Lessee - the brief of it is this:

1) I went to England from late July to late August.

2) I've been teaching school from late August to the present (and to infinity and beyond!).

The long of it is this:

I. ENGLAND

A. DEPARTURE So I escaped from Raytheon after a year's indenture to the great business god of Utter Boredom (although not without its perks - the Drawing Room and Pemberley being foremost among them!) and literally flew to England. The good-bye party was very nice, with a very nice cake, and a *very* nice briefcase which I'm using now, as well as several Raytheon-emblazed products, many of which I remember paying the bills for. About a week after I quit, I got a call to come back and help the new secretary, but thank God I had strength enough to call at an hour I knew my ex-boss wouldn't be in and say, "Um, sorry...*no*." Packing up was, as I recall, absolute bedlam and mostly done the night before I left (as usual). Unlike Austria, I DID make my plane with time to spare, even though I had more bags draping off me than I ought to have. Let me amend "time to spare" - I got through all the rigamarole of getting English moola and customs whatnotcheck etc., and dropping bags and dragging myself to the far terminal and kissing father, sister and brother good-bye, and all and they were loading up the plane when I arrived. Good stuff. The flight out was pretty good. The movie was absolutely insipid, with, at one point, full frontal (prolongued) female nudity - much to the delight of the fifteen little boys sitting in the middle section right in front of the telly. *Grrrrr.* The second movie was just as insipid, but also completely mundane and I attempted to sleep (ha ha ha). As day dawned (about 6 hours early in my estimation - can't imagine why! ; P), and I took off the sleeping mask they'd given me, I caught my first glimpse of London. (Yes, Kristen, glimpses CAN fly, but only the wild ones. The tame ones generally are thrown across a room, having atrophied their limbs.) Immediately, an Austenesque ingenue speech welled up in my head which I (dumb dumb) did not write down. But it was something to the effect of: "And there it was. The city she had studied for so long, the city she knew intimately from a painted map lay yawning beneath her. And there! There was the Thames - curving in the way the book had said it would. And there St. Paul's - visible even from here; and Big Ben and a thousand other sights she had only dreampt of. Real! Actual! Tangible! A little sigh escaped her lips...."

Sappy? Yeah. But hey, it was midnight, and the sun had decided to rise. Whaddaya want? Anyway, I WAS thrilled. I kept straining, WILLING away the wing of the airplane, attempting to place landmarks along the curving Thames, knowing that we must be well outside the city limits now and yet wanting that body of water to remain the London Thames, and not belong to the mere suburbs with its mere people and no great pile of carved stone.

B. ARRIVAL We landed in Heathrow and I got off, got through customs and got my luggage with no difficulty - pausing only briefly after my passport was checked to wonder at the porter who had actually said "Cheers" as I'd left. "Cheers!" in a very British manner! "Cheers!" Well, I'll be bediggered. As a dumb American, however, I thought I'd scrimp and wouldn't get a cart to wheel my baggage around. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Even dumber when I realised (and hour later) that they were free in England. Anyway, so I got my luggage and, being a very smart woman, went right up to the information booth and asked how I could best get to Gatwick to meet Lauryl (Lane, my friend via the net, and now in person *waving frantically*). Actually, I only asked how best to get to Gatwick, not how best to meet Lauryl, since, although they said "Cheers" here in that singularly British way, I didn't think even they would take to such a personal question. Pigs up the sides of buildings, yes. Anyway...so he directed me outside to such and such a place on the street where I could get on such and such a bus. Not seeing a phone in sight, and being a little late as was, I decided to try my chances with the bus and pray that Lau was late as well and so get around the fact that finding a phone in a foreign terminal with really heavy luggage and no cart because I'm an idiot was next to impossible. The first place I went to had an inefficient somebodyorother at the booth who refused to sell me a ticket to the bus, and directed me to the next one down. (I'd say this person was from Paris, except that she had a Spanish accent. Maybe Barcelona is doing its level best to catch up to the City of Lights. Something about the Olympics, perhaps.) I went there, managed to buy a ticket, felt vindicated since this one cost less than the previous and my 60 pounds would go farther therefore to the next ATM (I hoped), shoved my luggage around the street again to find a place near the road and waited....

And waited.

And waited.

And watched the bus that I had originally wanted to go on go by.

And another one of that type of bus go by.

And waited.

And waited. And began to think nasty things about people from Barcelona who were working in London because they didn't want to get their patootie to America because it was too far and maybe no one would sell THEM a ticket and wouldn't that be too sweet and there's another one of those @(*#&%&% busses I SHOULD be on...rassinfrassin. Well, eventually the bus for which I held a ticket DID come by and a very nice English man put my luggage underneath and I got on and all was hunky-dory and I met a guy going back to the States and we chatted and got off at the same terminal and it was then that I learnt that the carts were free! And, having a cart, I managed to find a phone, and more amazingly, managed to figure out how to make a collect call home on it, talked to Mom, and set off in search of Lauryl. And, since by 9 ish in the morning, I was already a savvy London chick, I headed for the information booth and had her paged. No sooner had it gone over the intercom than I saw someone whom I recognised from her pics on the web, etc. (thanks Lau!), and called her name. "Lauryl? Lauryl Lane?" "Emily? Emily Snyder?" Brief hug and then a set off for the way out and the subway back into London. Between us we managed to get onto the train which was pulling in just then. We were, of course, terribly American. We couldn't help it. We got looks from several Londoners wondering what the shreck American girls with luggage were doing giggling and asking each other hesitant, nervous questions like two people who know each other well who have never met (which, of course, we were), were doing on a late July Tuesday in the early am when all sane people were going to work.

Work, of course, was the furthest thing from either of our minds. The train quickly became crowded, and we were obliged to shift ourselves, and, more significantly, our luggage, to accomodate. There was a brief moment of interest when a young couple came on the train, apparently intent to break the world's record for (in ascending order) 1) interracial dating on a moving vehicle; 2) perrennial angst (perhaps the result of the lady's pechant for stilettos on said moving vehicle?); and 3) kissing (which, I can only assume, was the result of number one and two: i.e., that the natural inclination was there due to the prior relationship, and that her stilettos and the moving vehicle tended to hurl the two people into one another, which, because their hands were full of largely ineffectual bars - ineffectual since they didn't help the lovers keep themselves standing upright - made their lips the only means of breaking an otherwise possible fall into each other. Along with these factors, one must include the presence of our own modest selves, to which the young lady alluded, saying, "Well, they're TOURISTS" before falling towards the beleaugured beloved again). Leaving this singular pair alone, it was also interesting to note that everyone had a source of reading material on the train - two HP books were in sight (making me decide favourably in the cause of the American cover artist) - but no laptops. Kinda nice. We were able to hop off the train - WITH all of our newly-recovered luggage, and look frantically around for the underground we were supposed to take. At this point, a WORD about our luggage is required:

1) What I carried: Being bereft of a huge honking suitcase, I took with me four (yes four) bags: my hippy dippy purse (the striped one from Balogna, Italy, along with four new non-matching buttons, courtesy of my mother the day I left), my green long monogrammed tote bag which was with me for the disasterous trip to Paris back in '97, my rather nicer largish green tote, my Raytheon briefcase.

2) What Lauryl carried:

Her purse, her laptop, her backpack, and her huge honking suitcase on wheels (think of a black wardrobe on wheels and you've got an idea).

3) What we ended up carrying by the time we decided to keep going through the stupid underground system with stairs...STAIRS!...and a half-mile walk whenever you switched from one line to another!!!

I had my purse, my small tote, my large tote and Lau's backpack. Lauryl had her purse, her laptop and my briefcase, both of which were attached to her suitcase, which was pretending to be an obstinante mule. So, we went through the London underground - with the help of several very nice strong Englishmen (thank you Lauryl for wearing a dress!) - and exhausted and bruised, we arrived at our terminal. Consulted our directions. Squinted at roadsigns. Hermed and hawed. Decided that if we'd dragged our carcasses and our carcasses luggage this far, and it was ONLY half a mile (uphill, but what's uphill when no cab's in sight and you're young and sleep-deprived, and dehydrated, and...erm...*feminine*?), we'd walk. Well, it took us a half an hour to get up that hill, and that only by the grace of God and this charming English custom to put little low walls, just as high as one's posterior along the sidewalk, presumably just for people from America who weren't sure just how far a little less than sixty pounds each would go. Well, I'd say we each shed sixty pounds that day (mostly from our shoulders and hands), but eventually we made our way gasping into the hostel, collapsed into the sofas, and while Lau accosted the snobby guy at the counter (who WAS from Paris, and had apparently heard about the uppity Barcelona lady and was doing HIS level best for the ignominity of his own country) about seeing if we couldn't get into the room a tad early, I kicked into Austria survival mode, grabbed a complete (I mean COMPLETE) change of clothes, avec a washcloth, and repaired to the bathroom where I proceeded to give myself a sponge bath, scrub my face and hands and douse my grimy hair, and completely change my clothes so that I felt a little bit like a human being. (Just a little - I still had those @)(#% bags to contend with!) Anyway, so the upshot was that we could stick our bags in a completely unsafe closet (which we did - if anyone stole the bags, we'd probably let them take them at that point!), and hang out in the common rooms until two o'clock when we could reclaim what was left of our bags and go up to the second floor to the end of the hall where our room was. Lau and I spent that time gabbing (significantly more free in our conversation than on the train), and working on our lines for the Shakespeare School. I must confess that I didn't help myself or Lau as much as I should that afternoon in regards to learning my lines for Rosalind from "As You Like It." Sure - and they were funny lines, but I was having more fun being silly. Anywho, time passed, several waters drunk, and we managed to get up to the rooms, situate ourselves in our CRAMPED (I mean *cramped!!!*) space, find where the bathroom was, and get ourselves down for dinner then back up for journalling. Thus ends day one.

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Updated 18 February, 2001
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