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.