We Are In London!

5/19/06
Worcester

Today we visited the Worcester Cathedral. I'd never seen one before and it was pretty amazing. I walked in and thought to myself, "Khazad-dûm!" There were stone pillars that looked straight out of Moria. And of course, lots of stained glass--one with a pink giraffe in it. There was also this long hall, with dark wood pews on either side, and it reminded me of the hall in Charn, in The Magician's Nephew, you know--with all the kings and queens? Thre was even a table at the end, where the hammer and bell would have been. And there was a tall cabinet-looking thing, and I asked Sarah Dee "What's in there?" and she said, "Narnia."

Gosh, it's a good thing I'm a complete geek, or I wouldn't be able to describe anything.

Peculiar thing about the weather in England: it only rains for about 10 minutes at a time. Then it's sunny for about 5 minutes, overlapping the rain by about 1 minute. Then it's windy and gray and overcast for 30 minutes, and then the cycle starts all over again.

Weird place.


5/21/06
Worcester

Nothing can describe what it was like to be in Stratford-upon-Avon and seeing a production of Romeo and Juliet by the Royal Shakespeare Company, so I won't even try. Yesterday was my favorite day of the whole trip (and remains so even now). I wish I lived there.

Today Marion and Denis took Heidi and I to a real, inhabited castle nearby. Pretty much amazing.

A word about British newspapers: Breasts. Almost every page features breasts! IN THE NEWSPAPERS!! Today there was an article about a woman who had some genuine disease called something like "Constant Arousal Syndrome" and she has like 250 orgasms in a day, according to the headline. Mixed in among articles on football and some violence...in the newspaper, not tabloids. I can only imagine what their tabloids cover. Actually, I hope I never imagine them.

These are the haikus that Aubrey Weger wrote on this subject:

Boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Boobs.
Turn the page tentatively...
Boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Boobs. Boobs.

British newspapers
Are much more interesting
Than American.

Thanks, Aubrey!

Oh yeah, and Denis and Marion's favorite kind of music is country. :)


5/22/06
Worcester, Downtown, The Library
9:45 AM

"FamiliarStrange"

The sky is dark
Heavy with the prophesied birth
The sounds of her labor familiar
Strange, because I am strange
Unfamiliar with the old red brick
And the bluegreenred doors (but no purple)
That hide people
With strange accents
And lace curtains
The patterns of traffic are strange
Seeming to point everywhere
And Peugeots and Citroëns go in all directions at once
Confusing my muddled notions of Order
And Predictability
But the faces are familiar
Strange, on the wrong side of the car
Because I am strange
Timorously skipping across slippery white lines
Jumping the last few feet, to stand
Grinning, on the oppposite curb
Safe
Another game won
The sky heaves her last
Drops of ancient water collect in my eyelashes
Darken my hair
Splash my cheeks
(Carefully painted just two short hours before--
An effort to like myself)
The cold pinprick is shocking
The age old joker
Recycled
Made from the same water that flows from my garden hose
Drawn from the rivers of my childhood
Siphoned from the ocean I saw from 35,000 feet
It's presence familiar
Strange, because I am strange
Frizzy-haired and resigned to this inevitability
Not bothering with my purple umbrella
Accustomed now to soggy forays
Down unfamiliar gray streets
That feel old
Full of stories
Stories I've never known, because I've never heard
But stories I would recognize in an instant
Because they are their stories
Our stories
My Stories
And I am strange--familiar
Because they are familiar

There and Back Again

Yeah, so I disappeared off the face of the earth for about four months or so. Sorry about that. Anyway, so much has happened since then, and half of it belongs here. So here's what we're going to do: the next few posts will detail my trip to London (mostly taken verbatim from my London journal!), and then I'll talk about summer tour for a while, then maybe RUSH, and then we should be about up to date. So, yeah. London. Here we go.

There And Back Again

a British Tale

by Lindsay Westerkamp


or...


Remember that one time when we went to England?!



5/18/06
London
8:00ish AM

I didn't journal at all on the plane. I lost my pen in the first 30 minutes. Classic. Sometimes I took my journal out to look at it. I discovered a little pocket in the back, to keep mementos in. Handy. Sometimes plane rides make me feel sick. I watched parts of about six movies, though. Those thoughts were unrelated.

I am writing this from a British tour bus taking us to Worcester. Worcester, which is pronounced "Wooster." The British are weird. I still feel kind of sick. London feels like Omaha, only we're driving on the left side of the road, the cars are British sometimes, and the license plates look funny.

Matthew just slug-bugged me. In London.

Same day
Worcester/"Wooster"
1:00 PM

Heidi and I are staying with an older couple, Marion and Denis, who live in a small village near "Wooster." They've been housing students through this program for 17 years. They showed us an address book and a photo album full of names and faces from all over the world. They seem like delightful people.

We had tea, tomatoes, cucumbers, and ham&butter sandwiches for lunch.

The toilet flushes oddly. Not the civilised flow of water down the sides of the porcelain to refill the bowl, this English toilet gushes, a violent flood of water that quite startled me the first time I used it.


Same day
9:00 PM

We watched the "telly" this afternoon, and "The Price is Right" was on, with a flamboyant British host, and Pound signs instead of Dollar signs (₤ = Pound sign).

We had cottage pie and carrots and new potatoes for supper. Or was it tea? I'm not sure which was which. For dessert there was hot pudding poured over mincemeat pie. Cottage pie is mostly mushed-up meat combined with mushed-up onions, topped with mushed-up potatoes. No, really, it was actually quite good, and very filling.

After dinner we went for a drive around Malvern, a nearby town. It was wonderful. On both sides of the intimidatingly narrow road (made even tighter by a row of parked cars, reducing it to about a lane and a half) were ivy-covered brick houses straight out of the movies, big church-looking houses converted into flats, rhododendron bushes, and green, green trees. Everything is green here. It began to rain again, and a completely visible full arch of a British rainbow appeared. I've never seen one so bright. I've already used up almost an entire roll of film with pictures of the view from the ginormous Malvern hill--green fields, dotted with English sheep, wreathed in English mists, and framed by stone walls and an English rainbow.

I want to live here someday. Not forever, I don't think, but for a while, as a student, or an actor, with my own flat and a little car, far enough into the English countryside to see what I saw today, and close enough to London to work.

My mom would love it here.