The First Weekend – American Ignorance

Sep 21, 2007 by Justin Wayne

21/9/07
jwa

So… a bus crash, bikers in the mall and a few days later, we’re headed downtown London. Trafalgar Square is our destination, and as our Londoner flatmate describes directions so nonchalantly, we figure we’re not going anywhere too far out of the ordinary. WRONG. I suppose, for us foreign Americans, everything is out of the ordinary and how is someone who grew up in this city supposed to ever try and empathize with us. I think sometimes she finds is very strange the things that we don’t immediately understand. Anyway… back to Saturday.

So, we hop on bus for an hour. It’s a Saturday and because of what’s going on down in the city everyone’s going. We didn’t know this at the time, nor did we really know what was going on where we were going. Look up Trafalgar Square on Google, it’s very famous and our American ignorance about it is about to be crushed. (Thank god.)

So, we arrive at Charring Cross and Oxford Road, which is just east of more famous things that us two Americans have no idea of. We trot down Charring Cross road which is filled with bookstores, places that Jamie and I adore, and keep on to the Square. I’m wondering if we’ll find it, if it will be visible… if we’ll know it when we get there…

Yeah. We do. It’s huge, the square sits in the British Museum of Art’s proverbial porch/front yard and there’s a huge stage set up where it’s a Festival for Peace. Lots of local artists grace the stage and music from Hip Hop to (some sort of glam-ish) Pop blasts into the gorgeous square. We look for our flatmate, don’t see her, and move toward the river.

The Thames (pronounced Tems) River splits London roughly in two, and walking toward it and the Millennium Bridge (another piece of info we found out later) we see the London Eye. Apparently the rock that I was under sufficiently guarded myself from this landmark, but not Jamie. She begins to tell me that this is a very prodigious part of London – the largest ferris wheel in the world. It’s huge. Also we see, for the first time Big Ben, Parliament, and Westminster Abbey. AWESOME! And, to boot, it was a gorgeous, sunny day – rare in the fall.

We then stumble across the Thames River Festival that apparently happens at the beginning of every fall. Tons of street vendors, performers, and people are all over this area and it’s a site to see. We saw Jack Sparrow, some dood who looked like a tree, a fairy, and a folk singing statue. All in a day’s work.

We ended up running into our flatmates eventually, after we ventured back toward the busses for home. We still didn’t have a mobile them (we do now) and so finding them was pure luck. Email me if you want our number, I’d feel a bit odd posting it on here.

This last week has mostly been me searching for jobs and all that kind of great stuff. Mostly me sitting in our flat on the computer… kind of like I am now! We did go exploring once this week and found some fun things. I’ll enlighten you all on that next time.

Thanks for reading, all the support, positive thoughts, and all that. We’d love to hear from you out here: justin.arndt@gmail.com.

I think Jamie is going to start adding her own bits now and again too. She didn’t like some of the comments about her on one of the postings and so we’ll see if she can get back at me.

Until next time…

Cheers!

Justin