I’d just like to preface these pictures by mentioning that y’all know I’m terrible with the camera, okay? The one I have is a hand-me-down and I’ve never quite learned to use it and also the batteries apparently have this really short life so I spend a lot of time pointing and clicking and then going “Wait. Hang on, red light. Okay, smile again! ‘Error Type N15,’ what does that mean? Oh well, what’s important are the memories.”
That said, I present you first with this stealthily taken picture of the tube stop for Ashley and Tom’s house. I feel like I spent about a fifth of my time in London underground, so this became very familiar to me. When you are coming home from the museum or from dinner with your friend from college with whom you just reconnected and whom you adore unreservedly or from the furtherance of your Top Secret Plans, you get off at this stop on the Jubilee line and then you follow the sign that says, helpfully, “Way Out” and then you go up the escalator and you put your little travel card through the thing and then you take a left and go past the ATM and the bus shelter and the big huge Blade 3 poster and then you cross the street even though you are a little confused about which way to look so you look both ways about eight times and then you go past the pub and then you go around the corner and then you’re there. If you’re coming home latish by yourself you will want to do this at a pretty brisk pace; I have it on good authority from the girl at the Covent Garden LUSH that if you take a right out of the Bermondsey tube station it can get sketchy. This made me feel very hardcore when people asked me where I was staying and I’d go “Bermondsey, yeah!” and then I would throw gang hands. (I didn’t mention I was staying in a lovely flat with nice IKEA furniture and an all-regions DVD player. They didn’t need to know that.)
Bermondsey in the hizzaaaaayyyy!
Yes, here is a picture of a sign proving I went to Covent Garden. I wish instead I’d taken a picture of the awesome LUSH girl instead since she was very pretty and had dreadlocks and piercings and also because LUSH was giving away free wine and mince pies, neither of which I like too terribly much but which I ingested anyway. I love you, LUSH. And beautiful dreadlocked LUSH girl too!
Neither of the things I love are in this picture though, sadly.
But hey! Look at this picture of a Christmas tree!
Arty or just blurry? You decide.
Here are Ashley and me in front of the now magically non-blurry Christmas tree. This is perhaps the only picture I managed to take of myself with another person the whole two weeks of my vacation. Error N15 reasons, you understand. Still, my vacation photos always end up looking as though I spent my time alone on a windswept moor even when I’ve spent them with family and friends whom I love muchly. Oh well, at least I have my memories.
This is pretty blurry too, now that I see it again.
Here is my only picture of the team with which Ash and Tom live in community. I liked hanging out with these kids very much, even though a couple of the boys dared me to drink Bovril which was not very nice of them. They are all singing Christmas carols here. Ashley is the one in the blurry red scarf. Did you know that the tunes to a lot of the Christmas carols you know, if you live in the States, are not the ones that people know if they live in the UK? You will know it most intimately when you open your mouth reaaaaaaal big to sing “Away In The Manger” and it turns out that you are singing the total absolute wrong tune and that you are pronouncing Bethlehem like “beth-luh-hem” instead of the way everyone else is pronouncing it, “beth-LEE-hem.” And then you will slink off to the other side of the circle and take a blurry picture, keeping your mouth firmly shut the entire time.
Ashley whispered, “Smile, everyone, and look like you love Jesus!”
I’d also like to note that after we (well, they) finished singing Christmas carols I had a very strange experience and that was that I ate at McDonald’s for the first time in about five years. (On my drive from LA to Seattle when I moved up here for grad school, thanks for asking). The kids kept asking me if I felt at home there and I kept saying, “Dude, I never eat fast food” and they boggled their eyes at me and I also mentioned that for me Starbucks is the absolute last resort in terms of hot chocolate emergencies. Keeping it real, that’s me.
One really nice thing about the week was that I got to meet up with my friend Mara from college twice. We hadn’t seen each other since about 1997 and it was so cool how we immediately just got into it with each other, once we ascertained that there are, in fact, two Burger Kings\\ in Victoria Station and that we were, of course, at different ones when we were trying to meet. I hadn’t thought she’d remember me but when I emailed her to say I’d be in her town she immediately responded with offers to pick me up at the airport and to let me stay on her couch. Isn’t that cool? This is us at her house after “roast dinner” which she and her lovely boyfriend were kind enough to make for me. I wish we’d taken pictures of that dinner before snarfing it down because it was delicious in every way.
As as we.
I have many many pictures of some of the touristy things I did that week too, which I’m not sharing here because I am not totally convinced in my heart that you want to see the details of the walls at the Natural History Museum, which have little animals and flowers and plants all over them. But here is St. Paul’s Cathedral as seen from the Millennium bridge, right near the Tate Modern.
I walked all the way across the bridge and back but didn’t go to the cathedral itself because it was too cold and dark and I wasn’t a hundred million percent sure how to get home from there. Another opportunity for a badly taken picture missed. Sorry internet.
This is a picture of my orange-and-pink scarf and hat with my dubious face in the middle and some of London in the background, taken on the selfsame bridge after checking out the modern art museum, which, I’m sorry to admit, I kind of didn’t get. I walked around and looked at all the art (and the art students, which were often more interesting than what was on the wall to my barbarian eyes) and then I looked out a window and saw the bridge and I was like, “Hey, I can walk around in the cold and the dark instead of imagining the shared significands of temporal inconsistency and the fundamentalism of existential query as manifested by an artist whose primary medium is elephant dung (no, really). Rock on!”
Maybe I should rethink this matching hat and scarf thing.
In other tourist news, I spent a day in lovely Bath, about an hour away from London by train, and here is the lone photographic evidence to prove it:
This is an ancient Roman sewer. The end.
Here I am in a poorly wrapped kimono at the V&A Museum. Ash and I went there together and had a lovely time looking at lace patterns and scrolly ironwork and bronze casting and antique pianofortes but mostly just being together, surrounded by beautiful things.
Not a terribly flattering look for me, the poorly wrapped kimono.
And here, because it was the last picture I took in London before the camera really died instead of just playing dead whenever I had something especially interesting I wanted to take a picture of, is the fountain at Trafalgar Square, where we went to sing Christmas carols. This time the Christmas carol singing involved being up on a stage so I excused myself from that (“Beth-LEEEEEEEEEEEE-hem…”) and walked around in the freezing cold some more. I even got to speak Italian when two girls asked me to…clearly they had no idea what they were getting themselves into…take a picture of them.
//Actually I am just putting this here because I didn’t want the last picture of this entry to be of me in the kimono.//
Not pictured (and maybe that’s best for us all, you know?)
Ashley making cards while I knit at her kitchen table and talking and laughing and eating Jaffa cakes, my new favorite cookie of the universe.
Me with my face practically in a big bowl of ramen noodles at Wagamama the first day I got in, trying heroically to stay awake so as to fight my jet lag.
Talking to one of the girls on the team about going to Essex for Top Secret Reasons. This girl was herself from Essex and she was really excited I was going there and gave me really good directions on how to get there. When I came home that afternoon I yelled “Essex! Word is bond!” for some reason and we clunked knuckles and it was all very cute. I sat across from her at McDonald’s that evening and she asked if she could try on my glasses and whether I thought her hair would look like mine if she cut it short.
Watching movies with Ashley in her bed, as we’ve been doing since we were twelve or so.
Falling gently asleep when we went to see the play, lulled by Holly Hunter’s inexplicable Irish accent.
The beautiful golden houses in Bath and the long windy park.
Unconsciously touching my face and wondering if I had jam on it or something every time someone greeted me by saying “You all right?”