum with lots of prospective husbands, only hindered by the fact that they were a little dead.
“We had a good day,” said Caron. I wholeheartedly agree.
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