Day the Twenty-First

Sunday the Twenty-Seventh of June, Two Thousand Ten


My dearest and most ever so faithful readers,
It is the final day! Tonight will be our last night in Furnival House, the University of Westminster dormitories, as well as our last night in London, and, indeed, all of England proper. By tomorrow night (in Los Angeles, for it will be mid-night in England) we will be home, flying backwards in time, as we shall have done.


We decided to have a bit of a lie-in this morning ("a lion?" Diana asked me the other day, confused by the British turn of phrase), and awoke to the sun beating through our windows and turning our adjoining rooms into downright furnaces. Once we had completed our respective toilettes, we set off in the direction of Hampstead Heath, a large, wild garden with a supposedly superb view of the city of London. We never, however, made it that far. We took first a pleasant stroll through Waterlow Park near our lodgings with the intention of emerging out in the direction of the Heath. However, where the Heath was, I could not figure out, for none of my maps went so far as to include it. Ah, well. After much wandering aimlessly about, hot and tired we found a Tube station and set off instead for frozen yoghurt. One brief repast later, we made our way to Trafalgar Square to peruse the National Gallery. While there were many impressive works therein, there were also far too many ugly baby Jesuses and preposterous-looking dogs for my taste. I felt moved, though, seeing the Van Goghs in person.


Once we had developed a serious case of Malade de Musée (more commonly known as "Museum Legs"), my sister and I left the cooler confines of the galleries for the hotter steps outside. There, a young man engaged us in conversation with an unlikely opening line along the lines of "What's the deal with all these Squares? Is Leicester Square even square?" I believe he really meant Trafalgar, but it worked nonetheless: we talked to him. His name was Kit and he should well have known the difference between the two, for he was a born and raised London man. What he was doing strolling past the National Gallery, a location swarming with tourists, is beyond me, though it is not, I suppose, a bad plan for meeting young defenceless foreign ladies. He was quite nice, and we discussed his upcoming adventures in South America and what we thought of England, before he had to leave.


From Trafalgar Square, we then walked northwards to Picadilly Circus, then onward to SoHo and Oxford Street. It being a Sunday afternoon, and the weather being so glorious, the streets were seething with people, making brisk walking nearly impossible. We ducked onto a side street, where we discovered a dimly lit Thai restaurant with open windows facing the street where we ended up eating dinner--our last dinner in England. Across the street was a famous bakery called The Hummingbird Bakery, which we had glimpsed earlier. We decided that pudding today would be cupcakes. And while I would choose pie over cake any day, these cupcakes might have made me reconsider. I said "might.


We opted from there to take the bus back to Archway rather than the Tube--in this way, we would get one last city tour, perhaps see places we hadn't yet seen. And so we did. Back at the dorms, my sister and I watched another two episodes of the programme "Chuck," before it was time for us to retire.


Much traveling will be done tomorrow. I am not so much looking forward to that, though, as I am to seeing my parents, and settling back into normalcy, some kind of routine. This trip has been simply marvelous. It was a wonderful opportunity to get to know my younger sister better; we got along! (Mostly.) And I have finally been to England. Not since I was three years of age was I here: it was about time.


Thank you all for reading and those that commented, either on this blog or through various other media, I thank you for your feedback and your compliments. It was hard work keeping you all up to date on our various adventures, but it seemed the best way to remember all those stories likely to have been forgotten or muddled up upon our return. Your readership means a great deal to me.


Ever yours,
Angela

"Now, can you read the bottom row for me?"

At the National Gallery