London Weekend Part Deux

The only reason I can understand why it's the strange memories from London Weekend that stand out is because a guy running ahead of my dad in the 1984 Chicago Marathon decided to take a piss.

That was one of the two things my dad remembered from his Marathon: the urine dribbling down the guy's leg as they pushed towards the finish.  Of those two things, that's the only one I remember.  Although I do know he told me, before I ran the Chicago Marathon this past year, that he didn't remember most of the race.  Not even finishing.  

Back to London.  The strange workings of memory mean that it's not so much being on Tower Bridge, finding Darwin's grave in Westminster Abbey, seeing the Ancient Egypt exhibit at the British Museum, or wandering through the exhibits at Tower of London that I'll remember.  Don't get me wrong -- they were great.  And yet these adventures are expected.  They're the norm.  They're the 26 miles of the race that you're expected to run.  

 

It's the other .2 that stick. 

Episode 1:

"Red or white?" the MC asked.  His bloated red face was slicked with sweat from screaming out pub quiz questions for the past hour.  

I had no idea what he meant.  I had just captained our pub-quiz team to a championship -- with little thanks to me, really.  In a pub packed with over 50 U of I students and alums living in London, my team was lucky to have both Ryan, our spiky-haired London Weekend guide who actually read the stories beneath headlines, and Chris, the English husband of a U of I alum who took care of anything about England. 

"Red," I said.

The MC reached behind the bar and handed me a bottle of red wine as we left the pub to head to a Brazilian diner on the River Thames.  In the hierarchy of concerns and values of your vacation-minded U of I student, the bottle was a potion of instant popularity.

I'll have a feeling I'll be remembering that moment for a long time.  I have no idea why.  Maybe it was the spontaneity of the question.  Of having absolutely, positively no clue what he meant.  Or maybe it was the winning.  We always remember winning, don't we? 

Episode 2:

And then I'll remember the big orange "Drugs" sign.

After the Brazilian diner, Christian, a 2006 U of I alum, led us to a club called Rodeo.  The decor tried really hard to be American Old West, from the Harley to the Route 66 signs. 

But what caught my eye was the big orange neon "Drugs."  No catchy phrase, no embellishment, just "Drugs."  I found this hilarious, in a delusional sort of way.  I don't think there were any drugs there.  They wanded and padded down everyone who entered.  But then again, I'm not sure how else to excuse the flailing-limb-lolling-tongue dance style popular with most of the London crowd.  

Episode 3:

And then, of course, there was the waterfall.

On the last night, we played Circle of Death.  My roommate had annexed our room as the party room.  I decided to skip going to another club, wanting only to go to sleep to fight off a wicked sore throat.  It seemed that over the course of three days, we swapped bugs from our respective English universities so that, even if I was immune to Bristol bugs, the suckers from everywhere else got me sick.

But as more and more students piled into the room, sleep was becoming a less and less likely option. 

So I uncorked a bottle of throat-soothing 7-Up and played along.  It was good rowdy fun until someone crossed the line and threw beer out the window.

Now, Jerome, my study abroad advisor, said the average Londoner is caught on camera over 300 times per day.  Whether or not this is accurate, it certainly is true that there are cameras everywhere.

And one of them nabbed our beer hurler.

Ten minutes later, a fat security guard knocked on the door, breaking up the party and asking "Who dunnit?"  He made the usual threats -- accusations that the perpetrator could be charged with assault, or that we could all be kicked off the floor.  When some of the students denied the beer toss even happened, he victoriously pointed to the wet splatters on the window, evidently pleased with his detective work. 

I wasn't nervous, just angry.   The security guard wanted blood.  American blood made it all the sweeter.   But no one was going to be the rat, and the kid who threw the water was too much of a coward to turn himself in.  So a girl took the bullet for everyone, saying she did it while the guy who did slunk out of the noose.  I was furious at the injustice, but at the same time I was glad finally to get to bed.  Sure enough, the whole thing had blown over by morning.

In the end, what makes for a story are the unexpected snippets that grow like weeds or wildflowers in the cracks of an agenda.  No trip is worth it without these curveballs.  Luckily, they're not hard to come by. 

Indeed, a flexible mindset, a spirit of adventure, and a willingness to depart from the agendas of our expectations provide infinite opportunities for these curveballs.  (And believe me, some of them are very curvy indeed.)   The trick is not to fear the zigs and zags, but to realize that -- weeks, months, years later -- they'll be the tokens we use to assess our own enthusiasm for the experience.  They're the grains of sand that make the pearls. 

They're the reasons we should never be bored with the trials of travel.

London Weekend 2009 Part 1

London.

Thanks to Hollywood and literature more than anything else, the city had always enchanted me. 

It was where Peter Pan soared over Big Ben; where Marlowe bobbed on the River Thames and framed his search for Kurtz; where Shakespeare's plays were first performed right beside bear-baiting pits and brothels; where 007 called home.

They say if you're bored in London, you're bored with life. 

But as I walked through London with 44 other University of Illinois students from across England, it wasn't London I was bored with -- I was bored with being in a new place surrounded by old ideas.

Cocooned in American accents, blitzed by the familiar names of locations from Champaign, I realized I'd changed.  The month and a half in Bristol had distanced me from U of I by more than time and place.  I was a different person, too.  Just different enough to be uneasy around all the orange and blue.  Just different enough to be bored, even annoyed, with our UIUC way of communicating.

From the first night's dinner chat, it wasn't hard to see that many of the UIUC students were treating study abroad as a party abroad.  They chatted clubs and nightlife, one-upping stories with crazier stories.  Nothing is more University of Illinois than crazy nightlife stories.  It's basically a social currency.  And students will go to mad-crazy-wild-stupid-dangerous ends to get as much of this currency as they can.

I'd left my stash of this currency on the plane.

Don't get me wrong: I've had the time of my life at Illinois.   I love a good time.  I enjoy listening and sometimes partaking in the fantastical excessiveness that tops the social agenda of your typical UIUC student.   Plus, who better to go to a London club with than U of I students?  

Still, I felt they were blocking me from London.  Odd, I know, considering they were the reason I was taking advantage of this free London Weekend in the first place.  But I was in a unique situation.  I was the the only U of I spring study abroad student at Bristol.  By comparison, there were six of 'em at Leeds.   Which means most of them had never had the challenge of sitting on a plane to a place where you don't know a single person.  I did.  I'd had to build a new social life. And the one I built in Bristol was different from the one I'd left at U of I.  

This bored annoyance diminished over the course of the weekend.  There wasn't enough space in my head for minor discontent and all the new experiences in London.  London's way too good for that.  And the 44 study abroad students were way too much fun.

For one, we had four things bringing us together: 

1. Free money (or at least money that's disguised as being free).

2. Free nights in a hotel.

3. Free food.

4. Beer -- free or enough of it not to care.

Put 44 U of I kids from across England in a London hotel with all four of these criteria satisfied. And what does that mean?  

That's the epic of London Weekend 2009 Part 2.