Woo, I suck. I was doing so well with the updating! And then, silence. Radio silence. Not a word. Nothing. Not because my life and Europe have suddenly become boring but because they haven’t. They’ve stayed interesting. The only problem is being able to write or talk about it.
I’m a firm believer in distance. You need time and space to get over things, to think things through. I like closure. I like analyzing. I like details. I like to understand before I go and run my mouth. So while I had a fantastic time in London, staying with my beautiful cousin, I still need some time to mull over certain details.
I’ll try though. Try to write about certain days and ignore the others. I can do that.
First off, getting to London.
I am one of those ridiculous people who show up to airports ages before the flight takes off. I’d rather be early than late. Thus, I left at about 10 AM for my 1 PM train into London. It was a good call though because when I was on the RER A near Charles de Gaulle, the train decided to take a page out of a horror movie and turn all the lights off. Then, we slowed to a stop. The brakes screeched like a thousand screams. The lights were out and a woman near me started moving about nervously. The car was silent.
We sat there, waiting. Nothing was happening. No one was talking. A train full of people, silent and underground. I switched between calmly listening to my iPod and the certain knowledge that I was going to be killed on a train beneath Paris. Staring out the window was no good because next to me was a little half-cave that had a flickering light and the refuse of a homeless person. It was the perfect setting for a horror movie.
Luckily, it wasn’t one. After a good ten minutes without movement, the train began to go again. The lights turned on. The woman stopped fidgeting. I turned my iPod up.
Garde du Nord is a big station. I took the RER C there from Chatelet so I came up from underground. Maybe I’m blind but the signs pointing towards the Eurostar are crap. I thought it was hard to find and, even though I hate asking for directions, I had to do it twice. Once the woman was like “screw off”. The other guy helped me though.
Getting through security and border control is a breeze. I traveled on my Polish passport for the first time, which was great. The cute British guard told me my accent doesn’t sound Polish, which it wouldn’t when peppered with “ya’ll”. I explained my dual citizenship and he told me he tried to learn Polish once. It was much more exciting when it happened, I promise.
The train was nothing that exciting. I mean, it’s cool that you can get from Paris to London in about 2 hours and you go underwater and all but it’s just a train. The girl next to me was a stylist and had fantastically colored hair. Time flew because we spent most of it talking fashion and life.
After I got to London, I took the tube (so weird to write that) to the station near where my cousin works. Then I sat in Starbucks, waiting for her and people watching.
British kids wear uniforms. It’s awesome. They look like extras out of Harry Potter and I’m mad jealous that I didn’t have a cute uniform back in my Catholic school girl days. They also have ridiculously cute accents.
Speaking of which, there were some accents that I just could not understand. I mean, I’m a native English speaker. I was born in the US and I’m just about as American as apple pie, only with a Polish crust. So it baffled me that I couldn’t comprehend some of what they were saying. It didn’t matter though, because the cute boys tended to speak slowly and clearly.
After all that, I met up with my cousin and called it a night. Stay tuned for a partially more exciting Day Two.
