~George Henry Lewes
I'm starting this post from the spotless dining room of Francesco's London apartment. I am pleased to note that the walls are every bit as white as they were when I arrived, so my dear, mildly obsessive new friend will have no fingerprints to point out when he returns from his dinner party. His cousin (who is a spy from his mother) is flying in from Italy tonight, so the place has to be super duper squeaky clean.
Francesco is in his fifties. Francesco is still afraid of his mother.
Italian mothers would hate me so much. I must never fall in love with an Italian boy. No matter how charming and playful and seductive Italian men are, their mothers would definitively be the death of me. I would be found drowned in a bucket of soapy mop water.
Because of the spy's arrival this evening, Francesco asked his maid to come half an hour early to thoroughly clean up after his German couchsurfers (he called them his messy teenagers).
"Why are you leaving trash in the room? I texted you three times this morning -- why didn't you respond to my texts? Where did you go today? What is your plan for tomorrow? Did Aimee put the blinds up like I asked? Why hasn't Aimee emailed me yet? She promised to email me first thing."
Francesco is like an overprotective mama bear... except as a middle aged Italian man with crumpled crepe paper eyes from laughing too much. I think he's wonderful. He's so stressed out about the fact that I don't have a working phone (British SIM cards don't work with my unlocked samsung, apparently) that he's purchasing a cheap phone and SIM card for me to use while I'm here.
"It will make it much better for me to be able to contact you. And it will be good for other couchsurfers in the future who have the same problem."
I shrugged. I've grown so accustomed to the freedom of being inaccessible that having to carry a phone is oddly uncomfortable.
But to each his own. He opened the door to his home, I have to fit through.
"Okay."
The gregarious Bulgarian maid arrived at 7:30.
"Where are you from?"
"Colorado."
"Oooh! America!"
"Yup. The mountainous part."
"I have never been to America... but Francesco... he has lived in New York. What are you doing in London?"
"I'm attending a yoga training program."
"Yoga! mmm... yoga is so good for the body. And the mind. And the breath. Breath is important, yes?"
"Yeah, yoga's really good for that. I actually get to practice yoga for six hours a day for the next five days. I'm really ex --"
"SIX HOURS A DAY?" Nadia leaned against the counter and caught my eyes.
"Ermm... yes."
"SIX HOURS A DAY?" she repeated. "No..." she tsked disapprovingly. "Six hours is too much. How can you do six hours?"
"A lot of it will be massage. Yoga... massage... yoga... massage... I'm not too worried."
"You will be too tired," Nadia wasn't at all convinced. "Six hours," she muttered darkly.
Six hours of play. Six hours to blissfully indulge in an activity that draws out my inner child.
I left Francesco's apartment (rapidly becoming spy proof) at a quarter to nine and walked through gardens and parks, past ducks and dogs (and coots) until I arrived at Covent Gardens Piazza in time for the free Sandeman Walking Tour.
I took no pictures as I walked -- I wanted to try one of Michael's ideas on for size.
"I stopped taking pictures because I realized that everything I photograph is a lesson -- which is the reason I'm so drawn to capture that moment. Instead of taking the picture, I tried to think about the lesson life was teaching me. By the time I understood, the moment had passed. So I sold my camera in Italy and now just look for life's lessons."
Why do I want to capture the sinister crow stalking the squirrel with the cracker? Why do I want to photograph the morning mist drifting between the trees, dulling the vibrant daffodils and blanketing the grass? What attracts me to --
This Sandeman tour was my eighth (Berlin, Madrid, Dublin, Copenhagen, Paris, Versailles and Munich are already under my belt) and the most disappointing one thus far by far. The guide spent more time talking about her hometown in New Zealand and the other tours offered by her organization that explaining London history. The only remotely interesting thing I learned during the two and a half hours of wandering through Westminster was that at one point, the garden's pelicans had become so inbred that they started eating the pigeons.
Nothing else is really worth mentioning.
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| Our guide was from a town that sounded like "Cowcoppacoppa". Which was funny the first five times she had us say it. |
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| Our very large group. |
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| The National Gallery |
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| Baha! I might finally make it into a film! My dreams of becoming a film actress might inadvertently come true. |
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| Trafalgar square (in front of the National Gallery) was originally built to commemorate the defeat of the French (I can't remember when. I think Cowcoppacoppa got in the way of this bit of history). The English ran out of money during the final phase of construction, so this pillar was left without a statue. Eventually, they decided to turn it into a sort of rotating art display. This year's piece is by a feminist who wanted to objectify men the way men objectify women. So she erected a massive blue cock on top of the pillar. She didn't quite realize that the national color of France is blue and the national bird of France is... the cock. France was quite delighted with this turn of events. |
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| Changing of the guard. |
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| Buckingham Palace. |
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| The most lucrative Ferris Wheel in the world. This big guy makes 50,000 pounds an hour. |
If only Harriet could see me now... No! No, Bourget. You are not getting bitter over this. Eat your chorizo because you like chorizo and not because Harriet would not like you eating chorizo.
So I enjoyed the chorizo because chorizo is delicious and then went to explore the National Gallery. Because the National Gallery has works by my favorite artists and not because every guide book says I ought to visit.
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