London

When I was leaving Dublin, the person checking my passport ran it through the machine and gave me the side-eye. I knew what it meant. The Republic of Ireland was in the EU, but I was able to cross visa and checkpoint free from Northern Ireland. I had inadvertently stayed a few days over my three-month mark that was allowed by the Schengen Agreement. I did not know if I would be fined on the spot or they would make me pay a fine the next time I was in Europe, or even bar me from entry. Thankfully, he just waved me through.

I got to London with no problems. I took a super expensive train from the airport (£18) to then get to the Metro. The interesting thing about this new metro system was that the turn styles accepted contactless credit cards. So travelers always paid exactly what they needed and there was no need for a ticket. I loved it. 

I arrived at my hostel and was shown to my room by an Italian gentleman that worked there that looked like a miniature Tom Hardy. The room I was shown was a 14 topper. He pointed out my bed. Luckily it was against the wall as others were free right in the middle of the room. I set down my things and locked up my stuff then went and met my other hostel mates at the bar. 

As it was in the afternoon, there were only a few people there, but a young lady got my attention. She looked like a younger Lauren Cohen, famously known for playing Maggie from The Walking Dead. She was sitting by herself going through her phone when I came over, beer in hand, and asked if I could join her. She said it was OK and we started chatting. Her name was A and she was visiting Europe from Australia. Apparently, she had been on a European walkabout for the last four months, alone. The Motherland was the last stop before she returned to Adelaide. I told her about my trip, especially making sure to mention the stop in her hometown. She told me more about her trip, including getting a commemorative tattoo to remember when her friend Emilio got arrested in Croatia. Even though she was Australian, and by default crazy, I was still drawn to her. As a wise man once said, attraction is not a choice. A gentleman named Luke from New Zealand joined us as we shared more stories. I soon learned the unofficial national anthem of Australia. I said my goodnights and then headed to bed after getting some dinner from a nearby grocery store. I had a big day coming up.

I woke up very early and headed out to meet my tour group. Walking through the practically empty streets of London reminded me of the opening scene in 28 Days Later. I found my van, confirmed my ticket, then promptly fell asleep. Two hours later, the driver informed us that we would be arriving soon. Looking out my window, I saw it; one of the last monuments I wanted to visit in England.

Stonehenge is shrouded in mystery. Was it a burial ground? Was it a clock? Who built it in the middle of nowhere? How did they build it in the middle of no where? Apparently, as I would soon learn, it was a spot for healing and people from all over Europe came there for its magical powers. 

We got out in the parking lot, got our tickets, then headed into the little welcome center. It was pretty amazing and there were lots of people. The welcome center was a ways away from the site, so a little trek got me there before the hordes because it was still early. It was fantastic to finally see it. I walked around the entire thing a few times. 

I got back on the bus and listened to a few podcasts until we got back to the city. I decided I was going to let Rick Steves be my guide of London City. There were several things that I found fascinating. 

The first is that for all the Potterheads out there, the Australian Embassy served as the exterior of the famed Gringot’s bank in the film. Unfortunately, the protective dragon was on a coffee break when I arrived.

Turning 180° from the Embassy/Bank was an unassuming small church, St Mary le Strand. I did not know it at the time, but it was the official church of Women’s Royal Naval Service and had displays of members of the church that fought and died during World War II, both men and women. It was something to see all those once young faces looking back from those photos knowing that years before I was born, even before my parents were born, many of them had died. 

I continued on my tour with Mr. Steves over to the mighty Thames river that bisected the city where he shared a story. When one thinks of London, there are a great many landmarks that come to mind: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben (which is actually the name of the bell inside the tower,) and of course London Bridge. Now, picture in your mind the stunning trellises of London Bridge, towering above the Thames, with its blue and white hues. If you pictured that, then you did the exact same thing that Robert P. McCulloch, an Arizona real estate developer did. In 1968, he bought London Bridge and moved it brick by brick to Lake Havasu for a community he was planning for what he thought was a song. However, he soon learned that the bridge he wanted with the towers and blue hues was, in fact, Tower Bridge. 

Going back to my tour with Mr Steves, just per happenstance, I found a clinic on Fleet Street (close to Sweeney Todd’s Barbershop no less) that was offering Yellow Fever vaccinations. Considering that I would be in South America soon, I thought it would be a good idea to get one. I walked in and from a lovely doctor (for a quarter of the price of what it cost in the United States) I got my shot and I was back on my way.

The final location I saw was the St Mary le Bow Church. It was going through some renovations at the time, but I was able to find a way in. They had some lovely music playing. The reason this church was significant was for a very particular reason. The United Kingdom has a pleathora of accents. From Northern Irish, to Scottish, to Birmingham, Livepool, and even the many neighborhoods of London. The people that were in earshot of the bells of St Mary le Bow Church supposedly had the most particular (and stereotypical) accent of the London working class, the Cockney. Just think of Michael Caine (or to a much lesser extent Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.)

I returned to the hostel where I saw Luke and started talking. We were having a good convo when all of a sudden out of the blue, he asked me if I was gay. Perplexed, I told him, no I was not. I asked him his reasoning. He said that when we were chatting with A the previous night, she kept saying to me “your people” and “your kind.” I replied that maybe it was because I am American. A lightbulb went off and he agreed that was the reason. Pretty soon after I called it a night as I had a full day planned. 

I got up the next day and headed to the Imperial War Museum. I had visited the Museum before in 2006 at the behest of one of my high school professors. He was Army intelligence during World War II and “liberated” a lot of things from the higher up in the Nazi party. For example, I held in my own hands Hitler’s World War I dog tags. He collected a lot of things, especially pertaining to the Holocaust and planned to donate them all. However, he needed to be very sure that any museum that accepted his items would not later turn around and sell them. The last thing he wanted was a lampshade of human skin to end up in the hands of a Nazi sympathizer. He chose to donate his collection to the Imperial War Museum due to the fact that it took three separate votes for items to go into private collections, instead of one for a rather famous museum in the United States that shall remain nameless. 

While the exhibits they showcased regarding World War I were still on point, going through the displays, I noticed that the museum had taken a notably progressive turn. For one example, it compared Nazi ideology to current right of center political parties, painting them both with the same brush. 

But there was another exhibit that was the witness stand of a defendant of the Lockerbie bombing that really got my attention. On December 21st 1988, Pan Am flight 101 from London to New York at 7:00pm was carrying a bomb the detonated, killing all 259 people aboard over Lockerbie, Scotland. What I found most shocking about this display was that they offered a politically correct explanation of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, basically condoning the murder of people going home to their families around Christmas. My professor would be rolling in his grave.

Throughly disgusted with this once great museum, I went back to the hostel. I took a nap, hung out for a little bit,  and chatted with A. I then went back out to meet my friend Lauren.

Lauren went to my sister school and we did a play together back in middle school. She studied theatre in college and moved to Los Angeles soon after school. Her career immediately took off. She has a deep, raspy voice and was cast doing voice-over work for an incredibly large American retailer. When I was thinking about my move to Los Angeles, she was one of the people that helped convince me. She has such positive energy regarding everything she does and is a real light. I figured that if a lot of people on the West Coast were like her, it would be a great place to live. After a few years, while she liked Los Angeles, she loved England and moved to London to get her MFA. She has since worked as an actress doing live shows, including even the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 

I hopped on the train and headed out to East London. She was coming from another part of the London Suburbs. We met in the station and walked over to this cool storage container bar and had a few drinks as she had her partner’s birthday party to attend. We got caught up on the last 10 years and I told her about my travels. She asked about investment advice and I asked her about Argentina where her family spent a lot of time. Lauren has a unique ability to connect with people on a truly personal level, a trait that I find very endearing. It was incredibly good seeing her.

I headed back on the subway to my hostel when I got a really eerie feeling. After watching rats run around the platform, a song came on my iPod that I had first heard when I was driving West through the Montana night a year earlier on an ersatz road trip to see the rest of the 50 states. It was a cover of Silent Running by Mike and the Mechanics. It is a song about civil strife, violence, and authoritarianism. I did not spend too much time looking at news from home while I was out of the country. However, there was a large elephant in the room, the 2020 Presidental Election. Maybe it was the beer, the streaming fluorescent lights, or the fact I had been a stranger in a strange land for so long, but I had a vision that something big was going to be happening in the near future and the Free World would be in the balance. 

I got to my stop and headed to the hostel where to anesthetize my mind against my realization, I played some drinking games with my hostel mates. It was just what I needed to take my mind off it. And on to the fact that A was making inroads to bed one of the hostel workers. I went to bed at 12:30 AM but woke up having a wicked charlie horse. After I set it right, I went blissfully back to sleep. 

The next morning I was surprised I was not more hungover after going round for round people more than a decade younger. Sadly my go-to breakfast spot, the Tesco supermarket, was closed. So I went to a little place called Cafe Nero for tea and pain du chocolate. I then headed to the British Museum.

It was quite a place. I had been there before, but this time I had much more worldly context. Most notably regarding the Elgin Marbles. 

The Elgin Marbles is a collection of Greek statues of antiquity that had once adorned the Acropolis in Athens. When the Ottoman Turks invaded Greece, if you recall, they used the Parthenon as an ammunition depot, that was then promptly damaged during their war with the Venetians. Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin offered the Sultan a substantial sum to purchase many of these statues. As they were from a pagan and decadent past that did not celebrate the words of the Prophet, the Sultan obliged.  Lord Elgin transported these statues to England, but subsequently fell on hard time and was forced to sell them to the British Government.  The pieces were then added to the museum. As history is never completely in the past, the issue now was that the Greek government said that the marbles were pilfered artifacts and they wanted them back. The tension only increased with the looming Brexit. 

I walked around the rest of the museum. It was fascinating to see so many worldly artifacts from the far flung corners of the British Empire. They were right, the sun never set on it. 

I went back to the hostel and promptly took a nap as I had a big night. I rose, talked to A for a little bit to gauge the temperature which had turned notably frosty. But that was OK. I headed out for a show.

Knowing my way pretty well around London, I hopped the Tube and arrived on the far side of the Thames. I walked the London Bridge then made a left and strolled to the New Globe Theatre. I was going to culminate a dream by seeing a Shakespearean play at the Globe. I was seeing a late summer’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Before the show, I walked around the little museum they had and made quite a startling realization. While the Old Globe Theatre burned down in 1613, the New Globe was built with the aid of the Strawbridge family. For those that did not grow up in the Philadelphia area, the Strawbridge’s were buku rich, making their money in the very early days of department stores. I even went to school with one of their heirs. I had no idea the family were such patorn of the arts especially on the far side of the pond. 

The production was fantastic. It started with a brass band that made me a little homesick and stayed pretty true to the script while throwing in some improv and modern additions. They even picked someone from the crowd to come up and play a character. I was up in the Queen seats, but the Groundlings looked fun too.

I came back to the hostel, had a few beers at the bar while being froze out by A and her new accomplice, a ditsy blonde named Stephanie. Seeing how this was a less than stellar social engagement, I left and joined some boys playing cards. A few moments later, the girls came over. Then the object of A affection, the hostel worker came and sat in the same chair as she directly to my right. After arranging themselves in the most conducive position possible, they tackily began snogging right there. I avoided the sight as much as I could. 

I know I should not have been as attached to her as I was, and maybe because I was a little lonely from my voyage, but it put me in a sour mood. I finished my game, got up, and moved to another table. 

There was a bald guy from Long Beach, California that seemed really fixated on me. He inquired quite poignantly why a guy in his mid-thirties would be hanging out at hostels with people much younger than him. I said it was a great way to see the world and to meet interesting people, instead of being hermetically sealed in a hotel room. Typically, like people from Los Angeles, he did not know when to stop. He did not pick up that I was not in the mood to play 20 Questions. He asked me how I was able to travel the world the way I did. I answered his question with a question; I asked if he had ever heard of Bitcoin? His jaw dropped. He asked if I was a millionaire. I just made a sheepish grin. He very much wanted to play me in chess for some reason. I was not having it. 

The snog fest ended, but the worker said he wanted to make plans with most of us to go out the next night as it was his day off. Everyone was invited but me. All good.

The rest of the night, I chatted with Harry the Greek and closed down the bar. We talked about politics, philosophy, culture, art, and history. It is times like those that I know I made the right decision to do this trip. 

I still had some nervous energy and asked if Harry would like to go for a walk. He said sure. We walked all the way to China Town which was only a few blocks from where were staying. On the way back, we both inadvertently walked through a crime scene because the police had just gotten there and did not put up the crime scene tape yet. As I was walking, a cop linked my arm and flung me into the street saying I was walking through his scene of a crime. I apologized and asked what happened. Apparently, this was the fifth stabbing of the night in the neighborhood.

Seeing how knives were the only weapons readily available to the criminal element of England, stabbings had become a really big problem. So much so, there were warnings all over the city about what happens if one get caught with a knife. They even limited the purchase of kitchen knives for regular people. Being a fan of the Second Ammendment and also being a victim of violent crime where a knife was used, I found the whole predicament laughable. But as a noted historian once said, “…that as long as poverty gives men the courage of necessity, or plenty fills them with the ambition which belongs to insolence and pride, and the other conditions of life remain each under the thraldom of some fatal and master passion, so long will the impulse never be wanting to drive men into danger.”

The following day, I got up, got brekkie, and hung out with one of my friends from the previous few nights, Antonio. He was American but on his way to Barcelona. I wished him well on his voyage.

Looking at my email, I saw that my phone bill, one that I had not been using for over 6 months, was $100. Recalling my time in Nagasaki, I was not looking forward to having to call customer service and eat up my day. Luckily, their chat service was enough and I was able to send my bill back to $10 for holding my account. 

I set out to make a stop at probably the one place in the world where if it were possible, one could die by hypocrisy. While I got turned around a little, I finally made it to the entrance of Highgate Cemetery. It is a private cemetery where one has to pay £4 to enter. While there are many important people that are buried there, there was only one that I wanted to see. I walked directly to his tomb and read the inscription on it. I stepped back, inhaled through my nose mustering all the mucus I could, then hocked a loogie right onto his stone face. I did my part desecrating the final resting place of a man that made sure that millions of people would not have one and be known only to God. My spittle dripped from the nose of Karl Marx. The fucker is buried behind an actual paywall, but it was worth the entry fee.

I headed back to the hostel and took a nap, made myself some dinner while I chatted with everyone, including A as if nothing happened from the night before. I then got ready for my spooky tour of London. I left the hostel and went into the chilly London night.

In the summer of 1888, the city of London was in a panic. In the Whitechapel district of the East End, a more industrial part of the city where the machines of the Industrial Revolution churned out smoke night and day, a haze decended. Encloaked in smoke, like the devil himself, Jack the Ripper would kill five women. Presumabley prostitutes, each murder got more gruesome including the removal of organs.  

I got to Tower Hill station and met our guide Matthew. He took us around to the murder sites and dramatically recounted the most notorious serial killings of the era. He did a great job, complete with visual aids. I learned that at that time, the London police changed their footwear from leather-soled to rubber so they could walk more quietly, or sneak. This is the etymology of the term sneaker.

I did not realize that the murders were that grizzly, including complete hollowing out of women and cannibalism. But there were also many more aspects of the case that were fascinating that could be taken straight from today’s headlines where there is a high profile case: dueling law enforcement agencies, the press making up things to sell more papers, and even links to secret societies, the wealthy elite, and the powerful. 

Another thing I learned about the era and area was its abject squalor and hopelessness. Apparently, people were so poor here that they could not affored rents for rooms let alone adequate housing. Some nights, the men and women of complete destitution would drink themselves into a stupor on bathtub gin, and rent a rope for the night. They would double over the rope and pass out until morning. 

I thanked Matthew for the wonderful tour and then took the Tube over to Piccadilly Circus. It was kind of empty, but still an iconic site. I sat there for a bit, looking at the giant display as the colors lit up the entire place. 

I went back to the hostel for a Jameson, just in time to see A all dolled up to go out for the night. I told her to have a good time and be safe. My last night in London.

I woke up the next day with the whole day to kill before I took my transatlantic flight, so I made the most out of it. I packed up my bags and put them in storage at the hostel so I could still enjoy my day. I said my goodbyes to A not knowing if I would see her again, who looked like refried shit; the utter polar opposite of what I had seen the night before. She was already drinking beer at 8 AM. She mentioned in our previous conversations how she wished to culminate her childhood dream of visiting Harry Potter World in England. I knew she wasn’t going to make it.

My first stop was the Tate Modern Art Museum. Generally, I liked it. There was one display by Nan Goldin called Ballad of Sexual Dependency that was a series of gritty and candid photos from 1970’s New York. She would display them as a slide show there and all over the world. One of the placards said that it showed this intimate world before the AIDS crisis that would grip this community several years later. There was also a display talking about internet privacy that was a map on the floor and a choose your own adventure to determine your opinion on the issues.

However, it was not all fun and games. Two displays that I did not appreciate. One was a very tattered American flag painting which was OK. The one that disgusted me was that an Argentine immigrant in New York was giving sneakers to immigrants in Mexico looking to cross the border with the United States illegally. These shoes contained compasses, maps, places to hide money, etc. The shoes were called Brincos. She sourced them from China, sells some in America at $200 a pop to buy more and gives them away in Mexico. If she was that concerned, why doesn’t she use some of that money to set up a plant in Mexico and give the people who want it a better life there. It was dripping with hypocrisy and just stupid. So I left.

After that, I knew I needed to cross something off my foodie list, an especially rare occurrence in England. I headed over to the Borough Market and found the stand. I ordered my duck confit wrap. Imagine a large burrito sized wrap of sweet duck meat and mixed greens. It was utterly and completely orgasmic. I walked around the market a little and made sure to do a little gin sampling so that I would be sure to choose the correct one for my Brother-In-Law. I am not a real fan of Gin, but still know quality when I taste it. I then headed over to Westminster.

Westminster looked very different than when I had seen it last. The whole place was being renovated, and there was some sort of protest going on, probably in regards to Brexit. I walked past Downing Street, where the Prime Minister lives and works. It was locked up with armed soldiers. I treked all the way down to Trafalgar Square, then promptly turned around and came back. I then went to a pharmacy and got some sleeping pills for the plane.

I came back to the hostel and fooled around on the internet for a little. I then saw A at the bar and asked her how she liked it. The ditsy blonde asked A if she should slap me. Apparently, she was thinking that I was asking how it was fucking the hostel worker. But the look on A’s face was enough to let me know that it wasn’t very good. A said no, that I was asking about Harry Potter World. She ended up not going. I told her I was heading to the airport and outstretched my arms. She reticently gave me a hug. I then said goodbye to Harry the Greek. He said he was sad he did not have a gift to offer me for my journey. I put my hand on his shoulder and said our conversation was gift enough. We hugged and I picked up my bags and was on my way. 

On my train ride to the airport, I could not help but hear the conversation of four Australian girls that were heading back home. Apparently, it would take them 28 hours to get there. And I thought my travel plans would be difficult.

I got to the airport, checked my luggage, then found an unused outlet meant for the floor buffing machines to charge up before my fourteen hour flight. I then went to my gate and had to budge in front of a lot of people as I had priority seating, even though my ticket was still incredibly cheap. I got on the plane, found my seat against the window, and took some Vitamin Zzzzzz. An older couple filled in the row. As the pills were kicking in, I found Live Free or Die Hard on the back seat video player, one of the movies I was featured in when I worked in film in LA. It was in the classics section, so I felt a little old. I got as comfy as I could, and went to sleep. I would wake in Argentina, an ocean and world away.