The boat that I was on was named The Ulysses, which was sort of cool. The whole boat was James Joyce themed. Why would I, Forrest, not like this, you ask? After I saw "Nora Barnacle's Food Emporium," my respect for the whole thing kind of dropped. It was interesting being at sea though. I've never done any major travel by boat before, it was interesting. For such an early departure, there was a lot of alcohol in that boat. I hung out quite a bit in "HLeopold Bloom's Pub," (all I got was a sandwich, it was 8 in the morning for god's sake!) and most people were pretty drunk by the end. Leave it to the Irish.
Luckily enough, the boat took my right to a train station, and I only had to wait about 15 minutes for the train to get there. I sat with a very interesting group of people. The first was an Englishman--he seemed very proper. He had a fairly educated accent, although he did mention having a blue collar job. He was very clever though. I've heard before that English people are uptight, but I've found the opposite. They've got quite vicious humor though; you can't take anything personally. The second was technically an Irishman. He was raised in Dublin, but he's lived in London the last 10 years, and is now married to an Englishwoman. He sounded more Cockney than Irish, but really somewhere in between, if you can imagine that. He was a huge, dark-skinned man who obviously did a lot of weight lifting. His arms were massive around, tattooed, and his stomach was bulging a little, but from muscle I think. He'd just been married last week, and he wasn't very good about it. Every time a girl would walk by he would talk in very graphic language about whether or not he would like to engage in certain activities with her. They were at the table across the aisle. Across from me was another Dubliner, but she'd also been living in England for a long time; she really sounded much more English than Irish, and besides an Irish "R" slipping through every now and again, I couldn't even tell she wasn't English. We talked a bit on the first leg of the ride. As we passed a mountain, the proper gentleman mentioned that someone had fallen off it recently and died. "Did you know that Holland just made psychadelic mushrooms illegal?" I replied. They were very confused. Apparently, a French tourist recently got hopped up on mushrooms and jumped off a bridge (thus the connection) and the result was the prohibition of mushrooms in Holland. I explained the connection. "I also heard," replied the English gentleman, "that someone did that on Mt. Kilimanjaro recently."
At the first or second stop, a very strange man got on and sat at the table across the aisle, next to the proper man and the Dubliner. He reminded me a lot of Johnny Depp's character from Pirates of the Carribean--who is of course based on Keith Richards. He was never quite looking where he was supposed to be looking. He started some tangent about a band. The dark skinned Dubliner interrupted him: "Have you been to eating mushrooms lately? You've been hitting up Mt. Kilimanjaro?" Keith Richards was so clueless, he didn't even catch on that we were laughing at him.
"Where are you from in America?" he asked me. "I'm from Norther California, but I live up in Oregon now." I said. "So you're from Steinbeck country then?" He asked. "Yeah sort of." "He's one of my favorite authors." You have to of course imagine this all in very drunk Cockney dialect. At one point he asked me "Do you say 'a hotel' or 'an hotel'?" "If we're writing formally, we put 'an hotel', but we usually just say 'a hotel'." I said. "Well then," he replied, "you're not really speaking the Queen's English, are you?" I was temped to say "No, we're speaking William Faulkner's English!" but I resisted.
At one point, the proper gentleman looked at me and said "Well, I hope you go back to America with some good stories." Just afterwards, he nodded his head toward Keith Richards.
We had to transfer trains at one point, and fortunately, the dark-skinned Dubliner was also headed to London. One thing I've noticed here is that they really don't hold you hand with directions the way that they do in America. People are definitely more expected to figure things out for themselves. As I was sitting with this man on the next train, I began to realize slowly how strange he was. He kept talking about how hard it was to not look at other women. As the conversation went on, he revealed that he and his wife had only been married last week, and that she's five months pregnant. It sounds like a marriage really destined for success...
I told him that my friend in London had planned to go clubbing that night, and I was to go with her. "Oh man, you've got to check out the chicks, just loike so hot man," he said. "Well, seeing as I'm going with my girlfriend's best friend, it's not a very good idea to go on the prowl," I said. "You gotta be careful mate!" he said, "really really careful! You know whatever you do, she's going to be typing on Facebook or whatever to your girl back home!" "Yeah, you're right." I said. I figured we should just leave it at that...
When I got to London, we had a little get together with some Oregon House kids. Hillary (the girl that I'm staying with here, Jane's best friend from grade school) is a part time nanny, and her employer gave us permission to sleep in the house. Another Oregon House girl named Natalie--one that I didn't know really until Saturday night--is now living in Paris, and she was in London for the weekend. We ate some crackers and cheese and had some wine, and then we went to dinner. After that we went to this club... and I really don't like clubbing. For one thing, I don't really enjoy dancing anyway, but doing it in a hot, crowded, drunken room while watching strangers randomly rub their genitals against my friends is even less enjoyable. We got home around 3:00 in the morning and went straight to sleep. Yesterday we had a picnic by Hillary's school, and then we went to a pizza place, because Erika had half price vouchers there. It's nice to be able to socialize a little after spending a week basically alone, and it's also really nice having Hillary to show me around the city. Last night, after pizza, I ended up in a hostel. Hillary has midterms this week, and she wanted her room empty so that she could study. It was actually a really nice hostel though--only 18 pounds and it included breakfast. It equals out with the exchange rate right now to about 25 dollars. Not bad.
The Hostel is right near the British Museum, and I checked that out today. It's pretty amazing. Unfortunately, since it's not tourist season, a lot of the exhibits are shut down for repair of some sort. Still, it was very cool. I saw too many things to list, but the highlight for me was definitely the Greek sculpture. Call me a neo-classicist, but something in me just has this feeling from Greek sculpture that it's the highest form of art ever reached. I get the same feeling from Faulkner, Brodsky and Paz, but it's very rare for any visual art--as amazing as visual arts are--to touch me that way. There was one sculpture in particular of a priestess of Demeter (the goddess of seasons, her daughter Persephone is married to Hades and goes to live with him in the winter. Demeter doesn't like that very much and so she stops the plants frm growing until Persephone comes back, thus seasons), she was looking up at the sky, or toward Olympus if you will, and the look of suffering on her face was so perfect. It seems so well to reflect and widen the human experience. I later saw a small figuring of Demeter herself with a similar expression, although she was looking down this time, toward the Underworld.
This afternoon I went to meet Hillary's girls. She baby sits two very feisty British girls after her classes everyday. They're cute, but very snappy. They're also quite amused by any American idioms. Apparently in England "pants" are what we call underwear, and what we call pants are "trousers." That's one of their favorites. Also, in badminton, what we call a "birdy" is here called a "shuttlecock." That's one of my favorites.
Hillary is at a play right now, and I'm in her flat. I felt like I could use a little down time, so here I am. I have not a clue what I'll do tomorrow--which means probably the tourist information center!
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