The Texan, or, to London and Back Again

We left for London on Friday afternoon. We arrived fairly late at night, and didn’t have much time for more than getting to our apartment and going to bed. Starting the next day we went all over the place. We visited all the royal museums – Natural History, Science, etc. They were huge, by the way. I could have spent the whole day at the Natural History one alone, and probably would have, if the rest of the group hadn’t been there to drag me along. We went to several other places besides, and drank rather a lot of tea. We went sightseeing and saw quite a bit of sights to see. Elizabeth Tower (Big Ben), the Tower of London, Parliament, Buckingham Palace. All the big names. We also went to see The Book of Mormon, the infamous musical from the creators of South Park. I can say this: it certainly lived up to its reputation! It was also just really good. We spent most of the show laughing, and from what I saw the humor went over pretty well with the Brits, too. We ate several meals at the Camden and Borough Markets, both of which had street food as far as the eye could see. One lady running a Malaysian curry stand gave me an extra helping because I was, ‘such a nice boy’ (and the pot was almost empty). We always walked home full and happy from those visits. One of the most interesting places we went was Draughts, a board game-themed bar. They had a huge selection of games to choose from, and I was told the drinks were pretty good too. Sadly, I couldn’t convince anyone to play Arkham Horror with me, but we got some pretty good mileage out of Cards Against Humanity and Tsuido.

Our next stop was Cork, Ireland. A much quieter place than London, as you can imagine. The town was still bustling for Saint Patrick’s Day, though. The town threw a nice parade in memory of the day, and then the populace happily went about living up to their reputation for loving alcohol. We went out to the Blarney Castle, and kissed the Stone. Apparently I have the Gift of Gab now, though I’ve always been a pretty smooth talker, so we might not see any real difference. We also had a quiet picnic at Fort Charles. It was a lonely place, full of beautiful old ruins, on a cliff overlooking the Irish coastline. Reminded me of ICO (google it). We passed the time running around and playing Frisbee, and trying to climb around in all the old buildings. It was pretty great.

The return to London was much more low-key. We spent more time exploring quiet, out-of-the-way places. When it was time to go back, though, we had one more adventure waiting for us. That day the French air-traffic controllers had gone on strike, and even though our flight went nowhere near France, its effects had rippled out far enough to delay our flight to well after midnight. In the end though, we all got home safe and sound.

This Is What You Are – Keith Power