10 September | holy crap, I'm in England!

After a ridiculous day at the airport yesterday (more on THAT later), I crashed last night and woke up promptly at 7:30 a.m. Which, for me, is never by choice. The sun had been beating through the shades for a while already--it looks like I will be an early riser here. I decided to go for a run and wanted to see St. Paul’s Cathedral. It looked to be about 2.5 miles from here on google maps, so I wrote down directions and headed out. Got lost, ran in circles for a while, finally asked a woman where St. Peter’s was. Gah! Awful! She laughed but was really nice and pointed me in the right direction—I was two blocks away. The problem was (and I can’t believe I am admitting this), I had that stupid “Feed the birds, twopence a bag” song from Mary Poppins stuck in my head, and one of the lines talks about the bells of St. Peter (or at least that was the version in my head). Embarrassing.

I had forgotten about how much I will have to now rely on talking to strangers. That was a strange adjustment for me the last time I was in Europe. But I think it will be good for me—I am usually in my iPod cocoon at home when I am on the train or walking somewhere. Strangers don’t talk to one another. But it looks like I am going to have to, partially because my run this morning made it quite obvious that I am going to get lost here—a lot. The street names change every three blocks, and the streets curve so it’s really difficult to determine which direction I’m headed. There are no street signs; there are plaques on the sides of buildings at intersections that give street names, but sometimes there isn’t anything and I just had to guess.

My favorite part about this morning (besides seeing St. Pauls) was passing the London Wall area—there is an ultramodern high rise with a sign on it that says “London Wall.” Not exactly the Great Wall I had pictured in my head. But then on the other side of the street I saw the ruins of what looked like it could have been part of a fortress wall—flat on top with tiny bricked-up windows and an archway which I immediately imagined a horse could fit through perfectly. Very strange, the juxtaposition of the future against the past here.