The Dawg Days are Over
OK - not my own picture. Somehow, despite the three different packing lists I had before arriving in London, forgot to pack my camera wire. But I’ll find a way to make it work.
When I first got to London, my uncle who lives outside of the city arrived to pick me and my parents up from Heathrow. He walked us towards his Ford Transit van (the “kidnapper” van, which looked like this, and I sat in the back, where there were no windows. There was a small lightbulb, but it powered out after a few minutes. I had to bend and settle into an awkward cat stretching-cat pose in order to look out of this tiny hole, which was slightly smaller than my pupil. It is amazing how much of this city I saw through that small lens—while we were on the highway, I could see straight into people’s cars. I saw one driver texting and driving, one child reading a book in the backseat, one passenger taking a nap with her feet on the dashboard. As we got into the city, I saw clusters of black boots or various styles of rain boots shuffling near zebra crossings, flashes of the red double-decker buses, and the beginnings of ornate Victorian steps. Soon, the flashes got repetitive and I took a break to stretch and sit like a normal human being at a doctor’s office, but when I went back to look out of the unconventional telescope embedded in the kidnapper van, I was greeted by an image of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, and unlike the others, this image lingered for the 30 odd seconds the van took to cross over Waterloo Bridge. If my life were a movie, the opening credits would have started exactly there.
And then I got food poisoning. But that’s a whole different story.
