It Seemed Like a Good Idea... London and Buckinghamshire, England

I’m starting this post from Cafe Revival in Bristol, England. Boy and I sit in a window seat on the second level, drinking lattes and cappuccinos and being grateful that the wallet we absentmindedly just left in Queen park didn’t get stolen.

What would we have done if it hadn’t still been lying in the grass? I’m sure we would have survived, but goodness, that would have been a hassle. Calling all the bank accounts in the states, canceling cards, getting new ones delivered overseas... what a fiasco.

A cool breeze wanders in through the window behind us, sometimes welcome, sometimes not. The smooth, full voice of a street performer the breeze carries in is always welcome. Soothing guitar, rich harmonica, heartfelt words coated in caramel draw my attention away from my writing and to the street below.

Sometimes I wish I could create music like that… other times… I’m just so grateful other people have dedicated their lives to this art and I feel like being able to sit back and appreciate their music is enough. 

We spent Wednesday night in Keflavik Airport. 

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Spending the night in airports when one has a morning flight always seems like a good idea the day before. I mean, think about it -- you're saving money, you don't have to pack up and get on the road at stupid-o'clock in the morning and there's no way you're missing your flight. 

But then you arrive at the airport. And the person in charge of checked luggage tells you that she can't possibly take your bags until after four thirty am. So you can't go through security to the warmth and nicer chairs and carpeted floors surrounding your departure gate. 

So you think, "Okay. I've only got five and a half hours until four thirty rolls around. That's easy. Pshaw. Five and a half hours is nothing." 

And then the frigid drafts from the constantly opening automatic glass doors start to get to you. Moments of relative warmth and comfort are few and far between when all that stands between you and Iceland is a glass door that opens every ten minutes. And the ice cold, rock hard floors on which you sit make your poor, abused tailbone wish it had never been born. You bumble to your feet, rubbing the goo out of your eyes and feeling slightly nauseous. You walk around for the seventeenth time in the last hour, hoping hopelessly that someone has abandoned one of the few cushioned seats without the callous, metal armrest. 

You discover that the coffee shop closes in five minutes. You rush in, order a coffee, sink into a plush chair with your cold fingers wrapped tightly around the warm mug and hope (hopelessly) that the barista will take pity on you and allow you to just... sleep a little bit... 

The barista does not take pity on you. The barista says, "I'm sorry, but you have to get out," regardless of how pathetic you look. 

By four thirty in the morning, you have tried every possible maneuver to get to sleep with you, your bag and your exhausted boyfriend. You sit on a rigid metal chair with your legs propped up on your backpack and your head buried in your chest. You lean forward in your chair and cradle your backpack between your legs, head resting on the top. You try to lean over onto your boyfriend's lap, but your eternal enemy, the metal armrest, blocks you. Again and again and again, he thwarts all your attempts to drift off into some sort of sleep. 

You are completely wrecked. Utterly thrashed. Survivors of a natural disaster have looked better than you. In fact, casualties of a natural disaster have looked better than you.

We arrived in London at 12:15 on Thursday afternoon. We did not miss our flight. 

True to form, England's passport control was properly terrifying. 

"Where are you staying? Who are you staying with? Why are you staying for a whole month? What will you do for a whole month? Where are you going after this? What do you do at home? What sort of non-profit? Can you put your left leg behind your head?" 

"Left leg yes, right leg no," I said, thinking about my knee. 

After two more hours of navigating London's tube, we arrived at Enrique's (a friend of Boy's). Enrique was not home to greet us, but his roommate and an immensely friendly, fluffy pooch named Macho opened the door. 

"Hi... we're, uh... Enrique's friends. He told you we were coming?" 

"No," the girl looked behind her at another roommate. 

"Yes, yes. Enrique told me. Come in -- Enrique's not here, but come in. He said you can put your things in his room." 

We gratefully and resentfully dumped our backpacks on the floor of Enrique's tiny, clean room located at the top of several steep stairs. Then we flung ourselves on the bed to get as much sleep as we could before the grumbling of our abandoned stomachs became unbearable. Then we walked to a nearby Tesco Express and bought cheese (!), sausage (!), wine (!) and a giant container of grapes for less than ten pounds. 

"We're not in Iceland anymore," I said as we paid the bill. 

"Thank god." 

I can't remember a time cheese has tasted so good. 

I love being away from the UK for long enough that I forget all the things I love about it. Because then I get to fall in love all over again, but it feels like a more nostalgic kind of falling in love. 

Everyone calls me (and everyone else) "love." I recently overheard a phone conversation wherein goodbye was, "Alright then, love you, love." 

I'm struck by how easy it is to walk in English cities. So many people have told me that whilst visiting London, I need to get an Oyster card to make public transportation easier. 

Why would I want to spend my visit underground and in tube stations? 

Enrique is a construction worker, and he will always have work in London, because it seems like all of London is consistently under construction. Buildings hundreds of years old being renovated. Modern glass buildings being built. Scaffolding and cranes speckle the city. 

Planes fly overhead every minute or two, taking off from or landing in one of London's three airports.

We stopped for a picnic in a park on our first full day in London.

We wondered why everyone else was using benches when we all know picnics ought to be had on the grass. But after the sixth or seventh dog had charged us to get a good sniff of our paté, we understood.

An Irish wolfhound lumbered towards us, looking like a great beast out of a horror film. A very stubborn spaniel attacked over and over again. His owner would take him to a different area of the park, throw a tennis ball for him, and the dog would ignore the ball and hightail it right back to our picnic.

A chihuahua and a poodle approached at the same time. Boy and I joined arms to form a barricade around our chorizo and haloumi. A woman (wisely) sitting on a nearby bench laughed.

"Can't be left in peace, can ya?" she joked. But not really.

In a place like London, "natural" sometimes appears to be the anomaly. Tattoos frequently peak out from under shirts, makeup can be plastered on and hair takes on multiple fantastical colors.

When I walk London alone, I seek out parks in which I can escape the sounds and smells of urban life. When I walk London with Boy, he seeks out streets with old row houses and ancient churches and wine shops.

This is often the view in London. Beautiful old buildings seen through crisscrossed scaffolding.

We took the tube to Twickenham on Friday night. A Romanian family on Couchsurfing had invited Boy and me to stay with them, but as we'd already found Enrique, we had to say no.

"But I'd be happy to meet with you for coffee," I messaged Loredana.

Loredana went a step further. She invited Boy and me to a dinner in her home.

"This is the spirit of couchsurfing that I just adore," I told Boy as we sat on the tube. "Strangers going out of their way to become friends in such an intimate way. We're going to dinner with total strangers tonight. In their home."

And dinner was beautiful. Fish and sweet potatoes and cheese and wine.

"This is our first home-cooked meal in a week," I said, deeply content.

I love that this experience will probably be one of the main things I remember about this trip to London. Our dinner with strangers. The conversation we had about Sibiu and all its windows that look like eyes. The coffee Christopher shared from Italy. The fact that total strangers would do something like this. Nothing asked in return. 

"Would you like to join us for a coffee this morning?" I asked Enrique the next day.

"Okay... we can do that... breakfast isn't very big in Spain..." Enrique mumble in his morning face.

We expected Enrique to take us to a nearby cafe. Instead, he took us to a small restaurant serving full-blown English breakfasts. Boy and I looked at each other nervously.

This is NOT what we signed up for...

"Why don't we split one?" I asked Boy as we waited in line. "Preferably a breakfast with no beans."

Our enormous meal of fried tomatoes, mushrooms, bacon, sausage and black pudding was delivered in no time. Boy and I stared at the intimidating meal in wonder and incredulity.

How can one person put a meal like this away? 

"Thank god we didn't order two..."

Enrique disappeared for a moment -- we supposed to use the loo -- and then returned to slowly put away his own version of the English breakfast. A few minutes later (after we'd laboriously and barely managed to finish our own) another full-blown breakfast (half the plate was beans) arrived.

"Who's this for?" we asked, quite confused.

"It's for you," Enrique motioned. "I thought you looked hungry." 

"Oh..."

We just spent the last fifteen minutes talking about how full we were and the last two days talking about how we've been put off beans by Iceland... gosh. You wonder how much gets lost in language barriers...

We put in a valiant attempt to finish the second breakfast, but failed miserably. Enrique looked disappointed that we left the entire lake of beans on the plate.

Just...can't...no more legumes...

We lumbered off to Richmond Park after our incapacitating breakfast. I had stellar memories of my time in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, so I was very much looking forward to spending another afternoon in a London park.

But not all parks are created equal. Richmond Park has no flowers, hardly any interesting birds and nary a sculpture. It has a massive golf course, tall grasses full of ticks, a rather boring lake in the middle and deer. So many deer.

"Why would we go to a city to wander around in a forest?" Boy complained.

"I'm sorry... I thought it would be more like Kensington Gardens... you would have loved that park. There were sculptures everywhere. So many different kinds of ducks. People having picnics. Still close enough to the city that you know you're in a city... but this park? You're right. There's no reason to come here if you're just visiting London for three days..."
 

We made our way out of London's massive forest after about two hours of wandering with aching feet and still cursing the park's severe dearth of ducks. But the borough of Richmond had nearly enough wine and cheese shops to compensate for the barren city forest.

We had planned to meet Enrique at his home in Wandsworth, but he texted Boy that he was in Camden. And that we should meet him there. As Camden was on the other side of the city and Boy and I were knackered, we did our best to subtly say we wouldn't mind (not one bit) just going to Wandsworth. 

But Enrique was determined. 

"Okay," I told Boy. "He's your friend. He's our host. Let's go hang out with him in Camden." 

Enrique reminds me of a puppy. Eighty percent of the time, his features and demeanor are a bit droopy, and I think, "aw.... sad, kicked puppy..." The other twenty percent of the time, I think he's the puppy whose owner has just come home after a week away. 

In Camden, Enrique was like the puppy whose owner had just come home after a week away. But Boy and I felt just a bit out of place. Which isn't a bad thing at all -- just a little unusual to sit in a pub where the average customer sported dark arm sleeve tattoos, hair that stood over a foot high, too many piercings to count and clothing weighed down by chains.

Umm... I have a super hippie albatross with a sunset behind my ear... does that work?  

Enrique bought us some drinks. He would have liked to buy us more (to keep the party going), but Boy and I were both a little famished. Also, we had a bottle of wine at home and cheese we wanted to eat. So Enrique found an all you can eat vegetarian Chinese buffet where he treated us to heaping plates of dubious looking fake meat.

This guy tries so hard... sweetest fellow in the world. 

Enrique was desperate to go to another pub after dinner. Boy and I were not (even a little bit), but it's hard to say no to someone who's that excited. So we followed along, until the bouncer stopped Boy at the entrance of the pub.

"Sorry, mate. No shorts allowed. Manager's rules."

Wait a minute... we can't go in because Troy's wearing SHORTS? That's hilarious...

So we went home and drank wine and ate cheese and shared stories with Enrique's Polish roommates.

We said goodbye to Enrique the next morning, thanking him for everything (even the second breakfast) and promising to meet him in Spain one day.

We grumpily shouldered our backpacks and trundled off to Earlsfield Station. After an hour and a half on the train, we disembarked at Chalfont and Latimer station and sat down with our kindle to wait for Jack and Charlotte to arrive.

I haven't seen this family in... two years now? Yes... two years last April I stayed with them for a couple of days. I wonder how they've changed... how I've changed since they've last seen me. I think it's one of the hard things about having such large gaps between contact... you wonder, "have we changed in ways that will bring us together or ways that will tear us apart?" You wonder, "have defining things happened in this person's life that I've missed... and now I get to learn who they are all over again?" I was in Germany for the birth of my brother's first and in Mexico for the birth of my brother's second.  When I last saw Sabina in Slovenia, she was pregnant with her daughter... now her daughter must be... two years old? I'll get to relearn who she is as a mother. 

On the drive home with Jack, we discovered that we both had mirror knee injury stories. He'd injured his knee skiing a year back and had to have ACL reconstructive surgery. We talked about how horrible the recovery process is and how I've swung to the other side of the pendulum as far as risk taking goes.

No paragliding in Macedonia for me this winter...

Jack and Charlotte had moved to a different house last winter. A four hundred year old house that used to be a pub. In fact, Charles II used to eat there.

"We wanted a house with a garage for my Porsche and property for Charlotte's horse... so naturally, we bought a house with neither."

"I saw this place and just fell in love," Charlotte said as she gave me the tour. I couldn't blame her. All the ancient wooden beams, the gorgeous windows, the kitchen that you could easily get lost in...

"And what do you think, Jack?"

"I like straight lines and things that work."

 

 

Charlotte had invited some friends over for dinner that night, and what a dinner it was... wine, cheese, crackling, pork, sausages, veg...

"Thinking about dinner at your place is one of the things that got us through our cans of beans and bags of rice in Iceland," I said, slumping into my chair in contentment.

"Right, what would you like for pudding?" Charlotte asked Violet at the end of the meal.

I leaned over to Boy and confided, "Just so you know, in the UK, pudding is a general term for dessert. Like, cake can be pudding. And so can pudding. You can have pudding for pudding. Or ice cream for pudding. Or strawberries for pudding."

It's fun to share the things with Boy that took me forever to learn...

The next day, Jack and Charlotte took us for a walk through Marlowe --  
  

 

-- after which we stopped at the Dog and Badger for a spectacular lunch. 

I love that in the UK, all you have to do is put two creatures together and voila! You have a restaurant. The Dog and Badger. The Horse and Jockey. The Slug and Lettuce. Alternatively, you can put an adjective with the creature. The Golden Lion. The Black Stallion. The White Stag. 

Boy and I felt utterly spoiled at the Dog and Badger. It was one of those meals that we're going to reminisce about longingly for ages. Courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta, honey and truffle oil. Duck leg confit with pea puree. Vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce for pudding. A magnificent bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. 

I love food too much to be a poor vagabond... how do I reconcile my love for amazing food and wine with my general hobo way of life?

Charlotte drove us to the Lewknor Tube station the next morning (which is a bus stop, believe it or not). 

"It was great to catch up with you," she gave me a hug as we said goodbye. 

"Thanks so much for having us... it was so good to be here again." 

I hope that I can one day live in a place people will want to visit. So that I can host even a few of the people who've been this good to me.