| Apr. 9th, 2009 @ 10:49 pm Travelogue- London (soon with pictures!) |
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I have a penchant for wandering off alone and getting lost. (I am the person for whom portable GPS devices were intended.) Maybe this is because I stuck relatively close to home as a kid. I had a neighborhood in the traditional sense of all the kids played within earshot of the 6pm call for dinner. If I wasn't playing baseball in the sideyard, I was hiding out with a book under the giant honeysuckle bush at the end of the block .
I got the itchy foot bad in my early teens. When I was 13, I wandered off to see Poison (shut up) at Nassau Coliseum on a lazy afternoon and I ended up getting stranded on Long Island. I spent the night driving around with a 20-yr-old cabbie with a worse sense of direction than I while my warring parents reunited to plaster my picture across the 11 o’clock news and blame each other for my behavior. But that’s a whole other story. Anyways…
I love to travel and I travel quite a bit for work now. Whenever I do, I try to take at least a few hours to wander around on my own with my camera. I like to get a feel for new places on their own terms. Sometimes I drive, but mostly I go on foot.
In December 2006, I went to London for the first time. The trip was balls to the wall meetings in and around the market and client outings, which were essentially eating, partying and drinking. I had about two hours to sightsee with the other associates on Sunday. We ran through Harrods and saw Big Ben, Westminster, the Eye, fountains, statues, and fat pigeons, but I had no time alone.
In the very early morning before our flight, I spent about an hour walking around our building in the frigid damp taking terrible pictures made sickly yellow by the pervasive sodium arc lights. As I was meandering around, too wired to sleep, another associate kept a weather eye on me while she smoked her contraband Romeo y Julietta.
I didn't get a very good feel for the City at the time. Hustling between endless handshakes in concrete rooms, I got only a glimpse of her grey skies and red chimneys, the famous Wall, the little alleys so narrow you could just about stretch out your hands and touch the storefronts lining either side. The 15th century churches, empty courtyards, and embellished everything - lampposts, benches, buildings, just, everything. I had the sense that I could fall for her if we only had a little more time together but she remained out of reach. And then I was off.
I finally went back in April 2008. I got in with a day to spare and threw my arms around the City as hard as I could. I spent ten free hours walking her streets, admiring her bridges, and gaping like an idiot at her architecture and, in the end, I felt like maybe London loved me back a little too. |
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