One wouldn’t think I am in London now based on this blog, as I have blogged about the same hogwash I blog about when I am in Jersey, wearing my “Spidermon” shirt and surfing the internet for a new non-human primate picture to make my desktop background. (To be fair, a British girl in one of my classes said she broke her nose while whipping her hair back and forth in a club.) And as soon as I remember to ask my friend Alison if I can borrow her wire I’ll put up pictures. But the least I can do is to give you a small mouthful of my British day.
I spent most of it in the library in the circular reading room, which is where they filmed the scenes from Dumbledore’s office in the HP movies. (Sometimes, I guess a likely password before entering.) I decided to be a dork today and not leave the library, more appropriately dubbed “Narnia” as it is quite labyrinthine, because I won’t have time to do work in Paris this weekend. And so around 7 I went to Pret, which is this coffee/food chain all over the UK, and ate a hot jalapeno chicken wrap, which I picked over the cold hoisin duck wrap because it was so frigid that my nose got red, which NEVER happens to brown people. And just as I was hating on myself for wanting dessert after pigging out, Pret handed out free fruit salads! They make everything fresh every morning, and give the leftovers to the homeless when they close, so there is no sell-by date. It felt really good to eat colorful food, because it really lit up the dull scene - it was as though I were holding some kind of fireball. (OK - I’ll admit, I’m thinking one of those fire things Dragon Ball-Z characters create before they attack, and I hate that I can’t come up with a better simile because it reminds me of those listless vacations in India where the only daytime programming I could understand was Anime TV.) I was sitting at a barstool facing the window, and there were only three others sitting at Pret in the same configuration - they were all suit-wearing businessmen who refused the fruit because they had to go to some kind of company drinks reception after dinner.
To be honest, it was a melancholy evening and I don’t know why I am even bothering to write about it. I mostly don’t know why I feel the need to write about this uneventful day at 2 AM when I have class (at Shakespeare’s Globe!) tomorrow morning at 9. Maybe it’s because even when London feels melancholy, to the point where listening to Flo Rida and T-Pain made me nostalgic rather than made me laugh to myself, I know it was only because this is the first day since I have gotten here that hasn’t been some kind of adventure. It’s been so long since I’ve had a regular day, so much that I confused a regular day with a gloomy day, but isn’t that the difference between living abroad and traveling abroad? That to live abroad means literally to LIVE abroad, and not have an itinerary of things to do before you return to your elsewhere life? I think somewhere between sinking my teeth into a chunk of mango and packing socks for my weekend vacation, the realization that I actually live here and am not on some extended vacation crept up on me like a cluster of (innocuous) spiders.
