LONDON, United Kingdom: December 30, 2003 to January 13, 2004
I went to visit my boyfriend Nathaniel at his London flat for two terrific weeks during this holiday season. I got there just in time to ring in the new year, and got back not quite in time to catch the beginning of the spring semester at school. Since he moved there in late August, we have only seen each other for 3 rather short weekends. This trip was a great deal longer and very very welcome. This is an account of the trip. Be warned: there's not a whole lot of tourist-y stuff in here, since I was already there once in 2000 with my best friend Vera (alas! no vacation diary for that trip!). It's mainly a day-to-day living in London sort of thing, focusing on the highlights of unique things we got to see or do.
A story about this trip would not be complete without the two horror days that led up to it wherein I discovered I had left my passport in Pittsburgh. In order to keep the cheapest flight we could find, I was flying out of Newark, NJ, since my mother lives in NJ and I would be there for the Christmas holiday already. Now, I am very methodical in my packing. I make a list, check it twice, yadda yadda yadda. But one thing that never even got on my list was my passport. There are several possible reasons for this: 1) my passport is not in an obvious location; I keep it in a drawer in my filing cabinet so that I can't (ha ha) lose it. 2) The first leg of my holiday was not international. I was driving out to Philly for the weekend and then staying in NJ with my mom and family for a week. In my care to make sure I had enough but not too much for 3 weeks of travel, the whole "crossing international borders" completely slipped my mind. But whatever the reason, it happened and nearly threatened to prevent me from going at all.
I went to bed at about 1am on the 28th and had trouble falling asleep. I was anxious about all the things I had to do on Sunday in order to get prepared for my trip: some laundry, re-pack my things, check my bank account balance... I must have been imagining myself putting my passport in my purse to make sure I had it when I went through security at the airport when it hit me: I didn't even bring my passport! I immediately got back out of bed. I was at a loss. Pittsburgh was about a 7-hour drive when free of traffic from where I was in NJ, which meant spending the next 14 hours in a car. I guess I would have done this after all if it came to that, but I hoped I could find another way. Maybe I could have my roommate Allyson next-day air it to me at my mom's house, in time for my 8:30pm flight leaving Newark Monday December 29th? No dice: neither FedEx nor UPS nor the Post Office take next-day packages on Sunday. FedEx and UPS offer same-day service, including Sundays, but as I discovered, you either need an established corporate account and pay $300, or pay $900. The plane ticket cost me $300. $900 was a little out of my budget. Next-day service is about $50 so I thought about changing my flight to leave on the 30th instead of 29th. But, there's a $100 change fee AND flights had now gone up to $800, so I'd have to pay them $600 for the new ticket. I was losing my nerve. All the options I could think of were kaput and it was now 2am.
So I called Nathaniel in London (7am his time) and told him what happened. When I called, he was very groggy from being asleep, and I am sure you can imagine what being awakened by such news feels like. He was very supportive, however, as I told him what I had done to try to solve the problem and how I'd been met with failure on each count. He suggested a couple new ideas I hadn't thought of: getting Amtrak to send it on a train from Pittsburgh to Philly or Newark (where my plane was leaving from) and pick it up there; or having it sent by Greyhound bus, which also offers a package delivery service. If all else failed, driving back would be my only choice, although taking the train or bus might be better for my sanity than driving for 14 hours.
We got off the phone and I tried to call Greyhound or Amtrak. Amtrak's line said their package delivery department was closed on Sundays, so that removed them from consideration. Greyhound in Pittsburgh was open, however, and I talked to a very nice man there, who told me what to do with respect to getting the package to Greyhound and what buses left Pittsburgh and arrived in Newark in time for my flight. The price? $20. Armed with a list of bus times throughout the day on Sunday, I could go to sleep, assured that in the morning I could call my roommate and have her deliver it to Greyhound. Even if she was working during the day, I knew, the Greyhound station was open 24 hours and the last bus would leave for Newark at 2am. I sent her a brief email apprising her of the situation and went to sleep.
I got up on Sunday around 10am and started calling my roommate. Both her cellphone and our house phone went to voicemail so I figured she must still be sleeping; I left messages on both for when she might wake up. A little worried that she might already be at work, I found the number for the GAP in Shadyside where she works online, and called it. Their answering machine said the store was not yet open, so I went back to assuming Allyson was still asleep and would call me as soon as she woke up. By this time I was a lot less worried. I was sure I'd found the solution, sure it would all work out. I laughingly told my family that I had left my passport in Pittsburgh but that I had it all worked out now. Needless to say, it got more exciting before it was all resolved.
As the hours passed, I realized it was a lot less likely Allyson was still asleep--where could she be? I started getting a horrible premonition that Allyson might have gone off say to New York with her family or something. I started thinking about my other options. The way I figured it, I would have until about 7pm that evening to make the choice to start driving. Then I'd arrive in Pittsburgh around 2am, have 7 hours for sleeping, start back to NJ at 9am and arrive around 4pm, just in time to drive to Newark and wait for my flight. It was about noon. I tried to think of whom else I knew who might be still in Pittsburgh--being just after Christmas, most of my friends were out of town. My friend Elsa turned out to be in town but we couldn't think of a way for her to even get into my house. I thought about calling a locksmith but it would cost a significant amount to get one to come out on Sunday and then the locks would be all changed and that seemed pretty unnecessary. I did call my landlord since their maintenance people have keys, but of course they were also not in on Sunday. Their voicemail gave a number to call in case of "emergencies, such as no heat in the entire unit, no water in the entire unit..." et cetera, and being locked out was not on the list. But by this point I was trying anything. So I called the emergency number and got their answering service. After I gave my sob story to the lady who answered, she said she would have them call me. Needless to say, no one ever did, but I wasn't sitting around waiting for them since I thought it was pretty unlikely anyway.
Then I remembered Allyson's parents had an extra key. If they were home, I could get Elsa in my apartment if she picked up the key from Allyson's folks. But I didn't have their phone number. Luckily Google came to the rescue! Put in the first and last name and state or city and you might luck out and get a sort of phone book entry with the person's full address and phone number. So I called--but got no answer. I left a message explaining everything and asking, if they knew how to get in touch with Allyson, to please have her call me, or to call me so someone could pick up the key from their house.
3pm, and now I was just waiting again. And biting my nails. And dreading the drive which was starting to look more and more inevitable. 4pm... tick tock... 5pm... tick tock... 5:30pm and my phone rings--is it Allyson?! No, Allyson's dad. He tells me that Allyson's grandfather passed away just before Christmas, and they've all been out of town for the funeral this weekend. I felt really bad for being so preoccupied with my own thing. He said that he had just gotten home but that Allyson and her sister were still on their way driving back, and he expected them in about an hour. So I was saved! I knew Allyson wouldn't mind taking the passport to the bus station, now I just had to wait for her to get home. And still in plenty of time to catch the last bus at 2am.
About an hour later, my phone rings again--Allyson's cell # is on the caller ID. It's actually her sister and they tell me they got a call from their dad saying I needed to talk to Allyson and that they were still 3 hours from Pittsburgh. But that's ok: still plenty of time to get that bus. Allyson asked me to send her an email with all the instructions about where to find the passport and what address to put on the package and so on. I did all this and went back to being relieved it was all almost over. Around 10:30 or 11pm I get one final phone call. It's Allyson and everything is done: she's dropped off the passport and the man at the Greyhound desk assured her that it would be on the 2am bus to Newark. I go to bed.
My mother had an appointment in Newark in the afternoon until 2pm. The plan was that she would stop by the Greyhound station and get the package, because by the time she got home through rush hour traffic, we would not have enough time to stop and get it before going to the airport. But 11:30am came and went with no phone call from Greyhound to say the package was there... My mom called at noon to ask about it and I said no one had called yet. I called them myself to see if it had arrived and the people in Newark said they had no package there from Pittsburgh, but that there was another bus due at 1:40 that it might be on. Now I started to panic again. I called the people in Pittsburgh and they said they had no package there either. Now I started to really panic again. The man in Pittsburgh said he would have to check around to see if he could find the record of what bus the passport went on but that he was very busy and would have to call me back. I think I spent most of Monday crying. I had put the matter into others' hands and it seemed like nothing could go right. Every time it looked like it would finally be smooth sailing, the whole thing capsized again.
The Pittsburgh Greyhound guy never called me. I called him again an hour later, and an hour after that, but each time he said he hadn't had time to look into it. Finally, the last time I called, I explained that it was my passport and I needed it in time to get to the airport by 6:30 for my 8:30 flight. He said he would call Newark and start looking into it. My mom called and said that she had gone to the bus station but it had not come in on the 1:40 bus; they told her yet another bus would be coming in at 2:30 so she would wait for that. But that bus ended up being late. It finally came at about 3pm and no package was on it. So we decided it made the most sense for my mom to just come home because waiting around wasn't going to do much good since it would take way too long for her to get home from Newark and then back in rush hour traffic anyway. At this point, I think I had pretty much given up. I told Nathaniel via AIM that it just didn't look like it was going to work out. He said he was sorry he had suggested Greyhound, but that it had seemed like it should have worked. I think he was very upset about our much-anticipated holiday being cancelled. I myself was practically heart-broken.
Finally, at 3:45pm, my phone rings. It's the Newark people calling to say the package arrived! Five minutes later the Pittsburgh guy calls me back and says the Newark people told him the package was there. I am falling over myself relieved. I called my mom (now on her way home) and told her the good news. But now how was I to get to Newark? The train wouldn't arrive in time and my mom was nowhere near being home. Luckily my sister Kristen was about to arrive home from work. We decided to drive up to Newark together in my car (which I had driven out from Pittsburgh originally for the holiday), pick up the passport, head to the airport, and that Kristen would drive my car back to my mom's house, where it would stay while I was in London. And this is about the only part of the story that actually proceeded according to plan. I even made it in time to have a little airport dinner before boarding.
So I realize that was a lot of suspense and quite a long story. But luckily I can laugh about it now; luckily it all worked out in the end. I got to go to London after all, and what follows is an account of the rest of my vacation :)
I arrived in London at 8am on Tuesday morning, after a fitful night on the plane. I was unable to get to sleep at all, I guess because of all the excitement during the previous two days. Nathaniel wasn't meeting me at the airport because it was so early and because it's pretty expensive for the train ticket to the airport. When I made it to his house, he was just waking up to let me in. He had had friends staying with him that weekend and they were leaving that morning to let us have a day alone together before they came back for NYE. Since I guess neither of us had gotten much sleep the night before, we took a nap for a couple of hours. We didn't want to sleep longer because I didn't want to be too jet-laggy later. When we woke up we had a little lunch and exchanged our Christmas presents. That night Nathaniel made me dinner, a recipe he had made for me before, out of the Naked Chef (aka, Jamie Oliver) cookbooks. A slow day, but I needed that after the hectic few days leading up to the trip.
New Year's Eve! Nathaniel and I got up late, and went out to a late lunch with his friend Yan who was in town. We went to a Thai place in the West End called Busaba Eathai. It was very very good but expensive. That turned out to be a theme while I was in London. Everything we ate was great, everything we did was fun; all of it was expensive. They have a 17% or so sales tax on everything there, so it's expensive already, and then factor in the dollar-to-pound exchange rate--$1.80 per pound--and everything costs almost twice as much as what it might cost in an expensive American city like NYC.
Anyway after lunch we wandered around Trafalgar Square and I was starting to feel pretty tired. I had woken up with a minor sore throat and I was worried that partying for NYE that night might make me really come down with something, so I wanted to go home and take a nap. We left Yan to shop for souvenirs and gifts, and we went home so I could nap for a bit. Nathaniel woke me up a few hours later saying we should start getting ready for the party. I felt a lot better having napped. A bunch of friends were going with us, and they all started showing up. We took the London Underground (the city subway, aka, "the Tube") to the party; when we showed up, not many people were there but there was a lot of food and drink. We wandered around mingling and watching them play strange London party games... when we got there, some people were playing this sort of "Limbo" relative, wherein they were trying to bend down to the ground without touching anything but their feet to the ground and pick up a box with only their mouth. When they successfully picked it up, they would rip off a little more of the box so it got shorter. By the time we got there, it was already pretty short, but Nathaniel managed to pick it up once.
So we hung around and ate and drank. Some people were smoking spiced tobacco out of a giant hookah. Around midnight most of the party cleared out to go down to watch Big Ben strike 12. Since it was pretty frigid outside, we stayed in the warm apartment. We sang "Auld Lang Syne" at midnight with the other people who had stayed and watched fireworks out the window. After midnight, a lot of people came back and the party got pretty busy. Nathaniel and I were pretty tired--we left around 2am--the jetlag was really beating me up. We got home and watched DVDs from my Christmas present Buffy: the Vampire Slayer: Season 4, until 5am when his friends came back. They had a plane to catch so they pretty much packed up and left, and Nathaniel and I could finally go to sleep.
The next day was the first day of 2004. Nathaniel woke me up at 4pm. He had gotten up several hours before but wanted to let me sleep so I wouldn't be sick. How sweet :) But I knew that getting up at 4pm wasn't going to do much to help me adjust to the time change. Anyway, we had no food in the house so we had to go out and get something. We decided to try to go grocery shopping, because we would not be able to afford going out to eat every night for 2 weeks. When we got to the grocery store, however, it was closed. In fact, most of the places we saw were just closed. I mean, it was New Year's Day, but I was surprised that just nothing was open. It seemed like more stuff would be open in the US, even on New Year's. We finally found a place we could carry out a pizza. In England, they don't have real American-style pizza pretty much anywhere (except maybe Pizza Hut). The pizza they eat is thin-crust, gourmet-topping only. We had prosciutto, portabella and mozzarella on ours. Nathaniel likes American-style pizza a lot more but I really thought it was great. After dinner we watched more Buffy and chilled together, in front of his windows overlooking the Tower Bridge and the Thames River. A lot of our evenings we spent just hanging out together and watching Buffy; we wanted to get through season 4 while we were still together, since Buffy is one of the things Nathaniel and I have shared together.
The fourth day of my stay in London dawned nice and cloudy, as usual. The weather in London was remarkably consistent. In the mornings around 10am it was pretty sunny (not that I was very often up that early). By about 1pm it was pretty cloudy, by 4:30pm the sun had set. It was about 40-45 during the day, and 35-40 at night. It had been bitterly cold when we were walking home on New Year's Eve, but the rest of the time it was relatively warm. Back in Pittsburgh, it was snowing and 8 degrees. In London, it barely even rained while I was there. I brought all these sweaters, which turned out to be not even necessary. So on Friday we went to the grocery store and got a bunch of food to cook while I was there. The 24-hour grocery store in London is called Tesco. It's kind of like a Wal-mart--it sells everything, including food. We bought a bunch of these "refrigerated meals." They don't seem to have the frozen TV dinner thing that Americans rely on. Instead, you buy these pre-made but uncooked (and not frozen) dishes and then cook them in your oven. And they had gourmet stuff like "salmon en croute" (salmon wrapped in a pastry crust), "lamb chianti" and more. I think the fact that they were never frozen really made them taste better than anything pre-made in the US ever does. It was really like home-cooked, but fancier.
Instead of eating our newly-purchased gourmet readymade entrees, however, we went to a pub in Nathaniel's neighborhood that he really likes called the Garrison. Nathaniel had some kind of lam stew and I had cod with leeks in cream sauce. Sooo good. Afterward we went to see a movie at the Institute of Contemporary Art made in Norway called "Kitchen Stories". It was made by a Norwegian director who had once seen an article about an actual study of housewives done by the Swedish Home Research Institute in the 1950s or 1960s. They observed how the women moved about the kitchen and used the log of their movements to recommend a "standard kitchen" that let the housewives be more efficient. This idea fascinated the director and he made a movie about what would happen if they had done a follow-up study of single men. It was a very funny movie that showed what happened when an observer and a subject became friends in spite of orders to keep a professional distance. I enjoyed it very much.
The next day, we had planned to go back to the Garrison. They have a cinema of sorts set up in their basement and they were supposed to be showing the Indiana Jones trilogy (which had just come out on DVD) as an afternoon marathon. But when we got there, the people didn't know what we were talking about--apparently, the sign was a mistake. They were showing them in order on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday evenings instead. We left and went to Oxford Street to get Nathaniel's cell phone fixed. I tried to do some shopping but everything was so expensive, not to mention slightly weird. Things in Europe are supposedly ahead of the US in terms of fashion, and when you buy things there you either look very cool, or you run the risk of being so far ahead that you just look ridiculous. It's a hard distinction to make. Most of the stuff I saw would just make me look silly in America--I guess we're not quite ready for black and pink polka dots again (think 80s) or Sherpa-like suede boots.
On Sunday we decided to go to the British Museum. It's free and they have all sorts of cool stuff like the Rosetta Stone and ancient Egyptian sculptures and the statues off the Parthenon. We wandered around for a while and mostly looked at ancient European and Egyptian artifacts. It was fun to walk around and look at stuff with Nathaniel. We have a lot in common with respect to what we find interesting and stuff to talk about, which is of course very nice :) After the museum we went home and had one of our ready-made UK dinners. Mm. Then we went back to the Garrison yet again; this time we actually managed to see "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in their basement cinema. We were the only ones who showed up! We sat on a quaint little Victorian bench and watched my favorite of the three Indy movies. It was great fun, especially since I hadn't seen any of them in quite a long time.
Nathaniel went to work for a while in the afternoon and I stayed home at his place, taking care of some stuff for school starting up again. I finished proofreading my friend Chris' thesis and sent him the comments. Then I played the Sims (not the online version) while waiting for Nathaniel to come back. I spent a lot of time playing the Sims while on vacation. I was supposed to do some work for school but I was so burnt out from my stressful semester that I didn't feel up to starting anything. Besides, it was my vacation and I really needed some time off.
That night when Nathaniel got home we went to one of his favorite restaurants in London, a French place called le Mercury, in Angel. It was very low-key (paper tablecloth) but delicious. I had "wild chicken." For dessert we shared a chocolate mousse torte that was to die for. And Nathaniel treated, which was very sweet of him.
A week over, a week to go. I didn't do much but play the Sims that day. Nathaniel worked from home. We talked about going out but I was really never very energetic in the evenings. My jet lag was still hanging on by a thread because I was having a hard time really sleeping well; the beds were just a bit too firm for my taste. Anyway a true vacation day: playing games and vegging on the couch in front of the river.
The next day Nathaniel had to go into work for a while again. I played the Sims and met him in the evening to go grocery shopping again. We had to re-stock on ready-made meals :) This time we went to British Safeway which was pretty nice. So many strange products... I remember when I lived in Paris and sometimes I just was so homesick for ordinary, recognizable, American products. I know that sounds ethnocentric, but we all long for the familiar once in a while. But I wasn't in London long enough to get really homesick. And what I was really missing while in Pittsburgh (Nathaniel) was in London anyway, so it was just nice to be able to be there at all.
Nathaniel took off from work the next day to hang out with me since he had spent so much time at work the day before. We went to another favorite restaurant of his, Belgo (scroll down for a picture on that page) near Camden Town, a popular shopping district. Belgo is a Belgian mussels house, but I had a mushroom and pastry dish with Belgian fries and mayonnaise. Mayo in Europe is a lot different than in America; it tastes better, for one, and it tastes really good on fries, in fact.
After lunch we wandered around the stalls in Camden Town. It's full of retro or vintage stores, with all types of style represented: 60s, 80s, cyberpunk futuristic, retro movie star, rastawear, goth... I found a cute 60s dress for 9 pounds (about $15 at that time). It was cool to try on all the clothes in the vintage stores. Clothes from the 60s are a lot more likely to fit a girl like me because that was when women still looked woman-like instead of twig-like... For dinner that night we got a meal from Rocket, a stall-type vendor located in a couple different London Tube stations. You buy a bag that contains all the ingredients you need to make a nice meal; the vegetables are all chopped and spices are all measured out. You just mix everything up and cook it. We had Thai green curry chicken. Mm.
Friday Nathaniel had a mini-workshop to go to at work and had to be gone all day. I went back to Camden Town on my own and picked up some stuff I had seen the day before but wasn't sure I wanted or could afford. I got two cute purses for 5 pounds each, an Asian Betty Boop t-shirt (purple), and a white zip-up fleece that said England on it. And that was pretty much all I bought while in London aside from food and train tickets. I still managed to spend over $250 though. I guess that still isn't so bad--not having to pay for lodging really helped, and not going out every night helped, too.
When Nathaniel got home from work we went to an Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurant. I had been to have Ethiopian once before (in Phoenix while visiting a friend), and actually made it for my cooking club once, to great success. The custom is to serve the food (stews and vegetables and lentils and the like) on top of a flat spongy bread called "injera." Then you take little pieces of the injera and use it to roll up bits of food; the injera is your utensil. It is very very tasty and a fun experience. I recommend Ethiopian heartily to anyone. It's not too spicy and it's just darn good.
After dinner we stopped off at Gordon's Wine Bar, a bar specializing in serving port out of real casks. I'm not a huge fan of wine in general, and port is fortified wine and quite heavy. But I had a glass of tawny and it wasn't too bad. It goes to your head quite quickly, though, and we arrived 15 minutes before the 11pm closing time. Bars in London all close at 11pm. It's very strange to realize that London has such a reputation for being a fun lively city, but all the bars close so early. Danceclubs don't close then, of course, so people who stay out later usually are dancing.
We had planned to take a daytrip out to Windsor Castle, but when we woke up early for the day, I wasn't really feeling up to an excursion. I was really into the whole lounging-around-together, bumming-around-London type of vacation, and after all, the whole point of me going was to see Nathaniel, not play tourist in England. We should probably have gone out of London while I was there for a long jaunt, since most other times I'll only get to go for weekends, but I don't really regret not having done so. I loved spending time with Nathaniel and didn't need to be doing something extravagant in order to have fun with him.
Instead of Windsor, we went to the Natural History Museum (which is also free). We saw a lot of dinosaur fossils and a live leaf-cutter ant colony, and a cross section of a giant sequoia tree cut down when it was 1300 years old in the 1800s, and a bunch of other stuff. The museum was mainly geared toward children, with all sorts of silly hands-on exhibits, but we had a pretty good time anyway.
Saturday was also the first night since NYE that we hung out with Nathaniel's friends. Most of them having been away, we didn't have a chance to see them until that night. We had another British pizza, this time "deep dish," a kind of imitation of America-style pizza, with Nathaniel's friend Sean, and watched the movie "Ocean's 11" at Sean's place. A pretty good heist flick, and George Clooney and Brad Pitt are always fun to watch :)
The next morning, back to the Garrison again, this time for brunch. I made a mistake and ordered two meals. The way they were on the menu made it seem like a bunch of little things: "Scotch pancakes," which just came as pancakes and syrup and nothing else, and "baked beans on toast," which sounded like a small sort of side thing. But actually they were both breakfast-sized portions. A strange sort of brunch without eggs and bacon and sausage and pancakes, but then that's why some inordinate percentage of Americans are obese: monster-sized restaurant portions. Both of my brunches were good, even if I couldn't finish them all.
That afternoon we had found out Donnie Darko was playing in a theater--apparently the movie had been a huge hit in England (much bigger than it was in the US, I suppose)--and I loved that movie so I wanted Nathaniel to see it. A few days previously Nathaniel and I had watched Vanilla Sky together...very good, and Donnie Darko sort of reminded me of the Lost Highway/Mulholland Drive/Vanilla Sky movie genre: weird and surreal with cool imagery and not much explanation. I thought Nathaniel would like it. But we got to the theater to find that the news magazine in which we found out about the movie had printed the time wrong and we were too late. Disappointed, we went to the Virgin Megastore down the street to look at their after-Christmas sales. Virgin, as in Virgin Records in the US, is a big media superstore, kind of like Tower Records. They have DVDs, CDs and video games. We found Donnie Darko there for less than the price of one movie ticket! So we bought it and went home to watch it. Now you go watch it too!
We later went out to have dinner and drinks with Nathaniel's friends Mike and Reese. We met at a low-key sort of bar/pub called Cafe Emm, and I had "chicken goujons," which are basically chicken fingers, with fries (I mean chips) and garlic mayonnaise. Mm. Fried food is always so satisfying. After going through a bottle of wine we decided to go to this cocktail bar Nathaniel really likes and had been wanting us to go to since I go to London. It's called Freud's and is in the Covent Garden neighborhood. Places that serve actual cocktails are kind of hard to find in London, since the UK is mostly a beer- or wine-drinking populace, so Freud's was extra-special, being a cocktail-only bar. The funny part is, as soon as we walked in, I recognized the place! While Vera and I were in London several years ago, one night we went to see Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in history, very famous. Afterward we wanted a drink so we were wandering around and randomly stopped in some bar. Which turned out to be Freud's, Nathaniel's favorite bar in London. Oh the coincidences! Clearly it was meant to be ;)
My last day in London... Nathaniel worked from home and I updated my website. We actually worked most of the day without meaning to. We wanted to go out to eat on our last night, and Nathaniel also wanted to get me a birthday present before I left. I had been eyeing this watch in Tube ads all during my stay and he had decided to get it for me. But the jewelry stores were pretty much closed by the time we made it down there, so the watch will have to wait. We went to a different pub in Nathaniel's neighborhood, called the Barrowboy & Banker, and had real English "pies," which are kind of like pot-pies but better. After dinner we went home, a little somber knowing tomorrow I would have to leave...
My flight was at 12:30pm so we got up early to catch the train. Nathaniel came with me to help me carry my luggage, which had been a bit much for me on the way to his house two weeks before. He hugged me goodbye at the security line and I went on. I had the best time in London, being with him. I had almost gotten into a kind of routine, I was getting used to living there and wasn't sure I wanted to come back. But luckily enough, I already have my plane tickets for my next visit :) And someday we'll be in the same city again for good. Till then, till my next vacation, adios!
