Fire

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”

--Sir Winston Churchill

Being in London is almost nostalgic in a sense.  I was here just over two months ago.  I saw many of the sights before, and feel a little bit like I know what is going on here.  Add to that the fact that everyone speaks English here, and I have a much better sense of England than I have of the other countries we have visited.  

Even though I have only been in the English speaking world for about 1 ½ days, it is still a little weird to walk into a bookstore or a restaurant and not need to go searching for the English section or the English menu.  I thoroughly enjoy it, and life is a little easier.  If you want to hear any different language, you can just sit anywhere in the hostel, near any tourist site, or even at the restaurant where we had dinner.  I don’t think it will really hit me until I get home that I am back to the completely English speaking world, since both London and Dublin will have plenty of other tourists.

During my time in London, I have visited a number of the same sites, but in a very different way.  We saw a lot of the same tourist sites with the Tube.  We also spent a lot more time on the Tube last time.  I realized just how helpful the bike tour was that I took last time.  It is nice to see parts of the city by walking that I missed last time, though.

As some highlights for my time in London right now: the fire alarm went off at 2:45 am.  I felt like I was back in the dorms again.  At one point in time, I literally thought that I was going to die in a hostel in London, but that was partly because it was so early and partly because walking out the door, I knew that something wasn’t right.  Someone had decided that it would be fun to make it snow (Oklahoma sorority girl, anyone? No?  I guess it was a while ago.)  Until we left the third floor, the ground outside of our room was covered with the remains of the fire extinguisher. 

We had to change rooms in our hostel, and when I walked into my new room, there was a boy sleeping in my bed.  I would have been perfectly content to leave him there and make the hostel employees deal with him, but Bri woke him up and politely told him to get out of the bed.  I asked the hostel employees to change the sheets (because who wants to sleep on sheets that someone else already has slept on?).  This was probably around 7:00.  When we got back to the hostel around 10:30, the sheets were still the same.  I was told that they would be changed at 11:00, since the person with the next shift would change both my sheets and the sheets from another bed with a similar situation.

Other than that, we have walked around and seen a lot of the site.  We walked up the Monument for the Great Fire in London.  331 steps up a spiral staircase that got more and more narrow with no breaks or rests along the way.  It was kind of insane, exhausting, and at times a little scary.  The stairs just got really narrow, and we had to pass people who were going in the opposite direction. 

We also met up with Tony and spent the day with him.  It is kind of crazy to see someone from my life in Indiana halfway across the world, but it makes everything seem much more normal.  It is strange to think that the next time I see Tony, we will be back in the States.  But at the same time, it is nice to vary who I am spending my day with (or add a new person into the mix.)

It doesn’t seem real that I am supposed to leave in about 4 ½ days.  I say that, and I don’t think I really believe it.  I am excited to go home and see my family again.  I also know that they are really excited for me to come home (or so my mom says on facebook at least).  But the thought of leaving Europe, not living out of a suitcase, not encountering new cultures and new languages every day, doesn’t seem real.  It may become more real the closer I come to leaving London and to leaving Dublin.  I feel like I have been living out of a suitcase for such a long time, that the end doesn’t seem possible.  Planning outfits and packing for home just doesn’t seem right.

I just have to make the most of my last few days of legal drinking and exploring a continent an ocean away.