Days 3 + 4

London is a walker's city.

However, this walker must be tremendously fit with a heart like Lance Armstrong's before the most recent Tour and feet as hard as Margaret Thatcher's cold dead heart.

Notice how none of this describes me. Which brings me to my points that A) I've done a lot of walking over the past two days, and B) I never want to walk ten miles in one morning again.

Starting with Day 3, I woke up at nine-ish, had breakfast with my two roommates, and looked about for something to do, being that it was a bank holiday and thus classes were canceled. Everyone else in the group being either hung over or conserving their energy for the Notting Hill Festival later in the day, we had the whole city to ourselves, figuratively speaking. Claire wanted to go to Covent Gardens to see the street performers, so we set out towards the Thames, south of Bedford Place. The morning was crisp, so I slouched down in my leather jacket and jammed my hands as far in the pockets of my jeans as they'd go. My attempt at looking East Berlin-ish and cool promptly derailed as my scarf and my neck purse in which I carry my valuables joined forces in an unholy alliance to strangle me, and so I muttered quiet curses as I trailed after Becca and Claire down narrow streets, struggling with my clothing and looking totally unhinged.

The Covent Gardens district of the administrative city of Westminster, sad to say, didn't meet expectations; there were no street performers, no supposedly-chic boutiques whose self-conscious attempts to appeal to frou-frou women with too much money and not enough sense make me want to vomit, and not really enough to justify the long walk-

Until I caught sight of the sign for Trafalgar Square.

We headed for the square at a brisk clip, Claire leading us with unerring eye through the narrow cobblestone alleys of Westminster, alleys with bright yellow and green and red doors, each with its own little brass number leading to the flats above, the balconies so close you could theoretically jump from one side of the street to another if you were sufficiently inebriated to try. Once in a while taxis would zoom by at unnecessary speeds before squealing around the sharp corner at the end. The taxis confirmed what everyone's been saying about London's status as a theater town; there were ads for Wicked, the Lion King, Les Miserables in Concert, all the Shakespeare performances at the Globe, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's newest attempt to cater to the teenage goths that are his demographic: Phantom of the Opera: Love Never Dies.

For those lucky people uninitiated in this new pile of theatrical ridiculousness, the story goes that Christine and Raoul have kids, and then Christine takes the kids with her to America on vacation. While there they visit an amusement park, where the Phantom, magically teleported across the Atlantic, lurks. Of course, now that the Phantom has spent the last ten years obsessing over a woman who's left him for good, he's lost all sympathy and become nothing more than a deluded stalker, but never mind. How he knows Christine's family is headed to this exact amusement park is never explained, but this is Andrew Lloyd Webber, a guy who wrote a musical about sentient trains; he laughs in the face of plot! So Christine, displaying the incredible good sense that led her to semi-fall in love with a man twenty years her senior who spends his time running about the Opera House and playing pranks like a three-year-old, somehow gets captured again, the Phantom sings about how he loves her and all the teenage goth kids sigh how it's just so romantic, and so on and so forth and it. just. never. ends.

Ahem.

So we got to Trafalgar Square, which is just outside the Victoria and Albert Museum of portraits and the art of the former British Empire. Canada gets a whole building to itself, of course. Trafalgar Square is a lot smaller than all the pictures make it seem, but everything else about it is absolutely humongous. The entire thing is more or less a giant celebration of Horatio Nelson, and while I'm fairly certain that some people might look askance at these massive edifices celebrating a guy who perpetuated the British Empire that inflicted innumerable sufferings on its subjects, on the whole everyone seems to view Horatio Nelson as an alright guy, if the stuff in the square is any evidence. There's a replica of Nelson's ship in a bottle, with the ship at least three feet tall from keel to crow's nest, and the column around which the four lions, sculpted by Edwin Landseer, repose. No photographs can properly convey the sheer scale of these things: they've got to be at least seven feet tall from the bottoms of their paws to the tops of their manes. At the top of the column, a sculpture of Horatio Nelson himself stands, gazing blindly for eternity down the avenue studded with memorials for the men who died to preserve the rotting corpse of the Empire he helped create.

The main one, of course, is the Cenotaph.

It's a surprisingly small and bleak thing, a simple edifice of white stone with a wreath carved into the north and south sides with the words 'The Glorious Dead' carved beneath. The motto was chosen by Rudyard Kipling, whose son Jack died in World War One. Kipling's own attitude towards the war was complicated; Jack was nearsighted and almost ineligible for service, but Kipling managed to get him in regardless, and so blamed himself for his son's death forever after. However, he never grew to despise the war as an empty battlefield for an ideal of Empire that had already died, and believed in its moral righteousness until his dying day. Around the base of the Cenotaph, even over a month before Armistice Day, red wreaths of poppies lay in waiting, a few with small wooden crosses etched with ranks and names laid atop them. I debated the ethics of taking a picture, then settled on taking one of the monument and one of the flowers. Whether or not I post them depends on my feelings at the time, I guess.

We wandered on towards Parliament and Big Ben, past the London Eye, and found ourselves standing beside the memorial for Boadicea, the Anglo-Saxon queen who resisted Roman occupation, beside the Millennium Bridge over the Thames. I took pictures of the memorial for Rachel, especially as Boadicea as portrayed in the memorial is made of absolute stone-cold awesome. I know I'm omitting a lot of detail about the Eye, Big Ben, and Parliament, but it's after midnight here so I'll have to add in the details in a later post. Growing tired and hungry, we bought Cornettos (ice cream) and headed for home, where we rested before joining up with the group and hopping the Tube to Notting Hill Festival.

The Notting Hill Festival remains difficult to describe. Imagine a voodoo ceremony mixed with Mardi Gras, vats of strong English beer, hundreds of thousands of people crammed into the tiny borough of Chelsea and Kensington, and so much smoke from jerk chicken stalls that it nearly blotted out the spires of Saint John's Anglican Church at the borough line, and you'll have some idea of the environment. Britons swirled past in the crowd around us, most possessing that peculiar British deformity of possessing features too small for their heads. Or perhaps they were just squinting from all the marijuana they'd smoked. Six of us decided it wasn't our scene, and so after snapping a few photos headed back to the Tube and home.

As for Day 4, it was boring in the extreme. We had an ACORN orientation (don't bring strange people home, don't set fires, don't stick things to the walls, etc.), a University of London Student Union Orientation (pay us an exorbitant amount of money to use our pool that's not even Olympic-size!), a Senate House Library orientation (there are ten floors to this library you must ask us to get books out of for you, and there's nothing weird about that), our first British Life and Culture class (which was awesome), and finally met up with our British professors at a wine bar called the Truckles of Pied Bull Yard for a pint and a get-to-know-you session. I struck up lovely conversations with our Shakespeare professor and with Dr. King, and enjoyed just sitting and basking in Dr. King's wisdom about British life and politics in general. The man just knows an awful lot about an awful lot, and there's nothing more inspiring than somebody with that breadth of knowledge being happy to share it with you.

So that's the last two days, and now to bed.